Tom Verlaine
Scenes–dramatic, romantic ejaculations of zeitgeist–have been all the rage ever since Sir Thomas Malory decided that King Arthur’s court might have been a really cool place to hang out. There are those who dream of smoking opium with Byron and of being there when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare, of jouncing along in that big ol’ beater down Route 66 with Jack and Neal. Boiled down to the raw bones of legend and art, stripped of hunger and hangovers and all those days when nothing much happened, it all seems more exciting than our own lives–and easier and safer than creating something memorable ourselves.
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There are plenty of problems with scene obsession, foremost among them that the vicariously minded drift like dandelion fluff toward spectacle–Johnny Thunders’s rigor mortis, Dee Dee Ramone’s ex-girlfriend turning tricks–and pass right over all those tedious hours spent writing and rehearsing and recording. That’s what’s never mentioned in the gossip books or the fashion spreads: ideas may happen by accident, but art never does, and the grunt work is rarely glamorous. Oh, sure, there’s the moment when it catches fire in front of an audience, and it can look spontaneous–but it isn’t.
In the very early days of Television (which as everyone now “remembers” was the first rock band to play CBGB) Verlaine and original bassist and cowriter Richard Hell embodied a creative tension between perfectionism and punk chaos, a tension that Verlaine appeared to take upon himself when Hell left. You can hear it plainly enough on Marquee Moon, and it becomes even more evident on the posthumous live release The Blow-Up (ROIR), where Verlaine stops worrying about the clarity of the mix and his occasionally god-awful voice, and points his guitar toward the stars.
They say history is written by the victors, and the history of rock outside the mainstream is no exception. As much as punk originally might have been the refuge of the unfashionable, awkward, and weird, it has been resold to the chic and shapely at high prices many, many times over. That process was already well under way by the time Television broke up in 1978. Since then, Verlaine’s own victories have all been artistic, arguably moral, and somewhat Pyrrhic–the history he helped to create has largely been told by others, and this version, which may be as close as he’s come to his own telling, is available only as a British import. There’s nothing inherently antiglamorous about Verlaine: he’s good-looking, he dresses well, and when I saw him on his only other American tour this decade (the short-lived Television reunion) he turned out to be rather charismatic. It’s just that he understands the game either not at all or all too well.
