(TV) Re: TV Digest V1 #446

[DAYKARAK@aol.com]

> > Tom's musical cake was baked and frosted long before the Beatles or VU
> > existed. He grew up listeniing to 1950's AM radio as well as to
> > classical and jazz records.
 
from the great big article "Vision On" by Ira Robbins (MOJO, February 2001, 
p. 64) -quotes and punctuation Americanized for sake of proofreading and 
general clairty:

"[Verlaine] started to percieve the possibilities of improvisation, so long 
as it was on saxophone. He hated the sound of jazz guitar, only warming to 
the instrument in high school after his Motown-loving twin brother John 
played him The Four Tops' 'Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)'. The Stones' 
'19th Nervous Breakdown' and The Kinks' 'You Really Got Me' and 'All Day And 
All of the Night' furthered his unsentimental education.

"'Up until then, the guitar was a stupid instrument to me," recalled Miller, 
long after he had changed his name to Verlaine. 'Those records made me think 
the guitar could be as good as jazz.' The 16-year old heard The Yardbirds, 
The Byrds, and Mike Bloomfield's stinging leads on Dylan's Highway 61 
Revisited, records that, a decade later, would help shape Television..."

Obviously, the jazz influence was there in the fifties, but if this article 
is indeed credible, Tom didn't start liking guitar-oriented music until he 
was in high school. Considering he was born in late 1949, it would seem that 
he actually hadn't grown up on 1950's AM radio stuff, wouldn't it? 

 >Y'know ... this makes perfect sense. For a lot of people, the first records 
 >you hear that make you really love music are the one's that'll probably 
have 
 >the longest influence. 

Let's see...first song with a guitar line that grabbed me by me 
three-year-old balls? "The Old Man Down the Road," from John Fogerty's album 
Centerfield. I don't own a copy of that record. I don't even like Fogerty 
beyond a scant handful of CCR tracks, but the riffs from that song are audio 
tattoos, permanently inked into the tissue of my brain, jumping out at me 
when I'm stuck on the bus, little memories causing flashbacks through my 
auditory nerves and fading deep into the recesses of my spine. Yeah, I think, 
"Man, what a load of shit," but the riff's still got me.

-nick
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