Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist, best known as the frontman for the New York rock band Television...
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth13 December 1949
people firsts hell
The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.
piano lessons grew
I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.
men thinking artist
I think almost every woman artist I've ever met has this ideal of being in a partnership working situation with a man, that men don't seem to share. They seem to want this ideal thing, that we'll always be together and work together.
chinese quality sound
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
littles stuff sound
All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.
business thinking way
I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live. Unfortunately, its not the way the music business works. If you don't create some kind of public image, it gets created for you.
player guitar records
I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!
song love-is venus-de-milo
The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.
kissing media gimmicks
I don't see us as a big media gimmick band. We don't have a cultivated appearance or anything like Kiss.
saxophone records grades
When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.
guitar mellow
I never liked mellow sounding guitar.
thinking past institutions
I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.
song real kids
I have a real soft spot for flying saucer songs and Frenkenstein songs. When I was a kid the first record I ever really liked was called "The Mummy", and the flip-side was called "The Beat Generation" which Richard Hell later re-wrote as "The Blank Generation". I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I didn't like Elvis much then, but I was very young. When I was a kid I used to play that monster all the time!
europe elements radio
There were a lot of things I listened to, but so-called pop music never killed me, you know, the type of stuff that always seems to make it on the radio. The whole radio thing seems so... it's like they've accepted the whole "new wave" thing only because this kind of pop element came into it. In Europe they really love emotion, but here it's like, "let's stay away from it because we might cry or something".