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This Case Is Closed: The Enduring Enigma of Tom Verlaine

One of the great punk records is Marquee Moon by Television. Of course, that's a contradiction. There's nothing punk about Television really, except that they appear at the right time, in the right place, and Richard Hell is briefly in the band, and he has some claim to be the inventor of the punk look, with the spiky hair and the safety pins. But there is only one TV in Television, and Hell is gone long before Marquee Moon appears. Marquee Moon doesn’t need a category. It’s a record of jagged imagery in which the voice is a nagging shadow and the guitars - of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd - do the talking. Patti Smith compares Verlaine’s guitar to a thousand bluebirds. What they are talking about, I still can’t fathom. Marquee Moon is a timeless mystery. I talk to Tom Verlaine on the phone. This is probably better than talking to him in person. On a transatlantic phone line there is an excuse for the delays and the hesitations and the awkward silences. We are talking a full
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RIP Syd - Shine On


RIP Syd - Shine On
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.
I had to meet someone near Abbey Road, and got there early, so I sat by the zebra crossing and watched the tourists come to photograph themselves crossing the zebra, some of them removing their shoes, like Paul, who was supposed to be dead, and all of them laughing. There was a boy in an Ireland football shirt, but he had a military jacket, like Sgt Pepper, or The Libertines, depending on how derivative he was feeling, and a Scandinavian guy with a girlfriend like Jean Seberg in A Bout De Souffle, and she kept fluffing the photo, so he had to keep crossing the zebra in his bare feet. And there was a nervous Japanese boy who didn't understand that the traffic would stop if he stepped out, so he kept putting his foot out towards the road and withdrawing it, until eventually he ran across the stripes and back, moving like a flick-action book, all jerky, with arms like scissors. So I went to the wall outside the studio, and there was a grey-haired man there, writing graffiti, and photographing it. He was a very distinguished looking vandal, with a very nice pen. I'm not sure if he wrote it, but he seemed to be photographing the little tribute to Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, who had just died. Then again, maybe he wrote "Merci". It looks like it was scrawled with a fine pen. Which means he must have been called Pierre
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