Tom Verlaine - Rotation
I am breaking my unofficial rule of waiting until their next birthday, because some losses are unquantifiable.
As you may know by now, Saturday morning a truly legendary figure passed away, and a lotta folks are truly grieving.
2023 so far is really trying to give 2016 a run for its money, isn't it? It's not even February yet and no less than five huge music people have gone on.
There have already been myriad, deserved tributes in the wake of yesterday's announcement, and there'll be many deserved more, so I am adding mine here.
Marrying the rawness and unpretension of Punk with the extended improvisations of Coltrane in full flight, this guy altered the DNA of the landscape of music with one foot in Patti Smith and one in Eight Miles High.
In some ways he did it all a tremendous service, by delivering the electric guitar out of the hands of the Rolls Royce driving Claptonian class and back into more legitimately proletarian paws, jettisoning a lot of the tired Blues cliché set in the process.
As part of one of the most influential bands of our era, he upped the ante at a time when it was unclear whether anything new could be said with that instrument.
So now, after a career -- first with Television and then on his own -- that can only be described as monumental, Tom Verlaine has left the building.
His wild excursions of six-stringed Satori leave a mark no guitar player that remains will be able to avoid, however.
There isn't much more to add, except that any human being that touches an electric guitar from the first Television record forward -- that's the last 45 years and counting -- is gonna drive on roads this guy paved.
Case in point: this 63+ minutes of fire, captured from Spanish TV in the mid 1980s.
Tom Verlaine
La Edad de Oro
TVE Studios
Madrid, Spain
9.25.1984
01 Glory
02 Miss Emily
03 Red Leaves
04 Rotation
05 Souvenir from a Dream
06 Penetration
07 Dissolve/Reveal
08 Kingdom Come
09 Swim
10 Clear It Away
11 Marquee Moon
Total time: 1:03:28
Tom Verlaine - guitar & vocals
Jimmy Ripp - guitar & vocals
Fred Smith - bass
Jay Dee Daugherty - drums
256/48k audio from a DVD of a master Betamax videocassette of the original broadcast
extracted, converted to 16/44 CD audio, tracked, repaired and slightly remastered by EN, January 2023
301 MB FLAC/direct link
301 MB FLAC/direct link
I pulled the audio from one of those (yes they are epic) DVDs that circulate of so many of the La Edad de Oro shows, that homeboy in Spain made from his Betamax tapes of them from back in the day.
Now it can get about in decent audio form, having previously only been around as a video thing.
That's (really this time) it for January, but I could not resist staying up all night with the TV on, delivering a memorial to this departed, Adventurous icon of the music of our age.--J.
12.13.1949 - 1.28.2023