r.i.p. tom verlaine

another death.  fucking sucks.  but i am at that age when my beloveds do die off.  i was not a fan of the band television when i was a wee young punk rocker.  surely i knew who they were & have had heard their music.  but i was a punk into hardcore, & any music that smacked of 'craft' was suspect to me.  i was the standard issue idiot.  it was about 20 years ago when i started to explore early punk bands like television. i bought the CD Marquee Moon at the long defunct record store The Beat.  i miss The Beat. it was a record store par excellence.  you could go to school there & learn about the varieties & nuances of music with its deep catalogs & rangy import records.  but holy shit!  television!  miraculous.  those sinewy guitar lines by verlaine & richard lloyd.  verlaine's strained vocals & spooky lyrics.  while the very cool thing that verlaine took his last name from paul verlaine, the 19th C symbolist poet, absinthe connoisseur, lover & booster of the great demonic poet arthur rimbaud, & wow!  man i am gone!  patti smith famously described verlaine's guitar sound as 'a thousand bluebirds screaming at once.'  is that accurate?  not if you like your guitar sounds to be filled of wrong notes & distortions.  instead, verlaine was very like a jazz musician.  exacting.  precise.  but wild too.  since my rediscovery of the band television i must've listened to Marquee Moon a thousand times over.  it is a masterpiece.  plus, verlaine, & his former band mate richard hell, were quite literary.  they started as poets.  i was hoping for verlaine to publish his memoir.  like his former band mate hell.  rather, verlaine was an introvert whose preferred other things such as haunting secondhand bookstores & record shops.  every story i've read about verlaine in public meant that the poet-guitarist often kept to himself but would be friendly to the people who approached him.  i dig him even more!  for he was the consummate bohemian.   i hope that a good biography will come along shortly.  i also hope that a volume of his poems, notes, journals etc. etc. will make the light of day too.  tom verlaine made it to the age of 73.  still too early to go, but he was a bohemian punk poet-musician who lived by his own set codes & art.  he lived in his art & for that i am glad of it.  because he was a great pumk musician's musician, the poet of the fretboard. verlaine proved it on his pulse.