SUN., JULY 30, 2006
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The Singular Sound of Tom Verlaine
by Lenny Kaye
His is the horizontal vibrato. The swell of the volume knob. The oddball note in a fractured chord. The scrape of a slide finding the microtonal. A single pre-amp power tube of his own choosing.
Tom Verlaine sounds like no other guitarist on Earth, or for that matter, most other planets in this or any other solar system.
A disclaimer: I have known Tom for approximately one third of a century, a 33 1/3 that we reinforce whenever we run into each other at a record flea market, comparing arcane vinyl albums. He's found Billy Mure's Supersonic Guitars In Hi-Fi, I have a copy of the Nutty Squirrels' "Uh-Oh." Once, on a flight in a tiny plane encountering some heavy turbulence over the Italian Alps, we took our mind off the air pockets by comparing the ten greatest guitar albums we knew. I am not at liberty to reveal them, although Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant both figured heavily on our lists, as did the Ventures' In Space.
I first saw the work-in-progress that was Television the night I also was first introduced to a Bowery joint named CBGB, on Easter Sunday in 1974. By that June, Verlaine, a well-known browser of the Flying Saucer Bookshop and aspiring Jazzmaster, was in Electric Lady Studio B laying down a pair of guitar tracks blended into one on a version of "Hey Joe" for a trio based around a poet-singer. After, I had the pleasure of listening to Television as the group found their voice and confidence over the two or so years before their first proper debut album, hearing countless renditions of "Little Johnny Jewel" and "Marquee Moon," the evolving band collaborating and excavating and finding a way where there was none before. But beyond the group context, Yonki would have the last laugh, as the '80s and early '90s saw Tom craft idiosynchronous releases, filigreed and filleted, on his own and owner.
Now, after a space of more than a decade, not one but two albums have blossomed forth on the eMusic charts to hone Tom's solo muse. He began recording them in 2003, and for fans of his guitar texture-messaging, the strangled poetry that emanates from his epiglottis, the sly wit and humor and unexpected corkscrew shifts that give his music an outré edge and inner sanctum, this has to be welcome news on a par with finding just the right cup of macchiato, the perfect spaghetti pomodoro, the exact mixture of greens in your salad, and, yes, the sweet spot in the Vox AC30 amp.
The differences between the two simultaneous releases are minimal to maximal, depending on Tom's mood swing, though Songs And Other Things features vocals amidst its instrumental excursions, and the slightly more spare Around, well, doesn't. Tom's voice is much the same maker-of-sound as his guitar, muttering and insinuating and heavy breathing and whispering sweet nuthin's and suggestive phrases in your ears, rising to unexpected cries of appasionata, dropping back to resolve the diminished. He is lyrical in the truest sense, words and cryptic imagery dappled with sonic texture, syllables like effects boxes. He holds his cards close to his vest. "Just the facts," he once Jack Webb'ed in Television's "Prove It," (and which he has reconfigured as a slow dance on the set-list of his current solo tour, backed by Jimmy Ripp), though like all such factoids, the interpretations can be many, and sometimes, like a great detective novel, are only put there to lead you astray. His aspirations are literary, which is perhaps how he became a namesake, and when placed on a page, the free verse is revealing: "Your nightingale knows three notes only," he says in homage to Keats on the topsy-turvy "The Earth Is In The Sky." "Three sweet notes." Then he does "The Shingaling." Wig out!
Songs may be more uptempo, even poppy in places, galvanized by long-time Patti Smith paradiddler Jay Dee Daugherty and Television basso profundo Fred Smith's rhythm section; Around is more ruminative, contemplative, drone-ive, built over Televison personality Billy Ficca's skittering percussives and cumulus atmospherics. "The Sun's Glide!" is a pure unwind of notes that seem to have no begin or end; on "Meteor Beach," you can watch the falling stars and make a wish. Each is full of the surprise phrase, the unexpected transition, the heart felt.
Though a unique voicing, Tom is also part of a New York guitar community that has drawn from the wellsprings of the many musics which hieroglyph upper and lower Manhattan (much like upper and lower Egypt) and its satellite boroughs, be they Brooklyn or North Carolina. What these stringed new-things share is a love of genre-colliding landscapes of sound, liberated by a flair for dissonance influenced by free jazz, in which all musics loose their forms and begin to sinuously dance. Snake charming.
Six players for six strings: Elliot Sharp's voodoo slide and accompanying saxophone; Marc Ribot's global embarkations (and whose tribute to Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity, encapsulates this debt to "free" playing even as it acknowledges that it is the music and not the player who is truly free); Eugene Chadbourne's joker-is-wild mash-ups of country and skronk, always ready for a one-take special; Bill Frisell's carefully chosen notes and sly curvatures of the melody as it veers toward discord; Vernon Reid's turn-it-to-eleven waves of distortion; Gary Lucas finding the link between delta blues, Middle Eastern wail, West African life o' high, and Syd Barrett (check his version of "Astronomy Domine").
Verlaine, however, is the mercurial one. On these two releases, like the paired hemispheres of the first planet, he creates his own twilight zone. A winged messenger.
Tom Verlaine sounds like no other guitarist on Earth, or for that matter, most other planets in this or any other solar system.
A disclaimer: I have known Tom for approximately one third of a century, a 33 1/3 that we reinforce whenever we run into each other at a record flea market, comparing arcane vinyl albums. He's found Billy Mure's Supersonic Guitars In Hi-Fi, I have a copy of the Nutty Squirrels' "Uh-Oh." Once, on a flight in a tiny plane encountering some heavy turbulence over the Italian Alps, we took our mind off the air pockets by comparing the ten greatest guitar albums we knew. I am not at liberty to reveal them, although Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant both figured heavily on our lists, as did the Ventures' In Space.
I first saw the work-in-progress that was Television the night I also was first introduced to a Bowery joint named CBGB, on Easter Sunday in 1974. By that June, Verlaine, a well-known browser of the Flying Saucer Bookshop and aspiring Jazzmaster, was in Electric Lady Studio B laying down a pair of guitar tracks blended into one on a version of "Hey Joe" for a trio based around a poet-singer. After, I had the pleasure of listening to Television as the group found their voice and confidence over the two or so years before their first proper debut album, hearing countless renditions of "Little Johnny Jewel" and "Marquee Moon," the evolving band collaborating and excavating and finding a way where there was none before. But beyond the group context, Yonki would have the last laugh, as the '80s and early '90s saw Tom craft idiosynchronous releases, filigreed and filleted, on his own and owner.
Now, after a space of more than a decade, not one but two albums have blossomed forth on the eMusic charts to hone Tom's solo muse. He began recording them in 2003, and for fans of his guitar texture-messaging, the strangled poetry that emanates from his epiglottis, the sly wit and humor and unexpected corkscrew shifts that give his music an outré edge and inner sanctum, this has to be welcome news on a par with finding just the right cup of macchiato, the perfect spaghetti pomodoro, the exact mixture of greens in your salad, and, yes, the sweet spot in the Vox AC30 amp.
The differences between the two simultaneous releases are minimal to maximal, depending on Tom's mood swing, though Songs And Other Things features vocals amidst its instrumental excursions, and the slightly more spare Around, well, doesn't. Tom's voice is much the same maker-of-sound as his guitar, muttering and insinuating and heavy breathing and whispering sweet nuthin's and suggestive phrases in your ears, rising to unexpected cries of appasionata, dropping back to resolve the diminished. He is lyrical in the truest sense, words and cryptic imagery dappled with sonic texture, syllables like effects boxes. He holds his cards close to his vest. "Just the facts," he once Jack Webb'ed in Television's "Prove It," (and which he has reconfigured as a slow dance on the set-list of his current solo tour, backed by Jimmy Ripp), though like all such factoids, the interpretations can be many, and sometimes, like a great detective novel, are only put there to lead you astray. His aspirations are literary, which is perhaps how he became a namesake, and when placed on a page, the free verse is revealing: "Your nightingale knows three notes only," he says in homage to Keats on the topsy-turvy "The Earth Is In The Sky." "Three sweet notes." Then he does "The Shingaling." Wig out!
Songs may be more uptempo, even poppy in places, galvanized by long-time Patti Smith paradiddler Jay Dee Daugherty and Television basso profundo Fred Smith's rhythm section; Around is more ruminative, contemplative, drone-ive, built over Televison personality Billy Ficca's skittering percussives and cumulus atmospherics. "The Sun's Glide!" is a pure unwind of notes that seem to have no begin or end; on "Meteor Beach," you can watch the falling stars and make a wish. Each is full of the surprise phrase, the unexpected transition, the heart felt.
Though a unique voicing, Tom is also part of a New York guitar community that has drawn from the wellsprings of the many musics which hieroglyph upper and lower Manhattan (much like upper and lower Egypt) and its satellite boroughs, be they Brooklyn or North Carolina. What these stringed new-things share is a love of genre-colliding landscapes of sound, liberated by a flair for dissonance influenced by free jazz, in which all musics loose their forms and begin to sinuously dance. Snake charming.
Six players for six strings: Elliot Sharp's voodoo slide and accompanying saxophone; Marc Ribot's global embarkations (and whose tribute to Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity, encapsulates this debt to "free" playing even as it acknowledges that it is the music and not the player who is truly free); Eugene Chadbourne's joker-is-wild mash-ups of country and skronk, always ready for a one-take special; Bill Frisell's carefully chosen notes and sly curvatures of the melody as it veers toward discord; Vernon Reid's turn-it-to-eleven waves of distortion; Gary Lucas finding the link between delta blues, Middle Eastern wail, West African life o' high, and Syd Barrett (check his version of "Astronomy Domine").
Verlaine, however, is the mercurial one. On these two releases, like the paired hemispheres of the first planet, he creates his own twilight zone. A winged messenger.
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