Under the Marquee Moon

Tom Verlaine, 1949 - 2023

One rainy afternoon, a great many years ago, I went to a bar called the Lakeside Lounge in the East Village with my brother and we listened to all of the record Marquee Moon by Television on the jukebox whilst chatting with the only two other people there, a lady who'd brought her cute dog in and the bartender. It was Easter Sunday so we were more or less entirely alone in there, and it was such a nice experience that my brother pretty much moved to New York City on the strength of it.

In those days our love for stuff like Marquee Moon was a comfort and a pleasure and it made it super easy for us to form communities of solace based entirely on our listening choices. Nowadays, those communities have been infiltrated by vandals and goths, and even worse, this weekend Tom Verlaine passed away, so for god’s sake, stop all the clocks. His name may not be spoken in hushed tones in every household like that of David Crosby, but to me he was more important. And back when I was a college d-jay at a station called KFJC in Los Altos, California, the song “Marquee Moon” was especially important to me because if you had to go to the bathroom, it was the only track you could count on to last the whole time getting to the restroom and back.

But I jest. I also played “Marquee Moon” even when I didn’t have to use the restroom, because it was my favorite song on my favorite record by Television; in other words it was, and is, one of my favorite records, period.  When I hear those glorious chords rising up from the thin thin neck of Tom Verlaine’s guitar, I think about how this one piece of music speaks across forty years, wafting above every other track from the era. It’s almost as if it sucks the breath out of every room as it progresses, so that you find yourself holding your breath as it slinks up the chromatic scale in breathless anticipation, until at long last it comes right in your very ears.

Television! Listening to it now, you can see how musical, even proggy, it really was, so why the heck did we think it was so punk rock? Maybe it was just what Tom Verlaine looked like: gaunt and ethereal. Maybe it was because we knew he hung out with Patti Smith and played CBGB, and CBs was Valhalla to us here on the west coast. At Cal I knew a girl called Madeleine who once called CBs up during a Television gig and convinced the bartender to leave the phone off the hook so she could hear it.

This is all just to say that Television, and Tom Verlaine, were profoundly meaningful to me, so I feel about his death the way others seem to have felt about David Crosby. It hasn’t even been all that long since I last saw him perform either – pre-Covid, but not by a lot. I saw the band play the Gun-Bun Winery in 2018, and I saw Verlaine solo at the Chapel in San Francisco in 2017, just a few weeks before  the election of You Know Who. This is what I wrote in my blog at the time:

…Inside, I found a nice seat on a step at the back, where I could sit with a perfect site line. Presently the band comes on and starts tuning up. You know TV – he needs to do that – and besides, the ticket had said, “Instrumentals, improv and maybe some vocals;” what it DIDN’T say was, “…playing Marquee Moon.” Anyway, who cares? Hearing Tom Verlaine is a privilege devoutly to be wished. Even his tuning up is about a hundred times prettier than 99% of what you hear in a nightclub. Just the timbre of his guitar takes me somewhere different, and anyway it was what I expected.

But then, a jarring thing happened. Someone yelled “Free Bird.” Can you even believe it? FREE BIRD. I wanted to die of second-hand embarrassment. Thankfully Verlaine ignored it, because, I mean who wouldn’t? (A: Greg Dulli, who I once saw rip the yeller of that phrase a brand-new asshole at the Vis Club for doing it, which is why I, for one, would not dare to yell it out at concerts by notoriously cranky guitarists. I mean, among other reasons.)

And then an even worse thing happened, which was the person sitting RIGHT NEXT TO ME yelled, ‘HURRY UP AND START PLAYING.”

Oh. My. God. I was just beside myself. At the time that it happened I wanted to sink through the floor and die on behalf of the yeller, but now, post-November, I realize it’s just part of the new reality. Only a truly terrible person would yell “HURRY UP AND START” to Tom Verlaine, but we live in a world of truly terrible people now, you know what I mean? Violators. Plunderers. Rapists. Neo-Nazis. People who think they can boss Tom Verlaine around. This is where we live now, and that must be why that at that exact moment I felt like I was waking up from a lifetime-long dream. 

In my dream, the world was a soft and pleasant and everyone around me liked the same things and got the same jokes and even those who didn’t were at least trying to be chill. In my dream, you could bash Donald Trump pinatas and get carded at age 50, and listen to Tom Verlaine in peace, and all the daily and nightly equivalencies of those actions, and nothing really bad would happen to you on purpose.

I stayed for the rest of the set, of course, but I was deeply unsettled, and to make matters worse, the drunk lady next to me was heckling Tom throughout, so I had to move, and once I moved, I couldn't see, and once I couldn't see, I tried to tweet ("People are heckling Tom Verlaine, please make it stop!") and once I tried to tweet someone shoved me in the back and hissed at me, like I was the problem and not the solution.

Maybe I was. Maybe I am. Anyway, that was the end of my love affair with bohemian nightlife, and you know, whenever you break up with something, you kind of wonder why you went out with it in the first place. You know how people say it is better to have loved and lost? I've never been too sure about that one.

RIP Tom Verlaine, 1949 - 2023

“Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town."…” —Paul Verlaine