Tom Verlaine (1949-2023)
It’s a strange — though obviously not uncommon — thing to mourn the death of someone you did not know. We mourn the loss of leaders, heroes and celebrities all the time, with official holidays, half mast flags and televised tributes. And in all of those instances, we are, by and large, mourning strangers. But Tom Verlaine was neither a leader nor a celebrity. In fact, it’s fair to say that he was temperamentally averse to both of those ideas.
And yet, when he died this past Saturday, the very public and completely effusive response was extraordinary, befitting a man of great stature or, minimally, someone with whom we felt deep connection. The last two days have featured a parade of fulsome tributes to a man I did not know, from people I do not know and who, I presume, also did not know the subject of their flattery. But I guess that’s the thing with idols — if you really knew them, they probably wouldn’t be your idols anymore.
Of all of the many wonderful things said about Tom Verlaine this past week, the most moving words came, unsurprisingly, from Patti Smith. Her essay for The New Yorker, entitled “He Was Tom Verlaine,” was typically elegiac, like a series of black and white photographs narrated with poetic beats and prosaic secrets. I found it to be unusually revealing, not because the author was betraying any confidences, but because, prior to this week, and in spite of the fact that I’ve spent decades enamored of Tom Verlaine, I (like most of the world) knew almost nothing about the man.
We could all see his swanlike neck. We knew that he was doing something different with his guitar to make those bluebird sounds. We knew about those legendary CBGBs shows and that he was born in Jersey and raised in Delaware and loved John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and Raymond Chandler and comic books and science fiction. But we didn’t know about his days playing hockey in high school or his penchant for Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts or that, when he squealed “I want my little Winghead” right before the solo in “Little Johnny Jewel,” he was singing about Patti, whose hair he’d once over-cut into an inverted bob.
“He Was Tom Verlaine” could also be read “He Was Tom Verlaine,” as if to insist on the idea that this man, who was born Tom Miller, really was that guy — that sound, that aesthetic, that different. That subtle rewriting of the title suggests something like: “Yes, he really existed. He was how you imagined him to be.” Alternately, the essay’s title could be read as “He Was Tom Verlaine” as if to emphasize that there was, in fact, a very real man — who was once a boy — behind the legend of “Marquee Moon.” Or, I suppose, it could also read “He Was Tom Verlaine” in order to call out the space between the man — a tall, lanky, shy, handsome, sinister, broke, book-loving boyfriend once named Miller — and what he signified — a cult hero, guitar wizard, poet and occasional gumshoe who was the author of one of the most obsessed over albums from the second half of the twentieth century.
Because it is both so banal, on one level, and so obviously personal on another, “He Was Tom Verlaine” is the perfect title for an obituary. The sentence is both a matter of fact and a complete mystery — like the subject himself. There was always a feeling about Tom Verlaine that amounted to something like: “If you know, you know.” In many ways this winking acknowledgment was true. To love “Marquee Moon” was a point of connection between strangers and a validation of taste. You had to have either been there or know somebody who might invite you into the club. To love “Marquee Moon” was to wear a badge of distinction.
It follows that “Adventure” was like a medal of valor and proof of loyalty — a sign that you could appreciate subtlety and were in for the long haul. And then, of course, there was everything else. Nine solo albums over forty plus years. One more Television album which appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a spectacular asteroid flying into the ocean. There was the soundtrack work. The guest appearances. The festival shows that paid the bills. If you were there from the beginning (which I was not), Verlaine was more mythic than mythical. But for those of us that arrived just slightly later, he was probably close to the latter — a symbol, a fable about Seventies NYC, a living ghost who haunted Manhattan’s oldest bookstores.
credit: Pierre Schermann/WWD/Penske Media
Though she claimed that if she were a boy she’d have been him, Patti Smith is not all that much like Tom Verlaine. They are of similar ages and from similar places. They read a lot of the same books and listened to a lot of the same music and bought clothes at a lot of the same thrift shops. But whereas Verlaine’s bohemianism bristled at commercial demands, Patti was more of a natural star. Verlaine was undeniably introverted while Patti could go from wallflower to agitator to ham in a single verse. Patti Smith is in charge of her career while Tom Verlaine seemed generally disinterested in his. Patti has countless admirable traits, but perhaps most of all, she has chutzpah. And though he was Jewish and the leader of bands, Tom had whatever the opposite or chutzpah is.
Whereas I am particularly interested in the semiotics of Tom Verlaine, I can also imagine that some fans might roll their eyes in my direction, convinced that our collective infatuation is really, truly, only about the music. That “Marquee Moon” is a masterpiece which changed the way guitars sounded and how singers sang and how bands looked. That “Adventure” is a dreamy, overlooked gem. And that there are several dozen other stunning tracks from Verlaine’s career that marry the prosaic with the poetic with the extra-terrestrial. Obviously, I would not deny any of that. I mean, I’ve spent most of my adolescence and all of my adult life listening and re-listening to his music. Tom Verlaine composed the soundtrack to my life.
