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| Tom Verlaine (July.06 issue) |
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| Written by Steve Dollar | |
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Page 1 of 3  What's All That Noise?Tom Verlaine on Jazz, Zeppelin, Croissants and Other Things Though you'd never call Tom Verlaine "missing in action," he's not the most prolific of guitar heroes. The founder of Television, the jammiest (and most short-lived) of bands to come out of the CBGB's scene in the late 1970s, Verlaine has overseen various reunion tours of the classic quartet and joined pal Patti Smith on occasional revivals of her Horses album, played from start to finish. But it's been 14 years since Verlaine's last solo disc, the all-instrumental Warm and Cool, reissued last year by Thrill Jockey. The Chicago uber-indie recently ended that drought with a double-dose of Verlaine: Around, an album of instrumentals, and Songs and Other Things, which consists of songs ... and other things. Stomp and Stammer met up with Verlaine (born Tom Miller) at a coffee shop near Manhattan's Meat Packing District, an area that has been swiftly overrun by expensive hotels and velvet rope nightclubs. Verlaine, who lives not far away, grimaces at the changes and confesses, at one point, that the only reason he stays in New York is for its fine cross-section of ethnic food choices. Once he arrives, Verlaine grabs a chair and quickly orders a croissant, which he slowly deconstructs with evident pleasure. S&S: So, wow, it's been more than a decade between solo albums. What took so long? Tom Verlaine: I've just been doing other things. I was doing that silent movie thing for awhile. That became a mini-tour. I've been on tour with Patti Smith a couple of times. And touring with Television. You've been writing and recording all along? Not recording, but I'm always working on something. How are the croissants here? Very good. I had a pastry before I got here. It's usually much more crowded in here. We're lucky today. Both the reissue of Warm and Cool and your new instrumental record, there's a feeling of going back to earlier times in music, and there's a definite cinematic quality to it. Heh, heh. I think one of the few ways people hear any instrumental music now is going to movies. And that's disappearing because all the ritzy films want hit artists in there, so you get these horrible soundtracks with really crappy dance-beat stuff. None of that stuff [on the albums] was written as film music. It all goes back to listening to jazz when I was a kid, and '50s instrumental music. You had people like The Three Sons, which was accordion, organ and guitar - they were almost avant-garde, just in the idea of it. |
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