R.I.P. Tom Verlaine

He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.

Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention. There were hockey sticks and a bicycle and piles of Tom’s old newspapers strewn in the back, covered with ghostly outlines of distorted objects; he would run over tin cans until they were flattened, barely recognizable, and then spray them with gold, his two-dimensional sculptures, each representing a rapturous musical phrase. In high school, he played the saxophone, embracing John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He played hockey, too, and when a flying puck knocked out his front teeth he was obliged to put away his saxophone and dedicate himself to the electric guitar.

He lived twenty-eight minutes from where I was raised. We could easily have sauntered into the same WaWa on the Wilmington-South Jersey border in search of Yoo-hoo or Tastykakes. We might have met, two black sheep, on some rural stretch, each carrying books of the poetry of French symbolists—but we didn’t/ Not until 1973, on East Tenth Street, across from St. Mark’s Church, where he stopped me and said “You’re Smith.” He had long hair, and we clocked each other, both echoing the future, both wearing clothes they didn’t wear anymore. I noticed the way his long arms hung, and his equally long and beautiful hands, and then we went our separate ways. That was, until Eater night, April 14, 1974. Lenny Kaye and I took a rare taxi ride from the Ziegfeld Theatre after seeing the premier of “Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones,” straight down to the Bowery to see a new band called Television.

The club was CBGB. There were only a handful of people present, but Lenny and I were immediately taken with it, with its pool table and narrow bar and low stage. 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.

I went to see Television whenever they played, mostly to see Tom, with his pale-blue eyes and swanlike neck. He bowed his head, gripping his Jazzmaster, releasing billowing clouds, strange alleyways populated with tiny men, a murder of crows, and the cries of bluebirds rushing through a replica of space. All transmuted through his long fingers, all but strangling the neck of his guitar.

Through the coming weeks, we drew closer. As we walked the city streets, we would improvise ongoing takes, our own “Arabian Nights.” We discovered that we both loved the work of the Armenian composer Alan Hovhanessmour favorite work being “Prayer of St, Gregory.” Examining each other’s bookcases, we were amazed to find that our books were nearly identical, even those by authors difficult to find. Cossery, Hedayat, Tutuola, Mrabet. We were both independent literary scouts, and we came to share our secret sources.

He devoured poetry and dark-chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, downed with coffee and cigarettes. Sometime 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 we 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 on like Tom. He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music. In his last days, he had the selfless support of devoted friends. Having no children, he welcomed the love he received from my daughter, Jesse, and my son, Jackson.

In his final hours, watching him sleep, I traveled backward in time. We were in our apartment, and he cut my hair, and some pieces stuck out his way and that, and so he called me Winghead. In the years to follow, simply Wing. Even when we got older, always, Wing. And he, the boy who never grew up, aloft the Omega, a golden filament in the vibrant violet light.

—Patti Smith
The New Yorker
February 13 & 20, 2023

He played hockey, too, and when a flying puck knocked out his front teeth he was obliged to put away his saxophone and dedicate himself to the electric guitar.

haha, awesome

RIP

Marquee Moon (full album)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KvgP8MlEEE