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    Tom Verlaine, Influential Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 73

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    He first attracted attention with the band Television, a fixture of the New York punk rock scene. But his music wasn’t so easily categorized.Tom Verlaine, whose band Television was one of the most influential to emerge from the New York punk rock scene centered on the nightclub CBGB — but whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting were never easily categorizable as punk, or for that matter as any other genre — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73.His death was announced by Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Mr. Verlaine’s former love interest (and occasional musical collaborator) Patti Smith, who said that he died “after a brief illness.”Although Television achieved only minor commercial success and broke up after recording two albums, Mr. Verlaine had an enduring influence, especially on his fellow guitarists. (He was also Television’s singer, primary songwriter and co-producer.)“Verlaine persisted in playing the guitar while those around him were brandishing it as a weapon,” Kristine McKenna wrote in Rolling Stone in 1981.Lenny Kaye, the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, said in an interview that “Tom was capable of anything,” adding: “He could move from chaotic soundscapes of free jazz to delicate filigree. It wasn’t covered up with distortion. He had a real sense of the instrument and its expressive powers.”Mr. Verlaine and the other members of the group Television in 1973. From left: Richard Lloyd, Mr. Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca.Collection of Richard MeyersReviewing Television for the magazine Rock Scene in 1974, Ms. Smith wrote that Mr. Verlaine “plays guitar with angular inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming.” She also declared that he had “the most beautiful neck in rock & roll.”Tom Verlaine was born Thomas Joseph Miller on Dec. 13, 1949, in Denville, N.J., the son of Victor and Lillian Miller. The family relocated to Wilmington, Del., when Tom was a child.He attended a boarding school in Delaware, where he studied classical music and played saxophone. He was equally influenced by rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones and free-jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.He ran away from school with a classmate, Richard Meyers (later known as Richard Hell). “Our plan was to become poets in Florida where the living was easy,” Mr. Hell said in an email. Camping in Alabama, they set a field on fire and were arrested and sent back home.Mr. Hell soon went to New York and after graduating from high school, Mr. Verlaine joined him. They wrote and published poetry together; Mr. Miller renamed himself Tom Verlaine, in tribute to the 19th-century French poet Paul Verlaine.GodlisMr. Hell recalled the two friends being exuberant teenagers on Second Avenue near St. Mark’s Church in the early days of spring: “As we walked down the street, we’d start rapidly weaving between the parking meters making buzzing sounds with our mouths and flapping our bent arms, fertilizing the parking meters. Tom was often lightheaded and whimsical back then.”In 1972, inspired by the New York Dolls, they started a band called the Neon Boys. Mr. Verlaine bought an electric Fender Jazzmaster guitar for himself and picked out a $50 bass for Mr. Hell; their friend Billy Ficca joined them on drums.In 1973 they added Richard Lloyd, a guitarist, and renamed themselves Television. They chose the name because they had a distaste for the medium and hoped to provide an alternative. Mr. Verlaine also enjoyed the resonance with his initials, T.V.After seeing a performance by Television in 1974, David Bowie called the group “the most original band I’ve seen in New York.” However, Mr. Hell’s emotive, chaotic outlook on music clashed with Mr. Verlaine’s more controlled approach. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.Television signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 released its first album, “Marquee Moon,” which featured hypnotic guitar work that ranged from mournful to ecstatic.Television, Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith, Richard Lloyd, Filly Ficca on First Avenue in New York City in 1977.GodlisThe album contained eight songs, mostly written by Mr. Verlaine, and showcased two lead guitarists who did not just trade solos but also built sonic cathedrals out of countermelodies and interlocking parts. Although Mr. Verlaine was renowned as a lead guitarist, Mr. Lloyd said that his work as rhythm guitarist was underrated. “He used to drag me kicking and screaming through five minutes of solos,” he said in an interview.Mr. Verlaine’s lyrics (which he sang in a pinched but expressive tenor) were sometimes poetically abstract, sometimes slyly funny. The song “Venus” featured the line “I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo.”In 1991, Mr. Verlaine told Details magazine: “As peculiar as it sounds, I’ve always thought that we were a pop band. You know, I always thought ‘Marquee Moon’ was a bunch of cool singles. And then I’d realize, Christ, this song is 10 minutes long, with two guitar solos.”The New York punk scene inspired sonic experimentation in multiple directions, from the aggression of the Ramones to the tightly wound funk of Talking Heads to the calloused poetry of Ms. Smith. But no act seemed to push further than Television.Mr. