Tom Verlaine’s Brilliant Final Three Records Finally Come to Streaming Services: Album Reviews
Tom Verlaine — the guitar virtuoso, cofounder and “frontman” of the pioneering New York group Television, who died last year — might be the most low-key guitar hero in rock history.
If he had only ever released “Marquee Moon,” Television’s galvanizing 1977 debut album, his place in history still would be assured: The album, which brought the sounds of late-period Velvet Underground and the early Rolling Stones into a musical era filled with bloated solos and every imaginable excess, is one of the great guitar albums of all time. But for all the flash in the interplay between Verlaine and bandmate Richard Lloyd, it remains a masterpiece of subtlety and nuance, the songs and long guitar solos evolving gradually and at their own pace.
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That’s actually a decent analogy for Verlaine’s career. As one of the first bands to play at CBGB, Television were lumped in with the burgeoning punk rock movement and were a cornerstone of that scene (Verlaine ran away from home as a teenager with a young Richard Hell; he later dated and collaborated with fellow bibliomaniac Patti Smith), although their emphasis on musicianship and dynamics were light years away from punk. And true to form, Television, whose first two albums received mountains of rapturous press, quickly dashed any possibility cashing in on that notoriety by splitting up just weeks after the 1978 release of their second album (although a stunning archival album, “Live at the Old Waldorf,” finds them in top form at one of their last gigs before that split).
Television reformed for a 1992 album and reunited for several tours afterward, but musically, Verlaine always followed his own muse — I can remember seeing him in the 1987, performing with three top musicians who he’d worked with closely for many years (Television bassist Fred Smith, Patti Smith drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and longtime guitar lieutenant Jimmy Rip), and at several points in the show, he’d take off on a solo and you could tell they had no idea where he was going, looking at each other uneasily but knowing enough to just roll with it. Verlaine released 10 solo albums but largely tailed off after the turn of the century (only half of them are available on streaming services); more often, you’d see him working at the Strand bookstore on Broadway in the East Village, essentially returning to a place where it all began.
His three final albums — two instrumentals, 1992’s “Warm and Cool” and “Around,” and the vocal “Songs and Other Things,” both from 2006 — will receive an expanded and very welcome reissue via Real Gone Music, beginning today with the first above, following with the others on July 12 and August 9, respectively — returning (or being released for the first time) to vinyl and streaming services.
(Asked why the albums were never previously available on streaming, John Tefler, who managed Verlaine and Television from 1990-2017 and is now managing director of BMG Music Brazil, tells Variety: “The rights had reverted to Tom after the license to Thrill Jockey [which released the albums] terminated due to time. He did not listen to streaming – only vinyl. I do not think he realized they were not on streaming, and also he would not have known how to get them on the streaming services. He was a ‘true artist’ interested only in his art.”)
Anyone seeking another “Marquee Moon” isn’t going to find it here, but will find his guitar mastery and soundscape-creating abilities even more evolved, while “Songs and Other Things” is as strong as any of his solo albums, with majestic songwriting and his spoken-sung vocals veering between an almost filmic murmur that suddenly vaults into shouting, and his familiar, quavering high notes. The instrumental albums, “Warm and Cool,” in particular, fit in beautifully with the dusty, spaghetti-western-influenced instrumental music from contemporary artists like Khruangbin and Hermanos Gutierrez, and with guitar playing of even more dazzling virtuosity and imagination.
For all his ability, Verlaine usually relied on subtlety and tone, his sharp, crystalline notes ringing clearly even when the music is muted and hushed — but as songs like the apparently improvised “Ore” find him attacking the fretboard with a flurry of Coltrane-esque notes as the drummer does his best to keep up. The instrumental tracks are mostly soft and slow, with Verlaine accompanied only by gentle bass and drums played with brushstrokes, but occasionally a song will come marching in that’s cheery and downright jaunty, including one called “Wheel Broke” that’s oddly reminiscent of Norman Greenbaum’s psychedelic hit “Spirit in the Sky.” “Around” often evokes South Asian music — on the gorgeous “The Sun’s Gliding!” he plays with a slide but makes his guitar sound like an Indian instrument. It’s surprising that these albums haven’t been plumbed for film soundtracks or television commercials, although it’s possible that people tried and Verlaine just didn’t care.
Verlaine toured fairly regularly over the years, solo and with Television, but these long unavailable albums, originally released on the Rykodisc and Thrill Jockey labels, were basically it for his recording career. He also recorded a beautiful song with avant-classical legends the Kronos Quartet called “Spiritual” for the 2002 “Big Bad Love” soundtrack, and the Canadian alt-rock band Alvvays even released a song called “Tom Verlaine” in 2022 (the song itself sounds nothing like his music but the band’s guitarist Alex O’Hanley does take off on a homage-esque solo at the end). But the return of these three albums to the general public means at least this much is now right with the world.
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