(TV) Ramblings, incl. "There are guitar sounds on 'Cover' that simply haven't been heard before, sounds no synthesizer is ever likely to produc e."

["Casey, Leo J" <CaseyL@VOLPE.DOT.GOV>]

Some Potential New Topics:

Possible Influence of U.K.'s New Romantic
Movement on 'Cover's' Production Qualities?
/ 'Cover' Should Be Seen In the Context of 
TV's Failed Attempt To Cross Commercial 
Barrier? / "Tainted Love" Versus "Days On 
The Mountain" / 2 Reviews incl. a Verlaine 
NY Times Interview 

>The only TV solo album I don't have now 
>is Cover. >Any comments on that album 
before I buy it Keith?

Keith replied: >It's fab!-although there are 
>those on the list who will disagree with me. 

Maurice replied: >I stand by my opinion "good 
>songs, great playing, distracting drum 
>machine and sibilance" opinion.  Definitely 
>worth having.

Raymond replied: >Just don't get me started
about "words from the front" and "cover" again! 

Leo says: With apologies to Raymond, I totally
agree with Keith and Maurice--it's worth the 
effort needed to get by some mediocre production 
values, e.g., it's use of an early prototype of 
drum machine in places.  

But at the risk of appearing to be an apologist 
for some of Cover's aural sins, to be fair maybe
it should be considered within the musical 
context of it's release year, late 1984, when 
the New Romantics ruled the airwaves and charts.  
Remember that around 1982-85 synth/electro pop 
was quite the big thing ---especially in London 
where Verlaine was living and recording 
I believe roughly 9 months 1984).  Groups such
as Depeche Mode, New Order, Simple Minds, Human
League, Duran Duran, etc. dominated. [note: I'm
not claiming I musically approved of the New 
Romantics; I actually hated them except for 
some of New Order's soulful stuff].

My take on 'Cover' has always been that it's 
production/choice of drum machine (and 
synthesizers?)was somewhat inluenced by the
pervasive sounds or trend of this period as
well as by a more tangible attempt by 
Verlaine to write and produce songs that 
were more poppy, relatively shorter 
[I believe they're all less than 4:30), and 
catchy, i.e., the closest he ever came to 
deliberately trying to write music that 
might appeal to more of the mass audience. 
[Verclempt! Verclempt!---Discuss/disagree 
with this hypothesis (blasphemy?).]

This peculiar strain in Verlaine's music 
actually first appeared on his previous album,
"Words From The Front", in the form of "Days 
on The Mountain."  This particular song's 
synthesizers have unfortunately always 
reminded me of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love"
---albeit these two songs' lyrics couldn't
be more of polar opposites, with lyrics like 
Verlaine's "... Our clothes always clean ..."  
In Verlaine's concerts during this era, his 
drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, had a kit/set-up 
that also controlled/created the now dreaded
drum machine parts.  But the reason I always 
hated it when Tom would perform this song live
was that at 18-20 minutes it ate up so much of
his set that it forced the elimination of many
of the better songs in his repertoire.     

Now the above isn't to say that there still 
aren't some exquisite and breathtaking guitar 
heroics on Cover--"5 Miles Of You", 
"Dissolve/Reveal" and (at least on 'Cover's 
American version) "Lindi Lu"---their guitars 
certainly do it for me.  

See also below (especially Keith) from my 
yellowed, dog-eared TV archives.

Final rambling: I always thought it was 
tragic that Tom couldn't afford to hire a piano 
(maybe meven electric organ/keyboards) player 
on his tours in the 1980s---are you able to 
imagine a live version of "Kingdom Come" with 
Tom on guitar and someone else (Paul Carrack 
maybe?) playing Tom's organ parts?  That way he
could flesh-out in concert some his songs like 
Dreamtime's extended version of "Always".  
I always thought his use of keyboards 
(synthesizers?!!?)on Dreamtime was done in
such a tasteful and effective manner 
(dare I even use the word 'romantically'?), 
and that this song with some music biz push 
and airplay could have been a  commercial hit.   
----------------------------------

[Both reviewers below refer to TV as 
'Mr. Verlaine', which may seem strange 
(or simply be a NY Timesism), but I think 
it shows how seriously they took him as 
an artist.]

NY Times, Dec 19, 1984: The Pop Life 
by Robert Palmer

"New Album, 'Cover' From Tom Verlaine

Rock performers who write their own songs and 
have put in time mastering their craft often 
find themselves bored and short on ideas after 
spending 5 or 10 years making records, touring, 
making another record, and going off on another 
tour, in an apparently endless and often 
numbing cycle.  Tom Verlaine, who has made only 
four albums since the breakup of his pioneering 
New Wave band Television in 1978, doesn't have 
this problem.

"I can't remember ever being *really* bored," 
Mr. Verlaine said the other day, having returned 
to New York from an extended European sojourn to 
prepare for two performances at the Ritz tomorrow 
and Friday.  "I find life very interesting, 
actually.  I think some other musicians are always
looking for something to give them an idea, but I 
find I have to reject 90 percent of my ideas 
because they don't live up to some self-imposed 
standard.  That's also why I don't make a record 
once a year.  I throw so many things out, and I 
have to have something to say."

