(TV) Leo's Gotta fess-up! You win

["Casey, Leo J" <CaseyL@VOLPE.DOT.GOV>]

Hey, everyone, I gotta fess-up. 

I thought I'd *try to* have a little fun at Mark's and Jesse's 
expense in one of my previous e-mails. 

A couple of the interview quotes I gave therein we're incomplete; 
the complete quotes sometimes show that Mark and Jesse 
are a lot more than half-right.

(I believe that for a person to be considered intellectually honest,  
he/she  must accept what the evidence reveals or leads to, no 
matter how unappealing the conclusion, or how much he/she 
may wish it wasn't so).

Some complete quotes:

TELEVISION 
The Great Lost Band Finds Itself 
Source: Musician Magazine, September, 1992
by Scott Isler
Despite a forbidding image, Verlaine has consistently championed 
one of music's most consumer-friendly elements: melody. "It's odd," 
he muses, "that in the 80's melody, more than ever, should have 
gone out the window. Not to say that we're writing great melodies; 
we're probably part of the aspect of modern life that has to do with 
the absence of melody. In the '40s you had a melody that would float. 
On this record that's definitely true of some of the guitar things 
I'm doing. I have no interest in going whacko-whammo with another 
guitar solo. It's more, 'develop something that stays with the heart 
of a song.' ***"I don't think I've written any melodies as good as 
most TV show themes in the '50s."***

TV RERUN Source: The Bob (Spring 1993)
by Pat Grandjean
PAT GRANDJEAN WATCHES TELEVISION
Verlaine: The song "Rhyme" was a rehearsal tape I found where we're 
just playing something for 20 minutes. I took the best bits out of that. 
For instance; Richard was playing this melody-he played it once and 
never played it again, but we took that **little** melody and 
made it into a part. I just arranged these pieces into a format, 
or a song.
The Bob: Can we talk about some of the people whose 
technique you admire?
Verlaine: That's what I'm trying to say-I don't know if it's technique. 
You know what I mean? There's an old TV show called "Mr Lucky". 
Henry Mancini wrote this melody, and I heard this somewhere; 
and I found a record with it and listened to it and thought, 
"Christ, what a melody. Nobody writes a melody like this anymore." 
*****A lot of people would say that's good 'cause they can't stand that 
kind of thing.  But I picked up a piece of sheet music and looked at it, 
and it was just making all these little moves that I never would have 
dreamed up in a million years. That kind of melody just doesn't 
come to me, so somehow I have an admiration for it. *****
But Mancini, who wrote that melody-maybe it just came to him, or 
maybe he just noodle on a piano until he found something. 
Who knows? I don't know how he found it.

The Bob: I read that you said you didn't think you had written 
any melodies as good as most 1950s TV show themes.
****Verlaine: Yeah! I'd say that's true.**** These things are extremely 
strange and memorable somehow. They're all so rhythmically weird. 
Maybe because none of these people were writing to rock beats, 
they were strictly concentrating on melody-they weren't working 
against a boom-chick, 2/4 beat. Even in the late '50s, rock music 
was just thought of as total trash by anyone who was schooled.

The Bob: Of course, one quality common to all your albums is t
he conversational quality of the guitars-they're like voices 
as opposed to instruments. Is that something that developed 
deliberately?
**Verlaine: Well, for myself, less and less. I like chords.** 
So maybe on my last three solo records, the chords as chords 
start to disappear, and what happens is you get little 
parts-sometimes they're awash behind the vocal, but other 
times they're in and out of the vocal part-it's like a 
different kind of accompaniment, for lack of a better word. 

Musician Magazine 1987
By Scott Isler 
Musician: By "work" do you mean practicing guitar? 
Verlaine: I never practice. I just sort of doodle around, like somebody 
with a sketchpad. Sometimes I run a cassette recorder and maybe 
listen to it, maybe never listen to it again. There really isn't any pattern 
for how these things work. Some songs are written in 10 minutes. 
Sometimes I'll build a whole song around a bass line. 
**Often the melody is just two sentences and that becomes 
the germ of a song.** 
Musician: What's your modus operandi? Do you have a 
preferred method for constructing a song? 
Verlaine: It's real different. This "Cry Mercy" song had a title and I 
also had a guitar part lying around for years, which I never thought 
of making into a chorus. Then I just whacked it on top.... 
*****Three songs--"The Scientist Writes a Letter," "One Time at 
Sundown," and "Song"--have much longer melody structures than 
I'd been working with.***** The melodies tend to go on; instead 
of a series of riffs and an almost shouted vocal, they have a line 
that weaves along much longer phrases. I really like this. I 
don't know where it comes from.
	Leo
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