- Format: MP3
1st generation audience cassette
This was recorded when Verlaine was on tour promoting the "Dreamtime" LP. The band was Verlaine with Jimmy Ripp on guitar, Television bassist Fred Smith and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty from the Patti Smith Group.
Where the Wild Things Are
By Jon Pareles
Village Voice, Oct. 7, 1981
Maybe Tom Verlaine chose "Wild Thing" as his encore last Friday at the Left Bank because it's everything his own songs aren't. Its attitude is cocksure, its three chords never vary, and its downbeats are stomped unanimously by both singer and band. It's the prototypical rock plodder, everybody's favorite (mine, too). But Friday's run-through reminded me why I only need to hear "Wild Thing" once a year, while Verlaine's songs keep me coming back. "Wild Thing," with all four feet on the ground, stakes out a single, fixed position: one beat, one idea. Verlaine, his head adamantly in the clouds, is all over the map(s), resolutely plural. And from McLuhan to the Sphinx, everyone-except AOR programmers-knows that unsolved riddles make better legends.
Consider the least mysterious components of Verlaine's songs, the lyrics. (That is, after you've disentangled them from his purposeful, ambiguity-heightening slurs and gulps; Walkmaning around with a tape of Verlaine's wonderful new album, Dreamtime, I misheard every other line.) Verlaine's writing is associative, indirect-poetic? Yet in his own way, he's been clear and consistent. "Little Johnny Jewel" protagonist of his first record with Television, "had no decision/he's just trying to tell a vision"; on Dreamtime's "Fragile," Verlaine sings, "I've got to face what's never there." Like the surrealists he evokes and the symbolist whose name he borrowed, Verlaine wants to be where animate and inanimate, thing and idea, active and passive, real and unreal all converge. Where logic and the laws of physics are suspended; where words don't have to make literal sense; where images are facts and facts just images. Dreamland. Of course, that's goofball territory, home turf for lunatics, religious believers, drug users, and Stevie Nicks. Unlike most of the popsters who have used dreams as an excuse for flowers-'n'-bunnies mush-headedness, however, Verlaine doesn't pretend that dreamscapes are benevolent or easy and he doesn't expect to have any idea where he's going. He knows that the only sure thing in a dream is disorientation. What makes his music unique is that he puts his band where his mind is-wherever that turns out to be-and still comes up with rock & roll. Sort of.
Verlaine's music has been as consistent as his rhetoric-astonishing, since he's been at it for a decade, including four years (1974-78) as leader of Television. The difference between the two Television album and Verlaine's 1979 solo debut was a matter of finding a less military drummer; the difference between Tom Verlaine and Dreamtime is the eclipse of second-person defiance by first-person affection, and a freer hand with the overdubs. From the beginning, Verlaine's basic rhythm has been a 4/4 any Stones fan can dance to, and most of his songs break cleanly into verses and choruses. (One of his favorite devices is to use blue or modal chords in the verse, then switch to triumphant major chords for the chorus, as in Dreamtime's "Mr. Blur," "Always," and "A Future in Noise.") Still, don't expect the certainty, the fixed center, of "Wild Thing." By that standard, Verlaine's songs sound like they've exploded, strewing riffs all over the place. The drums bash one downbeat, each guitar (at least two or three) and keyboard chooses its own alternative, the bass threads its way in between, and Verlaine's voice plugs spaces up above; in Dreamtime's "The Blue Robe," he assembles such a precipitous ziggurat of riffs that all he can add is a two-note chant, "Hi Fi." Verlaine's method is call-and-response-and-overlap-and-interrupt-and-retaliateand-spin-out. Although each song has a specific set of more or less interlocking riffs, Verlaine doesn't mesh them into funk polyrhythms; he wants you to hear the battle of instruments, the parallax downbeat (when he called his publishing company Double Exposure Music, he undercounted), and he disrupts any impending stasis with a new riff or a solo or a random plunk. Like dreams, the songs are buffeted from within and without; they're not fixed objects, they're convergences of events. If that sounds like a notion from jazz or psychedelia-well, maybe.
Verlaine's songs do thrive on improvisation, on midbeat guitar collisions. (If necessary, he'll stage them all by himself the way he did on Tom Verlaine; Dreamtime, which uses second guitarists, isn't appreciably looser.) As a virtuoso rock improviser-what, Steely Dan haven't called?-Verlaine has obviously picked his way through the available traditions (blues, jazz, country, acid) with a conceptual ear. He's one of a handful of players who can still hear the electric guitar as a fantasy instrument, a dream: a guitar that can hit harder and sustain longer than any acoustic version bound by physical laws. Most guitarists who reach a certain level of agility use the fretboard like a keyboard, forgetting the visceral, while the best noisy plunkers-Keith Richards, for instance-have no use for lyricism. But Verlaine's dreamscapes demand both extremes: when things get too ethereal, he digs in blues licks like pitons sharpened with John Cipollina's trebly vibrato; if the bottom gets too gritty, he floats a time-stopper pause out of Miles Davis. Verlaine is no guitar hero-just the opposite. Instead of redoubling a bass riff for maximum impact, he'll play a counterpoint; when a chord progression threatens too tidy a conclusion, he'll shift into modal scales (Dorian instead of minor, Mixolydian instead of major) that dissipate the momentum. And when he wants to build a crescendo, as he does in "There's a Reason" on Dreamtime, he can toss off a sequence that, for its lift and sculptural proportions, might as well be spun-steel bridge cable.
It's just cheap irony that until Verlaine assembled his current band-drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, guitarist Jimmy Ripp, and ex-Television bassist Fred Smith-the only versions of the songs on Tom Verlaine or Dreamtime were unchanging vinyl artifacts. The songs beg for a band as crazy-intuitive as the Television that recorded "Little Johnny Jewel," honoring every riff by destabilizing it. Judging the new band by their less-than-startling second gig would be unfair, and they did have their moment in "Always," when Ripp approximated a George Harrison lick from the big suite on Abbey Road and Daugherty responded with Ringo's drum break. Another good sign: they can't play "Wild Thing" worth a damn.