Mr. Verlaine's new album, 'Cover'(Warner Brothers), 
his first since 1982's "Words From The Front", is 
his strongest, most consistent record since the 
glory days of Television.  That band attracted a 
rapt following in the mid-70s by playing New York 
clubs like CBGBs along-side contemporaries such as 
Blondie, Talking Heads and especially Patti Smith, 
the punk poetess who gave Mr. Verlaine his first 
exposure on records.  While other bands dealt in 
concise song structures and abrasive energy, 
Television often jammed for 10 or 20 minutes at 
a stretch, led by Mr. Verlaine's lyrical 
curling guitar lines.  The guitar sound of 
Mr. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd developed together
in Television has inspired an entire generation 
of young bands, especially in Britain, where Mr. 
Verlaine spent much of 1984. But Mr. Verlaine 
himself has moved on. The songs on 'Cover' are 
compressed evocations of place and mood, laced 
with luminous, interlocking guitar parts that 
seem to float in space and only briefly erupt 
into anything that could be called a solo.  

Though the songs on "Cover" telegraph vivid 
pictorial imagery, they also have a shimmering, 
dream-like quality.  Like many of his favorite 
authors and poets -- Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise 
Cendars, the Persian Sufi poet Rumi -- Mr. 
Verlaine closely monitors his dreams.  "I think 
keeping a dream record is a really worthwhile 
pursuit," he said.  "The other night I was 
reading a dream I had in 1983, and I was 
astounded because what it had in it was 
something that came true, in a very real sense, 
a week ago.  Sometimes I hear melodies, rhythms 
and things in my dreams, really wild stuff that 
the conscious mind would never have come up with.  
I wake up and hum it into a tape recorder."

Some of the music on 'Cover' suggests a 
quieter sort of vision.  "I hear the raindrops 
splashing on the leaves," he sings in 
'O Foolish Heart,' a song he said he imagined 
in a Southern setting.  "And the tapping of a 
branch on my windowpane, somehow is ravishing my 
sense of time ..."  Displays of heroic guitar 
prowess would be out of place on a record like 
this, but Mr. Verlaine's  tapestry of interwoven 
guitar motifs is equally entralling in its more 
introspective way.  There are guitar sounds on 
'Cover' that simply haven't been heard before, 
sounds no synthesizer is ever likely to produce.

Mr. Verlaine went to England earlier this year
to mix the record, and found himself staying.  
\"I found it very easy to write there, I 
found I was getting a lot done," he noted.  
"A guy I met who's become my manager asked 
me to produce a new band, the Room, and when 
the rumor that I was producing got around 
over there, I got barraged with tapes.  So I 
ended up staying for a while, got offered a 
tour, which I did, and then I spent six weeks
in Paris, which I liked an awful lot. One thing
this whole experience made me want to do was to 
develop melody a lot more on the new record, in 
terms of the guitar parts, as well as the 
vocals.  There is such a history of melody in 
Europe.  I'm going to try to spend around six 
months of every year there."

Mr. Verlaine's shows at the Ritz this week 
will feature three longtime associates from
 the New York scene, all of whom  play
on 'Cover':  the bassist Fred Smith, 
originally with Television; the drummer 
Day Dee Daugherty, from the original 
Patti Smith Group; and the imaginative, 
resourceful guitarist Jimmy Ripp.  
And what of his next album?  "Well," he 
said, "it might have more guitar solos.  
I know it will be different." 
--------------------------------

NY Times, December 25, 1984 ROCK: Tom Verlaine

by John Pareles

Tom Verlaine has been acclaimed as one of 
rock's finest guitarists  since he led the 
band Television in the late 1970s.  Now, 
he has decided to make a case for his 
songwriting.  On his new album, 'Cover', 
his tunes are stripped down to guitar 
riffs, drumbeats and short lines of lyrics.
Mr. Verlaine kept those songs terse and 
percussive when he brought his band to the
Ritz last weekend.

Most of Mr. Verlaine's lyrics are surreal, 
dreamlike narratives.  At times, his song 
structures have attempted to reflect that 
flow, growing too diffuse for their own 
good; they would also dissolve for 
exploratory guitar solos.  Onstage 
Saturday, however, Mr. Verlaine allowed 
himself extended solos only in a few older 
songs and in an encore, the Count Five's 
"Psychotic Reaction." Those solos, 
particularly a raga-like foray in 
Television's "Marquee Moon," were as strong 
as ever.

Mr. Verlaine's newer songs are guitar 
showcases.  They center on overlapping 
guitar riffs, played by Mr. Verlaine and 
Jimmy Ripp, that peal, screech, tingle 
and sigh.  Mr. Verlaine sings in a shaky, 
occasionally strangulated tenor -- an 
expressive voice that may be an acquired 
taste for the majority of rock fans.  Yet 
the tunes of Mr. Verlaine's songs are not 
in his vocals, but in those guitar  riffs, 
and they are memorable ones.  

Mr. Verlaine didn't take his riffs for 
granted.  While Fred Smith on bass, Jay Dee 
Daugherty on drums and Mr. Ripp played 
steady rhythm patterns, Mr. Verlaine 
continually reshaped  his part of the 
counterpoint, slipping new ideas between 
the lines.  

Like a jazz musician, Mr. Verlaine tested and 
illuminated his songs.  He added high, ringing 
harmonics to the finale of "Let Go the Mansion," 
and answered his vocal lines in "O Foolish Heart" 
with phrases in a shimmering vibrato.

At other points in the set, there were moments 
that recalled  rock's finest guitar-centered 
bands, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience to the 
Who to the Allman Brothers Band  to Television.  
But there was no gratuitous doodling.  Even with 
Mr. Verlaine's improvisations, the songs were 
skeletal.  Beyond that, they showed an 
intelligence, and a willingness to take risks, 
that is too rare in current rock.  

[I was lucky enough to attend this show with an 
American friend from Guatemala; the reviewer is 
not overstating his case.]

	 Leo                     
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