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January 28, 2023 2:21 PM

Tom Verlaine was a member of Television, the first band out of the CBGB scene in New York City to get signed to a major label. Their album Marquee Moon has been a huge influence on generations of bands. Verlaine died (non-paywalled) this morning after a brief illness.
posted by pxe2000 (55 comments total)

Oof. Feels so basic to say Marquee Moon is one of my favorite albums - like, yeah, how original, you and everyone else buddy - but truly, I got a turntable a couple birthdays ago and Marquee Moon was in my very first shopping cart. Out of all the albums I could think of, it was one of the most obvious that I really needed to own on vinyl, and I listen to it all the time. It's just, perfect. Has everything it needs and not an iota more. Any member of Television could have hung up their instrument and done something else after that album came out and still been worthy of remembrance, but he gave us a whole lot more to enjoy too.

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posted by potrzebie at 2:30 PM on January 28, 2023 [18 favorites]

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posted by Lawn Beaver at 2:32 PM on January 28, 2023

from the archives:

“In case you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a sucker for an epic, and Marquee Moon (the song) is definitely that. Title track of Television’s first and best album, and doubly lovable for how it righteously pulled the rug out from certain Stalinist tendencies of the punk scene at the time — way too many hard and fast rules getting laid down as to what drugs could be taken, the colour of your leather jacket, the length and style of your hair, how long a song could be. Which is all dumb, all opposite to the anarchic fervour that ignited punk in the first place. No rules, no boundaries, no nothing – just don’t be f***ing boring. And Marquee Moon (song and album) nail that. So yeah, maybe Television weren’t punk, but they certainly came from punk. So if a riff said, ride me to f***ing eternity, they were going to ride it, taking their orders from the music, not some tiresome Machiavellian assholes who, in another era, would be deciding what words could be used in a poem, what symbols … and who should be disappeared come the revolution.”
posted by philip-random at 2:43 PM on January 28, 2023 [15 favorites]

I can still remember incredibly vividly putting on Marquee Moon for the first time. I had read about them in… Mojo, I think? …when I was 16 or 17. And they seemed cool, but I didn’t come across the album until a year later, and I bought it on a whim. I put it on when I got home, and just that guitar sound at the beginning of See No Evil was like nothing else.

In some ways, they were simply a rock n’ roll band, but they, and the small scene that formed around them at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City opened up new ways to make music. There’s a low-quality video of them online from 1974, and they’re still figuring out what their thing is, but you can already see the roots of so much that was to follow.

Tom Verlaine is one of a few people who you can say changed the culture, and now he’s gone.

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posted by Kattullus at 2:49 PM on January 28, 2023 [14 favorites]

No! That seems unfair, somehow. "Venus de Milo" is one of my very favorite songs - it really captures the feeling of being out in the city at night and young.

Marquee Moon is a great album. Granted, a great album with a couple of weak songs, but the great songs are so great that it doesn't matter. And it's a really individual-feeling, human-feeling album, it's an album by a person. If Marquee Moon is basic, La Dolce Vita is basic, Donna Summer is basic, Vans slip-ons are basic. It's not basic, it's just good.
posted by Frowner at 2:52 PM on January 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

I bought Marquee Moon when I was 15, mostly on the strength of the cover art--I was living in a blue-collar Boston suburb in the mid 1990s and didn't know men could look like that. The album sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before and opened new worlds for me. (And I wanted to lose my virginity to Tom Verlaine.) This news is hitting me hard.
posted by pxe2000 at 2:55 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I recently read Duncan Hannah's collected diaries Twentieth-Century Boy, and Verlaine and the Richards Lloyd and Hell show up a lot, in no small part due to Hannah running the Television fan club. Hannah died this past summer, so this feels...not ominous, exactly, but definitely sad.

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posted by JohnFromGR at 3:03 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fuck. Their third album is also great, but obvs not in the same category. I did see them tour on that album at the TLA in Philly.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 3:26 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I only really know him from the cover of "Kingdom Come" that Bowie did on Scary Monsters, but it's a great song.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:40 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by djseafood at 3:41 PM on January 28, 2023

breaking in my heart from his first solo album
posted by pyramid termite at 3:46 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Television truly blew my mind when I first heard them. They were a band that sounded as if some aliens read the dictionary definition of rock band and decided to form one. Like nothing else. The world would be more ordinary had Verlaine never come on the scene. Thanks, bud.
posted by 2N2222 at 3:54 PM on January 28, 2023 [11 favorites]

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posted by SystematicAbuse at 3:54 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 4:04 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by awfurby at 4:54 PM on January 28, 2023

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Oh fuck. It's one thing to be losing 60s rock stars but now death is coming for the punks of my teenage years in the 70s? I'm not ready for this at all.

Television was so amazing and so unclassifiable. Too epic for punk but too angular for 70s corporate rock, they were their own pocket genre. I'm listening to this show from December '76 at CDBG and did they sound so amazing.
posted by octothorpe at 4:59 PM on January 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

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posted by neon909 at 5:07 PM on January 28, 2023

Sorry to hear this. I like his guitar work. He wasn't afraid to play solos when it wasn't considered "cool" in the punk scene. His playing on Guiding Light is especially great.
posted by Liquidwolf at 5:09 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by Thorzdad at 5:21 PM on January 28, 2023

Got my Marquee Moon LP spinning on the turntable right now and my son is jamming along on his little violin. Nice sounds on a Saturday evening - thanks again Verlaine. You were a real one.
posted by potrzebie at 5:22 PM on January 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

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posted by Capybara at 5:27 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by bondcliff at 5:28 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by nickzoic at 5:59 PM on January 28, 2023

Well fuck. I had just been wondering what he was up to these days.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:20 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Aspersioncast: I had a terrible feeling when they canceled their fall tour dates that something was wrong. There have been reports here and there that Verlaine was not in great health, but since he’s so private this comes as a shock.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:40 PM on January 28, 2023

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posted by kensington314 at 7:05 PM on January 28, 2023

I saw that he had died and thought "What a coincidence -- I was just listening to Marquee Moon!" But then I realized that it's one of the albums that's been in my frequent playlist for decades, and it would be stranger if I hadn't listened to it recently.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:30 PM on January 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Fire has a fun Ondes Martenot workout!
posted by ovvl at 7:45 PM on January 28, 2023

He could be a pretty incredible lyricist as well. He was a poet and a jazz musician and both of those show up in Television. It could be epic and chaotic but it also had space in the sound.

If you pull out your copy of MM tonight, take a closer look at the cover photo, and even better the photo of them with their instruments on the record liner. They seem impossibly young for making such a ground breaking and original record. And really skilled instrumentalists.

It's just, perfect.

I think this is nicely stated and I agree wholeheartedly with your comment.

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posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:05 PM on January 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

first time I’ve been back on MeFi in years and it’s for eulogy thread. Hi corpse!!
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:08 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

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posted by riverlife at 8:31 PM on January 28, 2023

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One of my favorite guitarists ever. I had the good fortune to see Television play in 2004, Irving Plaza, NYC - best show I've ever seen. Both Verlaine and Lloyd were playing Strats through AC30s and it was just a truly incredible guitar sound.
posted by equalpants at 8:33 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow. As a teenager he escaped from boarding school with Richard Hell and moved to NYC.

He dated Patti Smith and played guitar on a song on Horses.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:02 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Damn. RIP, T.V., and thanks for the music.

Along with being an amazing song, "Marquee Moon" has the virtue of being 10 minutes long, which was great back when I was young malcontent in a suburban pool hall and wanted to manage to get a few minutes of good music in between shitty glam rock while I played pool with my friends. It's incredible, but honestly my favorite Television song is the more compact but just as perfect "Days" from their second album Adventure.

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posted by whir at 9:02 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

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posted by Joey Michaels at 9:53 PM on January 28, 2023

I was just a bit too young to have experienced Television when they first hit the scene and when I did get old enough to begin exploring popular music according to my own choices (as opposed to whatever happened to be playing on the radio or otherwise going on around me) I somehow overlooked them for a very long time.

I knew of them by reputation, of course, but for whatever reasons I was very, very late to the party with Marquee Moon, enough so that it really only clicked for me in the past five years or so.

For anyone reading this far in the thread who, like me, missed out at the time and is wondering what all the fuss is about - well, the musical world has expanded a lot since those days and there are many other options but if you're at all appreciative of guitar-driven rock it's worth going back for a listen.

Marquee Moon is a powerhouse of an album and you could theoretically start anywhere but allow me to suggest the track that opened the door for me:

Elevation -

Our lips are sealed
Our breath is burning
These cold wild seas
Have left us turning
But I sleep light on these shores tonight...

Sleep light, Mr. Verlaine.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:08 PM on January 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

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posted by queensissy at 10:17 PM on January 28, 2023

with angular inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming

solo on, Mr Verlaine
posted by fregoli at 2:11 AM on January 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

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posted by WalkingAround at 4:34 AM on January 29, 2023

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posted by jzb at 4:42 AM on January 29, 2023

Sad to hear for many reasons. I haven't listened to that amazing debut in a long while, so it's going to be played this afternoon. A great guitarist and musician.
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posted by the sobsister at 7:38 AM on January 29, 2023

Elevation, such a great song. Marquee Moon, played so very many times. Meant a lot to me.
posted by The Half Language Plant at 10:06 AM on January 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

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posted by SageLeVoid at 10:15 AM on January 29, 2023

> I had the good fortune to see Television play in 2004, Irving Plaza, NYC - best show I've ever seen.

I was at that show too, it's one of a small handful that really stuck with me over the years.

This one hurt.
posted by bigschmoove at 10:27 AM on January 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

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posted by From Bklyn at 12:29 PM on January 29, 2023

Another one of the gems that emerged from the magical shithole of CBGBs. I was lucky enough to see them there in the golden era.

RIP, Tom. Most bands never craft even one really good song, much less an entire album like Marquee Moon.

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posted by dbiedny at 2:07 PM on January 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

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posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 3:48 PM on January 29, 2023

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Another guitar hero gone.
posted by artdrectr at 8:50 PM on January 29, 2023

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posted by evilDoug at 8:57 PM on January 29, 2023

♪
posted by Gelatin at 4:21 AM on January 30, 2023

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posted by schyler523 at 7:22 AM on January 30, 2023

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posted by lumpenprole at 2:58 PM on January 30, 2023

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posted by coppertop at 7:05 PM on January 30, 2023

James Walcott, in an obituary on Tom Verlaine he wrote for the London Review of Books, linked to a lovely remembrance of Tom Verlaine the bookstore haunter by George Szamuely. Here’s an excerpt:

After a while, I began to look forward to going to the Strand most evenings in the certain knowledge that I would see Tom there, either straining his eyes in the darkness (making sure that he didn’t miss a single book or pamphlet) or engaging in long, lively conversations with fellow-Strand aficionados

His interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging. He would greet me very excited, having found some book about traveling through New York in the 1930s or a volume of verse by an obscure poet from the 1960s or a vegetarian cookbook or the score of a long-forgotten musical or a memoir of the music scene in the 1980s. He would often come over with a book to where I was browsing and recommend that I buy it. Since, as likely as not, the book was about something I didn’t know much about—and the book only cost $1—I would generally follow his recommendation. However, I soon came to notice, he never reciprocated. Not once did he follow my recommendation. Out of politeness, he would place the book back on the cart and promise that he would buy it the following day.

His physical abilities were awe-inspiring. He was a tall man; so in order to be able to go through, one by one, the books on the bottom shelves of the trolleys, he would have to crouch down. To my amazement, he could stay in a crouching position for extraordinary lengths of time—cigarette in hand or dangling from his mouth— completely absorbed in a book he had just discovered. His eyesight too was amazing. As anyone who has frequented the Strand in the evening knows, it’s not particularly well lit outside. And the books on the trolleys are old, with the lettering on the covers sadly faded, almost invisible. Yet, the dark didn’t bother Tom: While I couldn’t make very much out below the upper two shelves of the trolleys and couldn’t in any case maintain a crouching position for any length of time, he could somehow spot an interesting title anywhere.

When Tom wasn’t reading a book he had just picked up, he would be tidying up. Most perusers of the $1 or $2 trolleys are very careless about the way they put the books back: some place the books upside down or back to front, some don’t put the books back at all and simply leave them lying around. This would infuriate Tom. He always wanted to see the trolleys tidy, with books neatly shelved, smaller books at the top, bulkier books at the bottom.

I recommend reading the whole thing, as well as Wolcott’s obituary.
posted by Kattullus at 10:43 AM on February 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Since Marquee Moon has gotten most of the attentions, I'd like to add: Souvenir from a Dream, a rousing piano doom-rock thumper from his first solo album. "Mister you've gone the wrong way..."
posted by ovvl at 6:25 PM on February 4, 2023 [1 favorite]