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television in performance in 1978. The band recorded two well-received albums before breaking up but later reunited periodically.Stephanie Chernikowski“Once we all got past tuning problems, we could explore at will,” Mr. Kaye said. “Those couple of years where nobody knew where CBGB was, it was a gloriously experimental time.”While “Marquee Moon” received rapturous reviews and now regularly appears on lists of the greatest rock albums ever made, that did not translate into significant sales or airplay. “Shooting himself in the foot was a particular talent of his,” Mr. Lloyd said of Mr. Verlaine. “He had a will of iron and he would say no to big tours and big shows.”Asked by The New York Times in 2006 to summarize his life, Mr. Verlaine replied, “Struggling not to have a professional career.”Television released a second album, “Adventure,” in 1978 and then broke up. The band reunited in 1992 for an album simply called “Television,” followed by periodic tours.The group’s members continued to employ “an experimental approach,” Mr. Verlaine told Details. “It’s like when we started, all falling together from different angles.”Mr. Verlaine released nine albums under his own name over the decades, some emphasizing songs and others emphasizing guitar heroics. Reviewing a performance by his band at the Bowery Ballroom in 2006, the Times critic Jon Pareles wrote: “Mr. Verlaine’s guitar leads didn’t flaunt virtuosity by streaking above the beat. They tugged against it instead: lagging deliberately behind, clawing chords on offbeats, trickling around it or rising in craggy, determined lines.”Mr. Verlaine performing at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesHe also wrote film scores, including for silent movies by Man Ray and Fernand Léger, and made occasional guest appearances with the Patti Smith Group. In 2006 he told The Times, “I liked recording, but I wasn’t much in the mood to do it until a couple years ago.”He was, Mr. Kaye said, “very much not into the persona of being a rock star. His legacy is that he was always looking for a new expression of who he could be.”Mr. Verlaine leaves no immediate survivors. However, he does leave an outsize influence on other musicians. The 2022 album “Blue Rev” by the Canadian group Alvvays, for example, includes a song titled “Tom Verlaine.”In 1981, Mr. Verlaine told Rolling Stone: “I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes — it’s obvious what they’ve listened to and what they’re going for. When I was 16 I listened to Yardbirds records and thought ‘God, this is great.’ It’s gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.” More

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      Robert Gordon, Punk Rocker Turned Rockabilly Revivalist, Dies at 75

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      Weary of the angry and aggressive sound of New York’s musical underground of the late 1970s, he returned to rock’s roots and seeded a rockabilly revival.Robert Gordon, a 1950s-influenced rocker with a silky baritone and towering pompadour who emerged from the New York punk underground of the 1970s to help stoke a rockabilly revival, died on Oct. 18 in a hospice in Manhattan. He was 75.His sister Melissa Gordon Uram said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.Neo-rockabilly became the soundtrack to a broader wave of ’50s nostalgia during the Reagan years, marked by Buddy Holly-esque Wayfarer sunglasses, James Dean haircuts and ubiquitous images of tail-fin Cadillacs in music videos, in retro-themed malt shops and at the Hard Rock Cafe.With a look and sound that seemed to travel by time machine from Sun Studio circa 1956, Mr. Gordon was a curious presence in an era when the rock world seemed split between Fleetwood Mac-type rockers with feathered tresses and Sex Pistols-style punks with spiked locks. Lester Bangs, the gonzo rock critic, once said of Mr. Gordon’s neo-hepcat look that he could be a museum display labeled “Bopcatus Americanus.”Mr. Gordon never achieved the fame of the musicians who followed in his wake, but his influence was felt. “Many fans and music historians believe that, had he been recording in the ’50s, he might have become a rockabilly legend,” the music journalist Mark McStea wrote in Guitar Player magazine last year. “Instead, he kick-started the worldwide rockabilly revival.”He never scored a hit on the level of the Stray Cats’ “Stray Cat Strut” or another ’50s-nostalgia chestnut, Los Lobos’ cover of Richie Valens’ “La Bamba,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in 1987.Mr. Gordon, left, with his band backstage at the Lone Star Cafe in New York in 1981. From left: the guitarist Chris Spedding, the drummer David Van Tieghem and the bassist Tony Garnier.John Kisch Archive/Getty ImagesBut, with Mr. Wray — who carved his place in rock history with the ’50s instrumental classics “Rumble” and “Raw-Hide” — he hit No. 83 on the Hot 100 with “Red Hot,” a cover of a 1955 R&B song by Billy “The Kid” Emerson that became a rockabilly staple when Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men covered it two years later. If it was too early for him to reap a windfall from the rockabilly wave he had helped begin, Mr. Gordon also had the misfortune of coming in early with songs that would become hits for other artists. His 1981 solo album, “Are You Gonna Be the One,” included the single “Someday, Someway,” a Gene Vincent-inspired number written by his fellow retro-rocker Marshall Crenshaw, which peaked at No. 76 a year