Guitarist Tom Verlaine, master of slow, beautiful guitar tones and clever intricacies, is dead.
Patti Smith, the great lady of punk and all other questions of attitude, finally ennobled Tom Verlaine’s guitar playing at the end of the seventies. On a cover of “Hey Joe,” which was a well-worn, great song even then, so I guess Smith wanted to deconstruct it a bit. So she invited Verlaine, who she was also dating around that time, and spoke this as an intro: “Honey, the way you play your guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so masochistic.” And then the song floats away: ethereal, space-wide guitars buzz around Smith’s voice, huge rooms, astronaut tragedy. Very great interpretation.
Very clever, too, what made this Tom Verlaine, born Thomas Miller in New Jersey in 1949, so special in almost everything and, a matter of honor, excluded from the big pot of gold. with television, the band he is best known for, and solo. With songs like “Marquee Moon”, the wonderfully ticked off “The Grip of Love” or the ingeniously arranged guitar orchestra of “There’s a Reason”. He borrowed his name from the French poet Paul Verlaine. His sense of melody as a child with saxophonist Stan Getz. The rock guitar of the time bored him until the adolescent “19th Nervous Breakdown” by the stones heard.
Since then he has blended the instrument’s traditional show-off formats with its fine complexities, which are just as much schooled in jazz as in punk. He’s never played someone else’s stuff, he told the magazine Guitar player once. That’s why he never learned all the fast licks. What luck. Tom Verlaine, the master of slow, beautiful guitar tones, passed away on Saturday after a short illness.