Re: (TV) Tom Thompson mystery solved

["Philip P. Obbard" <pobbard@yahoo.com>]

I'd like to re-visit the "Tom Thompson" issue now that the I NEED A NEW
ADVENTURE (INANA) bootleg CD is making the rounds
(http://www.obbard.net/misc/inana/).

Both Mark Abel (in the message, seen below, from the guestbook on Keith
Allison's site) and Tom Verlaine (in the liner notes for the TOM VERLAINE
reissue from Collectors' Choice) insist that the versions of "Last Night",
"Grip of Love", and a "folk-rockish song" (which I'm guessing is "Up All
Night") heard on INANA weren't recorded during the ADVENTURE sessions, but
instead during the sessions for Verlaine's solo debut.

This raises the question of why those three songs appear on the same tape with
10 "working" versions of songs from ADVENTURE, in identical quality. As far as
I know - and I think the liner notes Tom wrote for the new CD back me up - TOM
VERLAINE wasn't even recorded at the same studios as ADVENTURE. So how did
those tracks wind-up on the same tapes? Did they come from different source
tapes and someone combined them onto a single cassette at some point - and they
just *happened* to have a near-identical sound quality? Or were they all
recorded to the same "master" tape somewhere - which must have traveled from
Bearsville to the studio in NYC where Abel and Verlaine recorded (it's
mentioned in the liner notes for the TOM VERLAINE CC reissue, but I forget it's
name offhand)? Wouldn't that be pretty unusual?

Any ideas, perhaps from musicians in our midst? I have no reason to think Abel
and Verlaine aren't being honest, but I still can't explain why those songs
appear together on that tape - it's not like there are a lot (or any) Verlaine
studio outtakes floating around, much less in the exact same quality as the
only true outtakes (as opposed to just alternate mixes) from any Television
studio LP. The odds of these unreleased tracks from different studios winding
up on the same tape, in the same exact quality, seem exceptional, especially
considering how rare Television/Verlaine outtakes are to begin with.

--Philip



--- Keith Allison <keith@marquee.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> This just came in to my guest book:
> 
> "This is Mark Abel, who played 12-string on "Last Night" on Tom 
> Verlaine's first solo LP. I also mixed live sound for Television nearly 
> exclusively from late 1976 until their breakup, and also did a lot of 
> informal playing with all four members.
> I'd like to lay to rest your assertion that Tom Thompson, who played 
> drums on "Last Night," might have in fact been Billy Ficca. Not so. Tom 
> was the drummer in Architecture, my unrecorded New York band of the late 
> '70s and early '80s. Thompson and I played on a three-song demo that 
> Verlaine recorded at Blue Rock Studios prior to the full album. "Last 
> Night" was recorded at that session, along with a version of "Grip of 
> Love" and another folk-rockish song whose name I don't remember."
> 
> (Got that one wrong, then!)


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