Tom Verlaine, Influential Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 73 - The New York Times

Tom Verlaine, whose set Television was 1 of the astir influential to look from the New York punk stone country centered connected the nightclub CBGB — but whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting were ne'er easy categorizable arsenic punk, oregon for that substance arsenic immoderate different genre — died connected Saturday successful Manhattan. He was 73.

His decease was announced by Jesse Paris Smith, the girl of Mr. Verlaine’s chap instrumentalist Patti Smith. She did not specify a cause, saying that helium died “after a little illness.”

Although Television achieved lone insignificant commercialized occurrence and broke up aft signaling 2 albums, Mr. Verlaine — who went connected to grounds respective solo albums and reunited with the set periodically — had a lasting influence, particularly connected his chap guitarists.

“Tom Verlaine is the guitarist to notation these days if you’re a young rocker with immoderate pretense to quality and originality,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote successful 1987.

The layered, often ethereal dependable that Mr. Verlaine and the different members of Television developed was a acold outcry from the stripped-down attack of the Ramones and different starring lights of the punk scene. But that country — which besides included bands arsenic disparate arsenic Blondie and Talking Heads — was ne'er arsenic one-dimensional arsenic it was often portrayed.

Mr. Verlaine, who was besides the band’s pb vocalist and did astir of the songwriting, studied soft and saxophone arsenic a child, and his euphony had roots successful everything from the escaped jazz of John Coltrane to the Rolling Stones’ hard-driving “19th Nervous Breakdown.” His often impressionistic lyrics reflected the power of poets similar Paul Verlaine, from whom the antheral calved Thomas Miller took his signifier name.

A implicit obituary volition follow.