Warm and Cool by Tom Verlaine (1992)
DAVID SHEPPARD
“Where words leave off, music begins.”
— Heinrich Heine
The year 1992 was something of an annus mirabilis for fans of Tom Verlaine and his singular, ineffably ‘poetic’ approach to the electric guitar. In September the unexpectedly reformed Television – the Verlaine-led, nonpareil Lower East Side NYC quartet for whom the genre descriptor ‘rock’ could only ever be partially accurate – released a belated third album, the eponymous Television. Arriving a decade-and-a-half after its predecessor, 1978’s Adventure – itself the follow-up to the band’s startling, career-defining Marquee Moon debut from the previous year – the new album was received warmly, as much for its unpredicted manifestation as for its angular, enigmatic song structures or the fluidity and emotion-stirring synergy of its intertwined guitar lines, persuasive as they undoubtedly were. Moreover, those of us who’d been too young to catch the band’s earlier iteration live on stage could now make amends as the original line-up – Verlaine accompanied by bassist Fred Smith, drummer Billy Ficca and guitar foil Richard Lloyd – toured their new release, finding room every night for protracted extemporisations on key numbers from Television’s small but perfectly formed back catalogue.
For those of us who’d kept faith with Verlaine’s post-Adventure ‘adventures’ in the shape of his, up to that point, half dozen solo albums, from 1979’s Tom Verlaine to 1990’s The Wonder, which, for all their palpable writerly grace and six-string invention seemed to be consumed by an inexorably shrinking audience, Television’s renaissance was, of course, extremely welcome. For diehard TV partisans, however, 1992 had already been significant given that in April, Verlaine, courtesy of Warners in Europe and Rykodisc in the US, had quietly released a seventh solo album, the all-instrumental Warm and Cool.
Along with sketchily mooted ideas for an album made using vintage organs, and a book of Beat-style poetic monologues, a prospective collection of instrumentals was something Verlaine had been half-teasing in typically evasive and enigmatic interviews over the preceding decade. In 1990, he had toured as a solo act, wielding an acoustic guitar, which provided interesting insight into the stripped down superstructures of his songwriting – if also revealing the limitations of his relatively unadorned singing voice – while an unrecorded, half-spoken essay about Johnny Cash resting in a motel room “watching reruns of M.A.S.H.”, and a disquieting treatise about “the man in the backyard”, hinted at the possible tone and shape of that putative literary work. Nonetheless, long-time adherents continued to venerate Verlaine for one thing above all others – his remarkable, sui generis approach to the amplified electric guitar.
A teenage saxophone player, autodidactically schooled in John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, long before he ever touched the guitar, Verlaine’s belated adoption of the instrument, albeit initially inspired by hearing Keith Richards’ and Brian Jones’ playing on the Rolling Stones’ 1966 hit ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, owed little to rock’n’roll guitar’s blues-grounded canon. Dextrous deployment of the whammy bar and volume control of his favoured Fender Jazzmaster helped Verlaine tease out eerie brass, violin or theremin-like tonalities as readily infectious, rock-adjacent riffing, while his arpeggio playing could summon a peal of church bells one minute, a silvery echo of Roger McGuinn’s chiming 12-string Rickenbacker playing for The Byrds the next.
