Music Monday: Some 'Words from the Front'
An Appreciation of Tom Verlaine, the Former Frontman for Television and a Brilliant Poet and Guitarist, Upon His Passing
In the poem “Ars Poetica,” the French poet Paul Verlaine argues for a kind of open-ended sensibility, a poetry that exists in the gray, murky areas of the mind. Meaning is elusive and allusive, very much like instrumental music, open to interpretation on an emotional if not intellectual level.
For Nuance, not Color absolute,
Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue!
Nuance! It alone is what lets you
Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!
“Ars Poetica” might be seen as the Symbolist’s creed — Verlaine is often linked to the movement. “Symbolist artists sought to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and suggestive use of highly symbolized language,” Brittanica says.
They attempted to evoke the ineffable intuitions and sense impressions of man’s inner life and to communicate the underlying mystery of existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless convey the state of the poet’s mind and hint at the “dark and confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.
I mention Verlaine and the Symbolists in the context of the news that a different Verlaine has passed, Tom Verlaine. Verlaine was born Thomas Miller, and took his stage name from the great French poet, also borrowing the French writer’s symbolist sensibility, which was evident in both his lyrics and his sinewy guitar playing. Verlaine led the seminal New York punk band Television and recorded numerous solo albums, creating a music that has long influenced my own writing in ways I can’t explain.
Coincidentally, I had been listening to his song “Words from the Front” a lot recently, which I’ve included on a playlist I called “Armageddon Time,” which collects songs about nuclear war nuclear power, and other pop music relics that reflect the nuclear fear of my early adulthood — part of a writing project. “Words from the Front” is a war song, but more than a war song, harkening back to earlier wars and not to the most recent (Vietnam) or to the nuclear fears driven by Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House.
“Words from the Front” — from the album of the same name — arrives in 1982. It comes on the heels of what remains his most complete and creative solo work, Dreamtime (nothing tops the Television single “Little Johnnie Jewel” or the first studio record Marquee Moon, neither of which compare to the live recordings The Blow Up or Live at the Old Waldorf, San Francisco 6/29/78). It does not carry the critical cache of Dreamtime, but it is a record that captures for me much of what characterizes Verlaine’s work. A somber guitar chord progression opens the song, over drums, shifting downward, slows. Verlaine enters, speaking. Not quite a monotone, but restrained.
January 23rd
There's no road
It's been raining now for three days
We're in mud up to our knees
Then up a bit in the register, Verlaine shifts, sings, a fragile tenor.
If luck prevails and I'm given leave
I should be home by the 17th
One word I hear all the time
This word I hear
Blind
Blind
Why blind? What kind of luck? Where is the singer? And we are dropped into an ephemeral space, lacking detail to ground us. “John died last night,” the singer tells us, “He had no chance / Beneath the surgeon's drunken hands,” and we are given a hint about the blindness that repeats, but still we are asked to walk through this vague space of fires that “Soon smolder out.”
The song is a letter home from a soldier. But to whom? There is little here to explain, but the bare details the singer does offer — and Verlaine’s twisting guitar — are not designed to give us information, but to create an impression, to trigger emotions. All of it riding atop an orchestral guitar riff. “Up on the ridge,” the singer sings,
They're dug in deep
We move in waves
As if asleep
And there they lay
Four thousand men
The general orders "Attack again.”
And luck again. And blindness. And a sense of futility, of a lack of control. This is a war song, but without the bravado or romance of battle. It echoes earlier, premodern wars, but does so from the Reagan era, from a moment in which war means extreme violence, gratuitous violence, even cataclysmic, world-ending violence, and the images my mind conjures are of the American Civil War and the grand general, a Washingtonian hero, but dressed down, a general without his armor, without his clothes. A fake. Fraud. And all of us, blind on the front hoping that luck will prevail and we will find ourselves making it home.
I heard Verlaine and Television before I read Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, and because of this I think my understanding of these French poets is colored by the band and Verlaine’s solo career. I imagine the shaky tenor quoting Rimbaud and the Coltrane-eque guitar lines entwining with Richard Lloyd’s somewhat more conventional playing, painting an aural landscape that colors in the silences between the words and images.
I don’t know what else to say. I missed the chance to see Tom Verlaine live and against to see Television, when they reunited in 1992 and released their self-titled third album — a full 14 years after Marquee Moon (1977) and Adventure (1978). I guess I adored their music from afar, but I adored it nonetheless.
As a friend said on Facebook: “This one hurt.”
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Jon Pareles offers the 15 essential Verlaine songs at The New York Times. It covers the full range of his career.
The great Patti Smith, a friend of Verlaine, offers some words on her Substack blog: