Television frontman Tom Verlaine died last week, and, now, Patti Smith has paid tribute to the late musician and her former boyfriend in an essay for The New Yorker. Titled “He Was Tom Verlaine,” her eulogy details Verlaine’s upbringing in Delaware, the first time the artists crossed paths in 1973, and their shared interests in poetry, composers, and the bustle of New York. She also recounted the first time she saw Television perform live on April 14, 1974, at CBGB, writing, “What we saw that night was kin, our future, a perfect merging of poetry and rock and roll. As I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.”
“He devoured poetry and dark-chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, downed with coffee and cigarettes,” wrote Smith. “Sometimes he would seem dreamy and faraway then suddenly break into peals of laughter. He was angelic yet slightly demonic, a cartoon character with the grace of a dervish. I knew him then. We liked holding hands and spending hours browsing the shelves of Flying Saucer News and going to Forty-eighth Street and looking at guitars that he could never afford and riding the Staten Island Ferry after three sets at CBGB and climbing six flights of stairs to the apartment on East Eleventh Street and lying together on a mattress gazing at the ceiling and listening to the rain and hearing something else. There was no one like Tom. He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music.”
Verlaine and Smith dated in the mid-1970s and collaborated together over the years, with the Television guitarist contributing to Smiths albums Horses, Gung Ho, Gone Again, and Easter. The two stayed close friends long after they broke up, with Smith noting in her New Yorker essay that “having no children, [Verlaine] welcomed the love he received from [Smith’s] daughter, Jesse, and [her] son, Jackson.”
Verlaine died after a brief illness at the age of 73. Although he’s best known for his seminal work in Television, including the landmark 1977 album Marquee Moon, Verlaine also released numerous solo records throughout his life. In addition to Smith, countless musicians paid tribute to the late artist upon hearing of his death, including Michael Stipe, Sleater-Kinney, Blondie’s Chris Stein, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Flea, among others.
Television’s Tom Verlaine Changed the Guitar for the Rock Underground
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