TOM VERLAINE 1949-2023
Lightning Striking Itself
Television’s guitar thaumaturge Tom Verlaine left us on January 28. David Fricke says goodbye.
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A friend from many stages: Tom Verlaine, 1978.
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ON APRIL 14, EASTER SUNDAY, 1974, after attending the New York premiere of Ladies And Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, singer-poet Patti Smith and guitarist Lenny Kaye headed downtown to catch the midnight set by a new, local band with a cryptic name – Television – at CBGB, a club recently opened in a former biker bar on the Bowery. “They play undulating rhythm like ocean… like they got knife fight [sic] in the alley after the set,” Smith wrote in Rock Scene, describing Television’s lightning-bolt effect in that dark, narrow room.
She was especially taken with singer and lead guitarist Tom Verlaine, a tall, stoic figure with a wasted-poet’s frame and an eccentric, yelping vocal style, who played “with angular, inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming” and had “the most beautiful neck in rock’n’roll.” Two months later, on June 5 at Electric Lady Studios, Verlaine soloed on the A-side of Smith’s debut single, Hey Joe – “a maelstrom of double helix,” as Kaye recalled in his memoir Lightning Striking, and the start of a profound friendship and collaboration that lasted Verlaine’s life. When he died on January 28 at 73 after a brief illness, Smith was at his side, and his passing was announced by her daughter Jesse.