(TV) Warning to Take Cover

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

Trying to catch up on my reading of 'relatively' recent MM list posts:
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Christine W Indigo 
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 1:59 PM
To: tv@obbard.com
Subject: (TV) Cover (Was: Ebay Madness Strikes Back)
>I bought Cover as a cutout on a whim a year or so after it came out,
>knowing nothing about Verlaine or Television, and thought it was great
>--I was a teenage girl, so I really liked the whole idea of tall,
>good-looking men singing playful songs about sex. I poked around a little
>bit, and found out that he'd been in this band called Television that
>many of my favorite bands also liked. So, I bought a copy of Marquee Moon
>and was hooked. (I didn't even mind the lack of playful songs about sex.)
>Christine "Green Leafy Dragon" Indigo, Roguelike/Interactive Fiction
>Missionary and Proud Member of the -=UDIC=-

Possibly except for the small minority on MM list who like the album Cover, 
the rest of you Mooners may[?] want to hit your e-mail DELETE button now 
since what follows is a review of Cover (though very well written and its 
first two-thirds contains some wonderful words on Marquee Moon and 
Dreamtime.)  Also attention Keith: This is a "new" article for your site.

>From The Boston Phoenix, January 25, 1985, by Howard Hampton.   

"Run For Cover:  Tom Verlaine Is Not Yet An Open Book" 

>From Elvis Presley to Captain Beefheart to Tom Verlaine, the most 
gratifying rock originates from the performers of powerfully imagined 
acts of self-creation.  Although the gestures and demands of the star 
and the hunger artist may be worded in related sounds and experiences, 
the personas they devise are antithetical.  Singer/poet/guitarist Tom 
Verlaine has unobtrusively nurtured one of the most thoughtful and 
iconoclastic sensibilities in rock, one so wholly personal that it's 
landed him on the far margins of the music.  As his superb new Cover 
(Warner Bros.) testifies, there's nothing overtly jarring about his 
work; but ever since he led the now legendary, still misunderstood 
Television, there's been a steely isolation to his conception. He 
offers few obvious reference points in his songs; he's made his 
influences in his own image, so that his rock seems to spring from 
his head, a vibrant but self-contained entity.  (This isn't surprising 
coming from someone who began his career conflating Symbolist literature, 
with Albert Ayler and the Rolling Stones.)  Cover is typical Verlaine:  
charged with abstract sensuality, cascading mysticism, playful opacity, 
all couched in lithe, keening, crooked guitar overdubs.  It's a private 
record that beckons with uncommon immediacy---the sensitivity of 
Verlaine's vision makes the mundane deformities around him pale before 
the moving apparitions he summons up in their place.

Fine as Cover is, however, the records that best introduce Verlaine are 
Television's Marquee Moon (1977) and his solo Dreamtime (1981).  The first 
offered the shivery, spun-glass dual guitars of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd 
as signposts to a luminously alive city of the senses rife with desire, 
opportunity, contradiction.  Verlaine's literary but vernacular lyrics and 
chocked vocals filled in the rest of the picture: "My eyes are like 
telescopes/I see it all backwards/But who wants hope."  Perched on 
a tightrope between polarities that were unfashionable in rock at the 
time---empathy and detachment, act and trance, the oneiric and the 
routine---Television performed the balancing act with an ease and ambition 
that renewed hope for the music's powers of rebirth.

On Dreamtime, a less audacious record than Marquee Moon that nonetheless 
managed to be both more intricately textured and more candid, enraptured 
guitars provided the perfect instrumentation for Verlaine's heady verbal 
ejaculations.  His songs and arrangements caught the rush of longing, the 
mysterious infiltration of spirit into flesh that runs like a current through 
vulnerable, unattended lives.  Dreamtime casts passion as a kinetic blur; 
it verges on a nervous, unstable fusion of sensuality and self-consciousness. 
His oblique asides and his wily ambivalence reflected the importunate emotional 
acrobatics we enact like clockwork; it was as liberating---and yes, as 
sexy---as prime Prince.  (But if sexuality's function in Prince's music is 
autoerotic, in Verlaine's it's autodidactic.)

Cover, Verlaine's fourth solo LP, doesn't quite scale the heights of his 
two masterpieces, but offering the most melodic, confident pop arrangements 
he has yet put down on tape, it reaches closer than any of his other 
scattershot releases.  The album is an active, layered record, featuring 
his usual breathtaking signature guitar runs and a spacious, insinuating, 
multitrack mix.  It's also sanguine; even Verlaine's anxious quiver of a 
voice and his edgy dissonances seem no more than beguiling allusions---"Come 
into my consciousness" could be his motto.  From the outset, Verlaine seeks 
the obscure object of his desire.  The cinematic vignettes of "Five Miles 
of You" (monumental, echoing bass; pistoning drums; chiming, elliptical guitars) 
give us our bearings:  she's disembodied (woman as metaphor), all-encompassing, 
blissfully insoluble.  She's a utopian sylph Verlaine tries both to chart and 
to lose himself within.  Here love is the instrument of escape from the borders 
of personality, a means to a union that's irreducible to ego---or, for that 
matter, to id; the song's contrast of measured urgency (the verses) and 
ecstatic emancipation (the choruses and the bridge) captures the pilgrim's 
mixed determination and awe.  The exotic "Traveling", with its sly cycle of 
stuttering guitars and semi-Arabian synthesizer lines that recall David 
Bowie's "Yassassin", brings us in closer, still mixing journey and erotic arrival. 
"I'd like to wander into your touch", Verlaine tells his young beloved.

"Miss Emily" at last names this beloved, amid a spray of elongated blues-licks.  
He offers himself up in traditional fashion ("I'll be your handyman"), taking 
on every obligation of adoration ("I'll work real hard 'til my debt's been paid"), 
surrendering to the grip of love  ("Day after day, I've heard your voice/Inside 
of me, burning me up").  Elsewhere, the shimmering collage of African beats and 
rhyming guitars on "Dissolve/Reveal" implies the ethics of Verlaine's eros.  
He takes rapture as a moral imperative, as a means to revealing the wealth of 
feeling and sensation conventional love words gloss over, trivialize, segregate.  
In abandon he discovers tools for dissolving routine self-representation, allowing 
a hundred possible personalities to bloom.  

As eloquent and pleasurable as Cover is, there's an undeniably alien air about 
it---as though it were sung by the satyr from another planet.  To listen to 
the languorous, sweet-spirited cadences of "O' Foolish Heart", for example, 
is to experience an unbearable remoteness.  Cover is a call to life we, 
as realists in a mercantile, post-punk, pre-nuke world, have outwardly disabused 
ourselves of aspiring to.  Working from entrenched premises of isolation and 
despair, we could easily dismiss Verlaine's convoluted agape as high-flown escapism.  
But it runs deeper than that; Springsteen says, "There's more to life than what you 
see around you."  Back in the glory days of Television, Verlaine counseled us to 
"pull down the future with the one you love."  In distant 1985, he simply pleads 
with his femme ideal, "I want to go back, back to your garage/We'll flip through 
all the photos, the ones of the mirage."  Maybe it's just my foolish heart, but 
Cover hints that imagination and desire, hardly mirages, might create a future 
worth pulling down.

---------------------------------------
>>>In message gregg luvoxx <murderedman@earthlink.net> quotes:
>>>"The rarest and most sought after of Tom Verlaine's solo works. 
>>>[Cover], his fourth solo release, is intimate, accessible and warm. 
>>>A thing of beauty.

Keith responded: 
>>How come no-one but me loves it then?
--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"