But, as magnificent as his music can be, I do not think his appeal is purely (or even mostly) musical. It’s closer to the sensation of a crush. Of suddenly and desperately wanting to know someone before they are knowable and despite their unknowability. By his own admission, Tom Verlaine spent a career trying to disappear. He ran away as a teen. He changed his name. He moved to the crowded city. Then, he moved to Europe. He barely gave interviews. He took to hiding his face in photographs. Of his nine solo albums, only five are currently available on streaming services or in physical distribution. He apparently never practiced guitar. And despite the fact that, for over a decade, he had more than an album’s worth of new material, he stopped releasing new music in 2006.
Tom Verlaine was not hiding away like Jeff Mangum, nor was he a recluse like Syd Barrett or an outsider like Roky Erickson. It just seems that everything that fans (like me) most wanted from him was the opposite of what Tom Verlaine was most interested in. Which made him inaccessible. Which created more demand than supply. Which naturally led to idolatry, myth, fascination and — yes — crushes.
Though logically I know that there was a real life man born with the name “Tom Miller,” who died as “Tom Verlaine,” sometimes I do wonder. Frankly, it’s hard to reconcile the guy who in conversation sounds like any other guy born between Bergen County, New Jersey and Delaware County, Pennsylvania, with the guy singing on “See No Evil.” It’s hard to square the man hiding under his shirt in 1992 promotional photos for “Television” with the Bowery supermodel holding hands with Patti Smith in 1975. Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine somebody professing to care so little about music that we cared about so much.
The semiotics of Tom Verlaine is what Jacques Derrida called “différance” — meaning that is perpetually deferred and which exists only through what it is not. We cling to “Marquee Moon,” in no small parts, because of how different it is. We adore Tom Verlaine because of how unknowable he was. We understand both the music and the man mostly because of everything they were not. In that was he both never was and will always almost be “Tom Verlaine.”
Which brings me back to the oddness of mourning a stranger — and not just any stranger, but a stranger who wanted to be estranged. It’s this unresolvable contradiction that makes the outpouring of sympathy so desperate and so deeply felt. Similarly, it’s what makes those tiny, poetic details from “He Was Tom Verlaine” so completely heartbreaking — like the first and last time you held hands with somebody you loved.
It’s also that estrangement which compelled me to run to my turntable and listen to music other than “Marquee Moon” — an album that functions as our collective talisman every bit as much as it is an actual masterpiece. “Marquee Moon” is an album whose reputation and influence eventually superseded the magnificence of its reality. An album whose bookends I find to be far more interesting than its iconic centerpiece. Whose opener (“See No Evil”) is as fearless as any in the history of Rock and Roll and whose finale (“Torn Curtain”) is wistful as anything on “Astral Weeks.”
But I don’t listen to those songs or that album. I go elsewhere, chasing proof of Tom Verlaine (but knowing that all I will find is différance). And so I play “1880 Or So,” from “Television,” to hear the depth of despair as whispers: “Oh, rose of my heart, the vision dims/The time is brief, now the shadow swims.” Then I skip to “Mars,” the last song on that same record, with its “Twin Peaks” meets Duane Eddy hook and its surrealism and its old fashioned detective story and its lead singer pretending to lose his mind while he attempts to frighten us away.
And then I go back further, to the records in the middle, when Tom Verlaine was neither a budding star or a reluctant, aging cult hero. Back to his solo debut and the 2:54 mark of “Breakin' in My Heart,” when his voice strains and then cracks slightly, confirmation that the poet heartthrob on the album’s cover is, in fact, just a man. Next, I listen to all of “Dreamtime,” but especially to “The Blue Robe,” which is both a masterclass of Post-Punk guitar and a summation of everything John McLaughlin did with Miles Davis.
Then I jump ahead one year to hear “Postcard From Waterloo,” an absolutely perfect Pop song in the world where Lou Reed was Paul McCartney. Three songs later, our doomed soldier reads a letter from the front lines and then tears into what might be the most classically “Tom Verlaine” guitar solo in his oeuvre, full of clues dropped and traps set and mysteries revealed and dangers miraculously avoided.
Eventually, I go through each solo album, song by song, searching for evidence of the man who was, after Belinda Carlisle, my first Rock and Roll crush. The person whose musical ideas were born just barely from The Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones, but much more so from TV Westerns and “The Twilight Zone” and novelty songs and ad jingles and movie sound effects and Jazz. The person who started out sounding like no one else but who ultimately sounded a bit like everyone else that followed him — like The Feelies and Echo and The Bunnymen and REM and U2 and The Dream Syndicate and tens of thousands of lesser known bands — who, just like me, were chasing Tom Verlaine.
The great poignancy of Patti Smith’s New Yorker eulogy is the knowledge that I don't really know who “He Was,” but also — and more importantly — that love is so much more about what we don’t know than what we know for sure.