1st generation high-bias cassette audience
This was recorded when Verlaine was on tour promoting the "Words From the Front" LP. The band was Verlaine with Jimmy Ripp on guitar, Television bassist Fred Smith and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty from the Patti Smith Group.
From a Village Voice review of the "Words from the Front" LP and contemporaneous concert:
Tom at the Pantheon
By Steve Anderson
Village Voice, June 22, 1982
How does one decipher a Verlaine guitar solo for a first-time listener? Phrases like 'steel-stringed romanticism or "post-psychedelic desire" are acceptable. References to Beck and Coltrane are helpful, to Hendrix and Ayler less so. Don't bring up Mixolydian or any other modes unless you really think you understand their magic. Or maybe you could try pointing out how a dying swan's cry and the grind of an accelerating lawnmower and the tones of the angelus and a coyote's ululations are united in a trajectory that sounds not only seamless but inevitable—tendentious, admittedly, but it might work.
Or play the title cut from his new LP, Words from the Front, which features his first extended adagio solo since the rhapsodic heights of "The Fire." A blinded soldier's letter home describes the war in brief tableaux: "John died last night/He had no chance/Beneath the surgeon's drunken hands." The guitar starts on a plaintive wail, then drops down the clef, switches back upward only to lower again. Then a precarious ascent marked by swooning hesitations begins, pecking with a high tremolo which, once achieved, hurtles down in a rush of restless notes that stagger across the beat, lag behind, and finally catch up on the verse's return. This passage's dramatic eloquence, like the guitarwork in "Torn Curtain" and "The Dream's Dream," ought to lay to rest any notion that Verlaine "lacked melodic ideas or emotional sensitivity" (cf. Television summary in Rolling Stone Record Guide).
For a reverent fan, arguing with Verlaine detractors can be a tedious project. Granted, a rocker adopting a poet's surname has a formidable precedent and some of Verlaine's verse can be overly facile or opaque. Perhaps he is responsible for the ubiquitous fashion—jacket, tight slacks, short hair—that still, eight years later, can tranform the goofiest kid from Montclair into Louis-Ferdinand Celine. And a sensibility that distills themes of Doom and Redemption into paranoid/ hopeful monodramas defies populist theories of rock and roll. In fact, I think it's Verlaine's solipsism that grates on skeptics, not his music. Verlaine's rockers have the visceral tug of the Stones, but Verlaine rejects swagger for a tensile reserve—when Television covered "Satisfaction," the fuming petulance of the original became Tom's tender, choked-up pleading. This strategy, replacing arrogant bravura with determined pathos, inspired a devoted cult of New York clubgoers who were stunned when Televison, the apotheosis of the new wave, failed to break commercially with the angular Marquee Moon or the more dreamlike Adventure.
On his first two post-Television solo albums, Verlaine's pathos was subdued, not abandoned, in favor of high-mixed, heavily wrought riffs. In Dreamtime especially, the guitars grappled for attention; it was debatable which riff took priority, and if a solo emerged from the rabble it was abbreviated just as it began to soar. On Words from the Front, the guitars ring individuated and resolute while the vocal mix clarifies the sonority and astringency of his timbre, the pathos of which is once again well defined. But the definition of the sound on Verlaine's first self-production mitigates an uncertain overall mood—there's an unevenness here that pits traditional Verlaine formulas (bull's-eyes) against looser, perhaps more solipsistic structures (just-misses) in which he seems to conceive his voice as simply another instrument. This is a problem: at their best, voices sing words, and the new songs that don't coalesce ramble because their lyrics are arbitrary. Verlaine's best verses have always followed schoolboy rhyme schemes and taken their poetic allure from the imbalance between strictly metered stanzas and elusive imagery. But though "Present Arrived" and "True Story" bound forward in one-riff propulsion, the words are afterthoughts circling the point he wants to make. I know—that may be the point. Nevertheless, Verlaine reaches ambiguity more effortlessly and lyrically on "Postcard from Waterloo," one of his finest ballads, with lovely melody and typical non sequiturs: "Oh, those great plains so quiet and still/Tell me who belongs and I'll tell you who will." The tempo isn't much slower than that of "Coming Apart" which, raw-nerved and throbbing, is the toughest punch on the album, a three-minute knockout with lunging backbeat and manic-depressed lyrics that might be self-parody ("I choke on my voice" indeed).
Performing with confidence at the Ritz last week, Verlaine rampaged through rockers like "There's a Reason" and "Always" and deftly controlled the furious, protracted rave-ups. The solos, all improvised, were still fearless cliff-hangers. Jimmy Ripp has become less cautious as second guitar/adversary and on "True Story" he and Verlaine traded sharp licks and double-strummed to a startling caesura not on the album. Fred Smith's understated bass consolidated "Clear It Away" and Jay Dee Daugherty, emphasizing tom-toms, pounded a tenacious pulse and ran the synthesizer that underscores "Days on the Mountain," the moody dreamscape which closes Words from the Front.
The vertex of the set came when, gaunt in the pale spotlight, Verlaine embarked on the long cadenza that now interrupts the last of "Marquee Moon" 's multiple climaxes in his live shows. The large fingers skimmed across the strings as frenetic mordants erupted and resolved in cool sustains; he faltered, clawed at a dissonant chord, swept up an octave, then shifted gears and declined down the neck and paused. Not everyone could get away with this deliberation, but the audience was calm, rapt, because as always his distance never became alienation and his introspection avoided self-absorption.
As guitar revisionary, poete moudit, new wave forefather, eccentric recluse, Tom Verlaine has a surplus of legends to live down, but his influence, unlike that of Talking Heads or Ramones, is difficult to pinpoint. Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes are unconvincing, presumptuous legatees. Traces of his guitar phrasing appear in the music of dB's and Individuals, and the no wavers (his illegitimate children?) may have extracted the noisier ornaments for their own purposes (cf."Little Johnny Jewel"). The absence of convincing emulators puts Verlaine in a maverick category with Neil Young, an equally challenged and championed guitarist/songwriter. I take Words from the Front as Verlaine's first entry into the pantheon of erratic albums which includes Young's Zuma as well as Planet Waves, Radio Ethiopia, Berlin. The erratic album's missteps (unlike those of Hawks and Doves, Street Hassle, and Wave) are overshadowed by its elevating triumphs. Words from the Front mixes assurance with experiment, and as an unashamed admirer, I'll take Tom in transition over most anyone else's certified success.