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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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      Tom Verlaine’s 15 Essential Songs

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      From Television through his solo career, the songwriter created enigmatic tidings and cat’s-cradle guitar structures. He died on Saturday at 73.Tom Verlaine was present at the creation of New York City punk. His band Television held a residency at CBGB in the club’s first years. But his music was never bound by what became punk’s ruling aesthetic of fast, loud and simplistic. Instead, Verlaine’s songs reveled in the open-ended: in improvisations that could spiral out toward free jazz and in verbal enigmas and paradoxes.Born Thomas Miller, Verlaine — who died on Saturday at 73 — renamed himself after a symbolist poet, Paul Verlaine, and he built his songs around guitar patterns that interlocked like cats’ cradles, intricate but never confining. His music looked back to the not-so-distant days of psychedelia and the Velvet Underground, but it was leaner, tauter, steelier.His guitar was always clear and focused, whether it was balancing riffs in perfect tandem with Richard Lloyd in Television, clawing concise rhythm chords or arcing skyward for a keening solo. His playing drew on country, jazz, blues, surf-rock and raga; his compositions almost always set up a contrapuntal dialogue of guitars with distinct tones, colluding or contending.Verlaine’s voice would never be ingratiating enough for a broad audience; it was reedy, yelpy, quavery, a bit strangulated. Yet it was perfectly suited to the sly, cryptic tidings of his lyrics, which might invoke romance, dreams, spiritual quests or the convoluted plotting of film noir.Television’s 1977 debut album, “Marquee Moon,” still reigns as Verlaine’s most significant work — a signature statement that would become a cornerstone of indie-rock. But through the next decades, he created music that rewards attention to every detail.Here are 15 songs that demonstrate Verlaine’s tenacious ambition and singular vision.Television, ‘See No Evil’ (1977)“What I want I want now/And it’s a whole lot more than anyhow.” That was the mission statement that opened Television’s debut album, with a trilling riff and a warped Bo Diddley beat: new and old, terse and encompassing, absolutely committed.Television, ‘Marquee Moon’ (1977)No wonder this was the title song of Television’s debut album: It was a whole musical system and universe. “Marquee Moon” is both architectonic and disorienting, blueprinted and unpredictable. It starts with the two guitars of Lloyd and Verlaine, separated in stereo, syncopated against each other; then, before anyone can get settled, Fred Smith’s bass and Billy Ficca’s drums forcibly move the downbeat. Verlaine sings about opposites — “the kiss of death/the embrace of life” — on the way to a jam that culminates in chiming bliss.Television, ‘Glory’ (1978)Spirituality meets flirtation in “Glory.” The music harks back to the metronomic beat, talky verses and major chords of the Velvet Underground, but it has its own twists, as Verlaine’s guitar lines push toward Eastern modes. The glory is in the resonant chords and proud chorus, not whatever happens between the narrator and his partner; the sound suggests the most promising outcome.Television, ‘Days’ (1978)With its pastoral, major-key guitar hooks and vocal-harmony choruses, “Days” makes Television’s closest approach to a pop single. Still, it’s no compromise; it radiates an everyday mysticism.Television, ‘Little Johnny Jewel — Live in San Francisco 1978’ (1978)“Little Johnny Jewel” extended across both sides of Television’s first single, in 1975, and onstage it would expand even further, into a jazzy, sprawling, exploratory jam that was never the same twice. Its basic riff was blunt — two three-note arpeggios — but all four band members could tease at it, push against it, scurry around it or, as starts about halfway through this 12-minute version, launch a guitar solo that climbs from a lament to a flailing, racing peak. The reaction, at a gig in 1978, was a smattering of applause.Tom Verlaine, ‘Souvenir From a Dream’ (1979)On his self-titled 1979 solo debut album, Verlaine welcomed keyboards into his arrangements. The piano chords that open “Souvenir From a Dream” bring a droll but deadpan film-noir tone to the song, which has Verlaine patiently explaining, “Mister, you went the wrong way — I think you better go back.”Tom Verlaine, ‘Kingdom Come’ (1979)Over a stalwart march beat, with guitar chords like distant fanfares, a prisoner prays for redemption. Verse by verse, the song moves from despair toward hope.Tom Verlaine, ‘There’s a Reason’ (1981)In “There’s a Reason,” from Verlaine’s 1981 album, “Dreamtime,” infatuation feels like being buffeted from every direction by emotions and sensations. It starts with a brusque, seemingly straightforward riff, only to have that riff repeatedly sideswiped by tremolo chords. And when the singer admits, “You’re my thrill, my dear,” the floodgates open and guitars and drums pour in.Tom Verlaine, ‘True Story’ (1982)“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Verlaine sings, offering a desperate apology amid a crossfire of guitars and drums — knife-edged single notes, barbed lines, implacable offbeats — that don’t promise any forgiveness.Tom Verlaine, ‘Dissolve/Reveal’ (1984)A rhythm workout that turns out to be a love song, “Dissolve/Reveal” is constructed from tiny, pointillistic elements — cowbell and tambourine taps, zinging single guitar notes, brief trickle-down arpeggios, sudden chords on unexpected offbeats, explosive bursts of distortion — that eventually unite in ecstasy.Tom Verlaine, ‘Cry Mercy, Judge’ (1987)A brisk shuffle beat drives “Cry Mercy, Judge” while little corkscrewing guitar licks turn up all over the place. The terse lyrics imply a complicated back story, with Verlaine’s voice savoring some well-deserved revenge.Tom Verlaine, ‘Shimmer’ (1990)Verlaine never sounded more lighthearted than he did on his 1990 album, “The Wonder.” He gets downright funky in “Shimmer,” stacking up scrubbed rhythm chords, pithy blues licks and tickling riffs as he smirks his way through compliments and come-ons: “Nice new features on your automobile/Maybe I could get a lift uptown.”Television, ‘1880 or So’ (1992)When Verlaine reunited Television in the early 1990s, the band seemingly picked up right where it left off in 1978, aiming for the same clarity and suspense. Verlaine’s and Lloyd’s guitars set up “1880 or So” with a calm fingerpicked drone immediately answered by a nervous, leaping line, immediately re-establishing their two-guitar equipoise as Verlaine sings about love and mortality.Television, ‘Call Mr. Lee’ (1992)“Call Mr. Lee” hints at a movie plot — “He’ll know the code is broken/Tell him the dog is turning red” — and frames it with gnarled, reverb-laden, Middle-Eastern-tinged guitar lines.Tom Verlaine, ‘Spiritual’ (1992)From Verlaine’s 1992 album, “Warm and Cool,” the instrumental “Spiritual” suspends his lead guitar line above a drone. He plays the folky melody as if he’s discovering it for the first time, coaxing out each note, letting it claim its place in the phrase. He returns to it in a lower octave and then a higher one; at the end he lingers over a few notes, hinting that they still hold mysteries. More