before Mr. Crenshaw’s version hit the Top 40.His 1978 album, “Fresh Fish Special,” which featured the Jordanaires, a vocal group famous for backing Elvis Presley, included the song “Fire,” written by his friend Bruce Springsteen, with Mr. Springsteen himself on piano. The song became a smash for the Pointer Sisters, climbing to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Later in his career, Mr. Gordon bristled at the rockabilly pigeonhole, referring to his sound as “roots music” and citing his forays into country and other genres. Still, rockabilly was in his bones, and he said that his life changed the first time he heard Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”“I just remember hearing that one as a kid, I guess I was 9 years old, and it just opened new horizons,” Mr. Gordon recalled in a 2010 Australian radio interview. “The sound of that echo, and of course his smoldering delivery, was great. For a little kid, it was just amazing.”Robert Ira Gordon was born in Washington on March 29, 1947, the second of four children of Samuel Gordon, an antitrust lawyer and later a judge, and Arline (Rose) Gordon, a painter who did sets for regional theater companies.Growing up in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area of Maryland, Mr. Gordon lived in a house where a record player or radio was usually blaring, Ms. Uram said in an interview. Their parents had a huge record collection, heavy on jazz and opera, and the children cranked up the volume on everything from rockabilly to Motown to British Invasion bands.But Mr. Gordon set his sights on a different retro genre when he turned to a singing career. “He fashioned himself after crooners like Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones,” Ms. Uram said. “He could sing ballads like the best of them.”He moved to New York in the early 1970s to pursue a career in music, starting out in a folk trio called Reunion. But when punk hit, with its stripped-down sound and frenetic energy, an echo of early rock ’n’ roll, he joined the fray.His band Tuff Darts became a fixture in the scene centered on CBGB, the Bowery punk cauldron where future industry game-changers like Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones were launching careers.But Tuff Darts never broke out like the others, and Mr. Gordon left the band before it recorded its first album in 1978.“I left that group because, I’ll tell you the truth, because it was pretty sadistic,” he said on “The It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Podcast” in 2020. “The lyrics were pretty chauvinistic. I was into more of the roots thing.”With the pouty good looks and Eisenhower-era attire of an old-school Brooklyn street tough, Mr. Gordon also tried his hand at acting. He played a killer in a 1976 film, “Unmade Beds,” which also featured Blondie’s Debbie Harry, and a greaser thug in “The Loveless,” a low-budget “Wild Ones”-style motorcycle-gang movie from 1981 starring Willem Dafoe and co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.Mr. Gordon in performance at a festival in Spain in 2020.Juan Naharro Gimenez/RedfernsIn addition to Ms. Uram, Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife, Marylee, whom he married in 1995; his son, Jesse, from a previous marriage; and another sister, Jackie Gordon Spalding.Over the course of a half century, Mr. Gordon continued to churn out albums, collaborating with influential musicians like Chris Spedding, who has played guitar with Elton John and Paul McCartney, and Danny Gatton, the guitarist known for what he called “redneck jazz.” His final album, “Hellafied,” with Mr. Spedding, is set to be released by Cleopatra Records in November.“I always thought that Rob never had the stardom that he should have had,” Ms. Uram said. “He was incredibly handsome and photogenic and his voice was amazing, and his choice of musicians to play with was always spot on.”Still, Mr. Gordon played an important role as a bridge between eras, helping keep a treasured American music genre alive. He recorded his first album in April 1977. His idol, Elvis Presley, died four months later. More

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      The Stories of Teen Punks That Ruled New York In the Late ’70s

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      High school students spent their nights forging a colorful late-night scene marked by big choruses and few rules. The bands didn’t last, but the taste of art and freedom shaped their lives.The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands had moved on to larger venues and the international touring circuit. The thrash of hardcore was still a few years down the pike. Yet the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons.They passed their days at Stuyvesant High School. They came from the High School of Performing Arts and Murrow. They went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and to Brooklyn Friends, too. Some were dropouts and runaways; some were even from the suburbs. Almost all of them were under 18.Over the next four years, they spent their nights creating their own rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated and intense pop and punk for fellow teenagers in places like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurrah and TR3. These weren’t the all-ages shows that would become commonplace in the city a few years later. This was a unique moment in the city’s musical history that changed the lives of many of the artists and audience members who were there, though their stories have gone largely