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NEWS : STORIES
Whatever happened to Tom Verlaine? In 1977, his band Television released Marquee Moon. A glorious eight tracks of incandescent guitar antics and lyrical surrealism, it flipped New York punk on its head and has routinely been cited as one of
Verlaine pressed on though, releasing a series of undervalued solo albums during the 1980s. His guitar still burned and his music remained wonderfully mysterious. But it didn't translate into economic success. After releasing an enticing instrumental album Warm & Cool in 1992, he fell silent. Now, as the Thrill Jockey label reissues Warm & Cool with several new bonus tracks, Verlaine speaks to VH1 about free jazz and why he hasn't got an iPod yet. It's been over 10 years since there's been recorded music from you. Have you changed as a musician? Probably not. What makes you say that? I don't think people are aware of any kinds of changes. You write a bunch of songs and some of them you record, some of them you don't. Sometimes you record it and go "I really don't think this is so great," so you don't look on it anymore. It doesn't pass the full recording stage. When the time comes you go, "Oh yeah, this is a batch of songs." Do you play guitar everyday? Yeah, just about. Give me insight to the mindset that makes you do that. What in your head makes you spend time with the guitar? Because I don't have any keyboards, except for a couple of cheese-ball organs, which I'll plug in and mess around with now and then. More than playing guitar, I think it's something to do with making some kind of music. Certainly it's therapeutic in some ways, like going to a gym or even doing some writing everyday. It is an exercise for your brain and your hand, especially when you get older and everything seems to get harder to do. Dragging bags out of an airport these days is a complete drag. Can you remember where your head was at when you recorded Warm & Cool? It's something I always wanted to do. So when I got off Fontana, or whatever that label was [that I was on in 1990], I said, "Oh, this is the perfect time to do this without having to worry about an A&R man." What artistic muscles were you trying to flex by leaving vocals out? It had nothing to do with leaving vocals out. It was really simply liking playing guitar and having a whole mass of ideas for instrumental music. I had a lot of different instrumental ideas in my head for years. I started out as a piano player and a sax player and later on started writing songs. Was there a particular guitarist that you found inspirational when you took up the instrument? I wouldn't say guitarist. The first guitar music I liked was the 1965 English stuff -- the Rolling Stones ... maybe the first Who record, that might have been '65, too. Especially the Five Live Yardbirds album. It sounded like a jazz record to me, just people playing really free. Did you get more out of listening to jazz in the 1960s? Yeah. Up until that point I never listened to rock. I actually didn't like it. I listened to the so-called free jazz thing of the early 1960s -- Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler and Coltrane and Coleman, those are the four guys. Is there a guitarist you might listen to now when you throw a CD on? Not really. If I found an Al Caiola record for a dollar at a thrift shop I would probably buy it, but most of those aren't so great actually. He has one called Sounds for Spies and Private Eyes that wasn't bad, but it's because the spy-type melodies are kinda nice. Do you buy a lot of music? I try to go to vinyl shops and thrift shops to find stuff, but since the advent of eBay it's gotten more difficult to find any kind of wacky records that might have something interesting on it. But a lot of music hounds have found all kinds of lost treasures on the Internet. Because that's what they knew that they wanted. [I'm] looking for something you've never heard, like an oddball "What's this?" kind of record. The fun of it is that they're cheap and they may have something interesting on it. For instance I found a record by some Mexican organist that had an interesting guitar player on it in some bin in Portugal for 99 cents. That something I would buy, but only because the guy wasn't there that day grabbing these things and throwing them on eBay. Have you joined the iPod revolution? No, I don't have an iPod. I wonder if they're ever going to pay people. I've yet to see any statements on royalties from my record company. You never gotten a check from iTunes? Well, I'm wondering how it works. What is it? 99 cents a song or something? I think they probably pay a record company 50 cents to use the song and the record company is supposed to reflect an artist's share there in a statement, but it hasn't shown up yet. What is it? A million [downloads] a month? A day? They're making millions and millions of dollars. I wonder if any of these things [are] reflected royalty statements yet. It's certainly going to be a huge class-action suit soon if they don't start showing up, because clearly it's a new way people like to get their music and it certainly wasn't covered in the 1970s. It probably wasn't even covered in the 1990s record contracts. What's the one album you couldn't live without? I can live without anything. When I was a kid for Christmas, I begged my parents to get me the first ten records issued on the ESP-Disk label, these crucial free jazz things. I still have those. I still like those records. I don't think I'd part with those actually, they're nice. They're mono and they're cool. What makes you keep returning to them? That inspirational free jazz style. The way they sound. They sound like there's two mics hanging up in a room and a band playing live.
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