Tom Verlaine's music changed the course of rock music — and even the life of one UCF student, years back

I wanted to start this tribute to the great Tom Verlaine by talking about how he and his group Television and their 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon singlehandedly invented the word "angular."

True story: The word "angular" — a word music writers for decades now have used and abused to the point where it has lost all meaning ("'Angular post-punk,' eh? I'm intrigued …") — was a word invented by one Patti Smith to describe Television's unique and inspired guitar sound.

I could go on and on about that, but the Editor requested an "Orlando angle" [Ed. note: Even our editing is angular!] to this piece, so here goes:

My friend Frog turned me on to Television while we were matriculating at the University of Central Florida. He gave me a blank cassette that had Marquee Moon on one side, and White Light/White Heat on the other. They were dubbed copies of dubbed copies of dubbed copies, and it was the soundtrack while Frog and I ran for Student Government president and vice-president, respectively.

Our platform, what I recall of it, consisted of instituting a holiday called "Big Lug Day," where it was OK to go up to people and say, "C'mere ya big lug!" before embracing. I think we wanted to change the school's fight song to "Drink Fight and Fuck" by Sir G.G. Allin. During the VP debate, I was "assassinated" with Super-Soakers, my dead wet body carried off to the crying and wailing of no one. It was all pretty standard collegiate prankity-prank stupidity, but it was fun to thumb our noses at the ball-capped frat boys who ran the school, and probably still do.

With no financial backing and active hostility from "the Greeks," we still managed to get around 20 percent of the vote. Not too shabby, and I've been able to add "failed politician" to my résumé ever since.

I was the Opinions Editor of the college paper, and wrote a surprisingly popular and increasingly infamous humor column. I started writing more and more like Hunter S. Thompson, as young men are prone to do upon reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There'd be lines on the order of "The Administration's savage and unnatural enforcement of the draconian parking ordinances inspire scorn and ridicule to all honest and true Golden Knights, and it's time we drown these scurvy shyster bastards in the Reflection Pond!"

So it was against this backdrop of collegiate hijinks and Figuring Out Who and What I Was About that Marquee Moon first entered my ears, and it changed a lot of things for me in the short term, and would continue to change things for me in the years to come. It's an evergreen album — those interlocking guitars, the crisp drums, the tick-tock bass. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First hearing it in college, it was not what I expected. I had read about Television for years before actually hearing them. Marquee Moon consistently made the "Top 100 Albums of All Time" lists, and they were often discussed in terms of being "one of the first punk bands," the band that first played CBGB and so on and so forth.

That said, I was expecting something, you know, punk. "This isn't punk!" was probably my first dumb-ass reaction.

"But I like it for some reason!" was my second and much more intelligent reaction.

Punk without being punk. You know? Punk as personal vision rather than fucking tattoos and the requisite black hoodies and all that horseshit. It was an ideal I found that was epitomized by Television and Marquee Moon, and, at the end of the day, it is a punk rock record.

Alongside the music was Tom Verlaine's voice, a beautiful artsy-goaty warble that is a deal-breaker for so many, which is why Marquee Moon and 1978's follow-up Adventure didn't sell as many copies as corporate copycats like The Cars, where Ric Ocasek replaced the warble with a more accessible, pubescent Lou Reed talk-sing.

Marquee Moon and Adventure are still albums I listen to almost every week, as I continue to find something to admire. In particular, the guitar interplay between Tom Verlaine and foil Richard Lloyd. Something new always comes out of that — wait for it — "angularity."

What I came to realize after giving Marquee Moon repeated listenings while writing columns and running for elected office and meeting girls and goofing off was that Tom Verlaine was a guitar hero for people who aren't particularly fond of guitar heroes. Fuck Eric Clapton with a COVID-besotted Fender Jazzmaster. Guitarists like Tom Verlaine reclaimed guitar from all those blueshammer dickbags.

Television also played long songs at a time when the audience clamored (yes, clamored) for the loud and short songs. Some called them "The Grateful Dead of Punk," and yes, Verlaine's epic guitar solo in "Marquee Moon" is in the scale of D Mixolydian, which is the same "jammy" scale Jerry Garcia et al. used in their own extended forays into bliss and/or wankery. But Verlaine's solos were more rooted in jazz — he played saxophone as a teenager and played along to Coltrane and Ayler records, and that influence comes through.

No Television, no Pavement. No so many other bands and even entire genres, like indie-rock and post-punk, such as they are. In his lifetime, Tom Verlaine was not as well-known as he should have been. But in a way he was, because the influence inspired so many, from Manhattan to Stockton, California, to even goofy young collegiates pulling pranks way down yonder Orlando-way at UCF.

That said, cheers to Tom Verlaine, and Happy Big Lug Day to you and yours, if you celebrate.

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