Singer and musician Tom Verlaine, best known for fronting the band Television during the punk and post-punk generations, died on Saturday in New York at the age of 73. According to his old friend Patti Smith’s daughter, he died “after a short illness,” with no further details being released.
Verlaine, whose real name was Thomas Miller, began his rock history on the grimy stage of CBGB, a biker joint turned rock club in the 1970s, which also served as a springboard for the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and many other new bands. – Yorkers of the era. Despite having studied the piano, playing the saxophone and being a jazz enthusiast, he has distinguished himself as one of the most important guitarists in American punk rock.
Miller became Verlaine, after the 19th century French poet, when he formed Television with Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd and Billy Ficca. The band debuted in a small theater in Times Square on March 2, 1974, with an unusual look for the time: unkempt short hair and torn clothes darned with safety pins – which ended up being exported to England by Malcolm McLaren, when the manager he decided to launch the Sex Pistols a year later.
Hell and Verlaine then convinced the owner of CBGB to give them regular space at the bar, which started drawing attention to their strange style of music, unlike anything else out there. Then-rock critic Patti Smith wrote a glowing review that was eventually copied around the world describing Verlaine’s style, mentioning “guitar played with inverted angular passion”, which sounded like “a thousand nightingales singing”.
Patti Smith and Verlaine ended up dating, and the guitarist helped the writer become a singer, playing on her 1975 debut album, as well as composing the song “Break It Up” for her. Feeling left out and jealous of his colleague’s attention, Richard Hell left Televison to form another band, the Voidoids, with whom he recorded the classic “Blank Generation” in 1977.
With original Blondie bassist Fred Smith in place of Hell, Television recorded a seven-minute track which was released as their debut double-sided single in September 1975. The release marked the beginning of a new era, as it was fully independent. The song “Little Johnny Jewel” sparked interest from a new record company and the band was eventually signed to Elektra Records in July 1976.
Their first album, “Marquee Moon” (1977), and its ambitious 10-minute title track with two guitar solos were key to the American indie rock that emerged in the following decades. The pioneering spirit of television was to combine the energy of punk rock concerts with the avant-garde dissonance of Lou Reed’s band The Velvet Underground in the 1960s, time fragile and aggressive, soft and hard. But the band broke up weeks after recording the 1978 album, due to Richard Lloyd’s drug abuse.
Though television was never commercially successful, the impact of Verlaine’s stripped-down, structure-free playing – a jazzman in punk rock – influenced everything that followed, from Sonic Youth to the Galaxy 500 to the Dream Syndicate. , Pixies and Wilco.
All members of Television pursued musical careers, with drummer Billy Ficca finding major success with new wave band The Waitresses (from the hit “I Know What Boys Like”). But in the long run, Verlaine has been in the spotlight the longest. He released nine solo albums between 1979 and 2009, although he only released one near-hit single, “A Town Called Walker,” in 1987. So much so that, in 1992, he reunited with former partners for a third album, titled only “Television”, which ended up being the band’s last album.
In the same year, Verlaine released an instrumental record, “Warm and Cool”, and then fell silent.
He decided not to record new albums for nearly a decade and a half, appearing only on concerts and recordings by the ex Patti Smith, as well as producing a lauded posthumous album by singer Jeff Buckley.
Many of the songs from Televison and Verlaine’s solo career have gained new life in the soundtracks of films and series. This made the musician invited to compose for the cinema. His debut as a film score composer was in the documentary “I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School”, in 1993. He also wrote the music score for another documentary: “On Hostile Ground”, in 2001. But he only worked on one feature film: “Um Amor e Uma 45”, independent thriller directed by CM Talkington in 1995.
In addition, the guitarist and the band Television also became a movie, played in the film ‘CBGB: The Cradle of Punk Rock’, from 2013.
In a 2006 interview with The New York Times, Verlaine was asked how he defined his trajectory and said he would like to be remembered as someone who has spent his life “struggling not to have a professional career.”
Recall below some of the outstanding songs of the artist.
Source: Terra

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