Punk rock band ‘Television’ founder Tom Verlaine no more

New York [US], January 29 (ANI): Tom Verlaine passed away on Saturday in New York’s Manhattan. He revolutionised rock guitar during the punk era of the 1970s with his band ‘Television’. He was 73.

According to Variety, Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Verlaine’s friend and former lover Patti Smith, confirmed Verlaine’s passing to the New York Times. The musician passed away “after a brief illness,” she revealed. With appropriate nods to John Coltrane’s modal jazz and the Byrds’ resonating raga-rock, lead guitarist Tom Verlaine of Television carried on the (Velvet Underground’s) legacy of street-real lyrics and harmonic clang-and-drone when the punk rebellion began to take shape in the mid-seventies, according to critic Robert Palmer in “Rock & Roll: An Unruly History” (1995).

According to Variety, the influence of Verlaine’s freewheeling, jumbledly inventive playing and Television’s combative two-guitar assault would later be heard in a wide range of younger acolytes’ music, from New York-based bands like the Feelies and Sonic Youth to West Coast-bred musicians like Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate and Nels Cline of Wilco.
“He was my guitar hero at a time when I needed one most,” Wynn said in a statement.

“I spent the entire year of 1981 practising daily to Marquee Moon. Tom Verlaine’s soloing (and Richard Lloyd’s as well, of course) showed me you could be a virtuoso and dangerous at the same time, more Coltrane or Ornette than the arena rockers of the day. It was a revelation and I was hoping my Jazzmaster could somehow channel his when I played the solo on ‘Halloween’ on the first Dream Syndicate album. Such an immeasurable influence on me and, of course, on so many of my fellow guitarist friends.”

‘Television’ released its groundbreaking debut album ‘Marquee Moon’ in 1977 after being signed to Elektra Records (after the departure of Verlaine’s close friend and fellow founding member Richard Hell). The album’s 10-minute title track, which was written by Verlaine and featured an extended solo as well as a distinctively throttled, wobbly lead vocal, stood out among the short, intensely focused songs of such CBGB contemporaries as the Ramones and Talking Heads.

After releasing its second album, ‘Adventure,’ in 1978, Television split up due to growing hostility between Verlaine and Lloyd. The group would reconvene for a self-titled album for Capitol Records in 1992 and intermittent live performances. Jimmy Ripp, who had long accompanied Verlaine on his solo recordings and tours, took Lloyd’s place in the touring band in 2007, as per Variety.

From 1979 to 1992, Verlaine independently released eight solo albums on Elektra, Warner Bros., Virgin, I.R.S., Fontana, and Rykodisc. These albums continued the enigmatic authorial voice he created in Television. After a subsequent 14-year absence from the recording studio, the guitarist made a comeback in 2006 with the simultaneous release of the instrumental album ‘Around’ and the vocal collection ‘Songs and Other Things’ on the Chicago-based independent label Thrill Jockey.