Where Television had been defined by the switchblade interplay of Verlaine and Lloyd’s coruscating Fenders, and his previous solo records had been hallmarked by shapeshifting suites of guitar texture, a phalanx of sinewy lines overdubbed into shimmering, reverberant clouds, Warm and Cool would dial down the architectural drama in favour of an exploration of reverberant space, quietude and pure tone. Cut in two nights at New York’s Acoustilog studio, with the emphasis on improvisation around a simple theme, the album’s 14, mostly concise, pieces found Verlaine supported by brilliantly fidgety Television drummer Billy Ficca and unobtrusive bassist Patrick A. Derivaz (Fred Smith and Patti Smith sticks-man Jay Dee Daugherty play on one track, ‘Harley Quinn’, which dates from an earlier session). The music they conjured is liquid, nuanced and often supremely mellifluous, occasionally gnarly and dissonant, but always enigmatically, magnetically evocative of night, mystery, magic and – abetted by some just-so song titling – the quotidian sublime. This is music that seems to dwell in a still, past tense, urban edgeland America, its sketch-like, sometimes gossamer yet never fainthearted, spontaneous compositions apparently channelling everything from Illinois Jacquet’s ‘Harlem Nocturne’ to Angelo Badalamenti’s David Lynch scores by way of arcane TV themes from Dragnet and The Twilight Zone, alongside hints of, as Verlaine’s partner, the artist Jutta Koether, suggests in her intimate, poignant liner notes for the 2024 Real Gone reissue of Warm and Cool, “Scriabin, Varèse, Satie and Duane Eddy”.
After his untimely passing in 2023, Verlaine was revealed to be something of an inveterate hoarder, of books principally, but also of vintage vacuum amplifier tubes (known as valves in the UK) – he had allegedly amassed several thousand of them by his death. So forensic was his analysis of these power bulbs that each would be labelled with specific notes about their tone and potential (“really good for an E major chord”). This Herculean attention to technical detail at first seems at odds with the apparent insouciance with which Verlaine generally conducted his artistic life (“I’m trying very hard not to have a career, you know?” he once told an interviewer), yet his dedicated fealty to pure guitar tone is demonstrated exquisitely and repeatedly on Warm and Cool.
The album title proves to be practically onomatopoeic; both warmth and coolness certainly abound on opener ‘Those Harbor Lights’, its jouissant lead line twang offset by softly brushed cymbals, distant bass and subtle trickles of a tremulous second guitar, while the ensuing ‘The Deep Dark Clouds’ layers chordal swells and wiry, subtly overdriven lines fleetingly redolent of Ry Cooder over reverberant, rumbling drums. ‘Saucer Crash’ swaggers along on a swinging, jazzy beat, arpeggiated tremolo chords couching some fine exploratory lead work, at times reminiscent of the tone and culminative invention that distinguishes Verlaine’s mythic soloing on the title track of Marquee Moon, while ‘Depot (1951)’ pares back the palette; a stuttering beat supports squalls of mysterioso lead guitar and, later, some subtle but affecting chord changes. The aforementioned ‘Harley Quinn’, meanwhile, features a delightfully playful topline melody that unfolds over Daugherty’s strident drums, the verses consistently punctuated by a resolving, arhythmic figure that was surely an influence on about-to-be-formed Chicago post-rockers-in-chief Tortoise.
Elsewhere, Verlaine runs the gamut from the short, barely-there tone poem ‘Sor Juanna’ (a tribute to the so-named 17th century Hieronymite nun, philosopher, composer and poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, no less) via the drone-based, almost folkish ‘Spiritual’ to the contrastingly cacophonous ‘Ore’, one of a pair of diversions (alongside the closing ‘Lore’) into James Blood Ulmer-meets-Sonny Sharrock-like noise, while the lilting ‘Depot (1958)’ offsets its plangent guitars with an organ sound lifted from 1950s sci-fi nirvana.
Verlaine’s final vocal album, Songs and Other Things, released by Thrill Jockey in 2006, would arrive simultaneously accompanied by a second collection of guitar instrumentals, Around. Thematically and tonally, the latter owed much to its 1992 predecessor, but while it proffered a further index of chewy guitar tones and moments of disarming filigree playing, Around remains very much the younger sibling of Warm and Cool, an album on which the musical planets align to consistently transporting effect, offering an enduring testament to the indefatigable artistry of Tom Verlaine, the peerless poet of the vacuum tube.
David Sheppard is a musician, producer, writer and lecturer. He is the author of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno and plays in the bands Snow Palms and Ellis Island Sound, amongst others.