untold. Imagine an upbeat “Lord of the Flies,” styled by Manic Panic and Trash & Vaudeville.Their ranks included Eric Hoffert, who did four hours of homework from Bronx Science each weekday, then practiced his guitar for four hours; weekends belonged to his band, the Speedies. Arthur Brennan, a 16-year-old from Groton, Conn., who regularly hitchhiked 20 miles to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines that covered new music; he renamed himself Darvon Staggard and ran away to New York City to join a band. And Kate Schellenbach, a ninth grader at Stuyvesant who had heard a rumor that groups her age were playing the most famous music clubs in the world, just blocks from where she lived.In September 1979, Schellenbach was 13 and starting high school in an outfit assembled to express her interest in new wave music: overdyed painters’ pants from Unique Clothing Warehouse, white go-go boots from Reminiscence in the West Village, a bowling shirt and an Elvis Costello pin.“I remember going into the girls’ bathroom,” she said cheerfully, speaking via video chat, “and this girl, Nancy Hall, who was the coolest, was sitting on the sink.” Nancy suggested that Kate go see a band playing at CBGB later that week called the Student Teachers. The arty pop combo included a female rhythm section featuring some kids from Friends Seminary and, somewhat improbably, the rather distant Mamaroneck High School.“If I hadn’t seen the Student Teachers that fateful night, I might never have been a drummer,” said Schellenbach, who helped found the Beastie Boys in 1981 and went on to form Luscious Jackson. “Seeing Laura Davis play drums, seeing Lori Reese play bass and how exciting the whole scene was, everything about it made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I can do,’” she added. “These people were still in high school — it seemed attainable.”From left: Joe Katz, David Scharff and Lori Reese of the Student Teachers, onstage at Trax in 1980. The band inspired Kate Schellenbach, who went on to help found the Beastie Boys the next year.Ebet RobertsThe timing was perfect: This was the first generation to grow up with punk as the status quo, not the exceptional rebellion. “Part of the call of history was that you weren’t supposed to just listen and take it in, you were supposed to listen to the conversation and form a band yourself,” the Student Teachers’ keyboardist, Bill Arning, now a prominent gallery owner and curator, said via video chat. “Of course you were supposed to form a band; it didn’t even seem like it was an ‘out there’ idea.”The key groups in the movement were the glam bubble gum Speedies, a high-concept bunch of overachieving teens (plus two very slightly older members) who “wanted to be the fusion of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and the Bay City Rollers,” according to the founding guitarist Gregory Crewdson; the Student Teachers, who played art pop with elegiac touches reminiscent of Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground; the Blessed, who were the first, sloppiest and most fashionable group on the scene; and the mega poppy mod group the Colors, who like the Speedies were enamored with bubble-gum music and were mentored by Blondie’s drummer, Clem Burke. (Other bands on the edges of the movement included the Stimulators and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan.)If the core bands in the teen punk scene had anything in common, it was an affection for big choruses, flashy, colorful clothes and a near-arrogant certainty that the empowerment promised by punk rock was now theirs to inherit.From left: Nick Berlin, Billy Stone and Howie Pyro of the Blessed onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus,” Berlin said.Eileen Polk“We didn’t know any better,” said Nicholas Petti, who, in 1977 at age 13, started calling himself Nick Berlin and became a co-founder of the Blessed. He spoke to The Times via video chat just before attending the funeral for another founding member of the band, Howie Pyro. Last month at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, Pyro’s inheritors, including D Generation, Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks and Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, paid tribute to the New York mainstay with a memorial show.“We thought this was how you lived. We would watch John Waters movies and, yes, of course we would understand they were actors, but we thought, this is what you are supposed to do,” Petti said from his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., where he works as the head of the Culinary Arts Management program at Mendocino College. “This is your life, this isn’t how you dress up, this is all of it,” he added. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus. When we played an early show and a late show at Max’s, we would bring two complete changes of clothes for each set. This certainly isn’t how we would have expressed it at the time, but it was living life as a performance art piece.”The Blessed (pronounced as two syllables) were the band that Arthur Brennan ran away from Groton to join; after two weeks the money he had saved from his paper route ran out, and when private detectives came to retrieve him, he was happy to leave his new identity as Darvon Staggard behind. “After the first night, it’s really not that much fun sleeping at the all-night Blimpies on 6th Avenue,” Brennan, now a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, said via video chat. “But it was such a sense of relief to meet people who were like you. In your own hometown, you’d be considered a loser-slash-weirdo. We were kids learning how to act in a crazy, artsy adult world.”The author Jonathan Lethem, who wrote about his affection for the Speedies and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in “The Fortress of Solitude,” noted that childhood was different in New York at that time. “The city was chaotic, in a way, but it was really easy for us to operate,” he said in a video chat. “You couldn’t convince a taxi driver to go back to Brooklyn if your life depended on it, but you could always walk over the bridge! I do feel that we essentially owned the city, that we were the actual ones it belonged to at the time.”Jill Cunniff, a scene patron who later founded Luscious Jackson with Schellenbach and Gabby Glaser, said the city seemed like a nonstop event. “Night was freedom,” she said, “and it felt like we were really safe. If you were a parent, you might think the opposite — those kids are going out to nightclubs, they are only 13, that’s so dangerous. No. My daytime at I.S. 70 was really dangerous,” she added, referring to her public middle school. “My nighttime was safe.”How did the scene keep going? None of the well-traveled downtown venues — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, TR3 or Studio 10 — regularly checked IDs, the musicians recalled, and they said the ones uptown, like Hurrah and Trax, only loosely enforced age-based alcohol restrictions. (The legal drinking age in the city was 18 until late 1982.) In fact, the CBGB owner Hilly Kristal and Peter Crowley, who managed and booked Max’s, seemed to welcome the wave of underage New Yorkers eager to discover music.“Kids, generally, like to drink,” said Crowley, laughing via phone. “But we tried our best to make sure people were safe — though I did wear a badge that said, ‘I am not your mother.’”But was the safety an illusion? “For a long time, I looked at this period of my life nostalgically and sentimentally,” the author Christopher Sorrentino said in an email. “Only recently have I begun to recognize how vulnerable we all were, how many risks we were exposed to with absolutely no one to apply the brakes. This goes double for the girls, who at 15 or 16 often had ‘relationships’ with men in their late 20s and early 30s.”Laura Albert, who was in the scene from age 13 and later achieved fame (and notoriety) writing under the nom de plume JT LeRoy, agreed. “Access still came with a price, especially for girls and queer boys,” she wrote in an as-yet-unpublished memoir. “That said, there was a sense of possibility, age was not a barrier, I was a teen in foster care but I still had access to the musicians I admired, calling them on pay phones and interviewing them for fanzines.”The Stimulators onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978.Ebet RobertsBy 1980, the teen punk scene was simultaneously evolving and dissolving as its members grew up and moved on. Some of its participants went on to play prominent roles in the local hardcore punk movement: Hoffert and Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys demo, and the Stimulators became a foundational band of the local hardcore punk scene. Others went to college or took jobs that required leaving their dalliance with late nights at Max’s Kansas City and shopping for brothel creepers on St. Marks Place in the rearview mirror.“As cool as I thought the scene was, I realized I just didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in college,” Laura Davis-Chanin, the Student Teachers’ drummer, said via video chat. “That was a big thing for me, given the incredible, shocking, thrilling world of rock ’n’ roll that I was a part of.”While the punk scene that preceded this moment has been exceptionally well documented, far less has been written about the teens who ran the night as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s. None of the groups were signed by major record labels and only one of the bands, the Colors, released an LP within the initial span of its career. (The Speedies put out an archival collection in 2007, largely to take advantage of the use of one of their songs, “Let Me Take Your Foto,” in a Hewlett-Packard ad campaign).With only spottily distributed independent 45s to spread the word outside the five boroughs, what was a potent local scene never gained a national or international profile. But several of its members have had notable careers inside and out of the arts world. Crewdson, the Speedies’ guitarist, is an acclaimed tableau photographer; Hoffert, his bandmate, became a data technology pioneer who helped develop the QuickTime media player and is now the senior vice president of video technology at Xandr; Allen Hurkin-Torres played in the Speedies, too, and is a former New York State Supreme Court justice.“There was a magical empowerment from what we did that has carried us through life,” Hoffert said via video chat. “The photography Gregory has done, my work in digital media, is directly related to that.”Schellenbach had a similar outlook: “It spawned so many cool things — art, authors, hip-hop. A magical time in New York City!”Eli Attie, who began going to Max’s before he had even hit puberty, became a speechwriter for Al Gore, then a writer and producer on “The West Wing” and “Billions.” “It made me unafraid,” he said of the scene. “It made me realize your life can be anything you want. If you want to know these people, if you want to experience this music, even if it seems out of reach or not allowed, you can just do it. You can write your own story.” More