More on Guitar in Dreamtime / RE: (TV) WTF, Tom?

["Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@comcast.net>]

Tom Verlaine: Dreamtime  

I used to have such sweet dreams," sang Tom Verlaine with poisoned flippancy
in "Careful," a song from the second and last Television album, Adventure.
"Now it's more like an air raid."

Indeed, Verlaine has always written compositions about close emotional
encounters of the phantasmagorial kind - of lovers and loners (Verlaine
principal among them) populating a fourth dimension of cold, gray
uncertainty-and then staged them like an air strike on the soul with
sirenlike guitars, a banshee bass-and-drums barrage and his own
wounded-coyote yowl. Dreamtime-only Verlaine's second solo LP since
Television, one of the first-string CBGB bands, signed off in 1978 - finds
the guitarist returning to fight another ten rounds with his fears. Or, as
he says in "Fragile": "I've got to face what's never there."

Verlaine immediately takes the offensive in "There's a Reason," going after
his "Cinderella with a new treat" to the martial beat of former Television
bassist Fred Smith and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty (they split rhythm
responsibilities here with Donald Nossov and Rich Teeter) until the chorus
dissolves into a crystal rain of guitar notes. Dreamtime, in fact, is a
veritable monsoon of guitar playing, from the resounding guitar choir
(joined by Bruce Brody's church-bell piano) in the exhilarating "Always" to
the awesome, acid-symphony finale of "Down on the Farm." In the gripping
instrumental "The Blue Robe," Tom Verlaine applies free-jazz daring to
exotic modal inventions in a manner reminiscent of the Quicksilver Messenger
Service's John Cipollina or Roger McGuinn's twelve-string expansions in the
Byrds' "Eight Miles High."

Though second guitarist Ritchie Fliegler's interlocking rhythms and fills
recall Richard Lloyd's pivotal supporting role in Television, neither the
brittle, post-Velvet Underground anxiety of Television's 1977 debut disc,
Marquee Moon, nor the seductive chamber-music quality of 1979's Tom Verbaine
match the dramatic resonance of Dreamtime's deep echo and rich, ambient
production. Verlaine's volatile Ornette Coleman-cum-Keith Richards guitar
orchestrations and dazzling sixstring maneuvers rarely threaten to overwhelm
the songs. Instead, along with his strangely histrionic singing, they color
in "what's never there," providing tangible presence to various phantoms.

Chords and arpeggios whip through "Without a Word" like wind in a deserted
house. A chilling ballad of love given but not returned, "Without a Word"
combines the romantic grandeur of Love's Forever Changes with the dark
gentility of the late British songwriter Nick Drake. In "Penetration," the
vicious pumping of Verlaine's guitars and Daugherty's drums accentuate the
vivid sexual allusions and emotional push-pull between the tune's
protagonists: "You say 'ok please get me what I need'/Well I'm sorry, I
can't find it, please don't hate me." And the only things meaner than the
singer's put-downs in "A Future in Noise" ("You're a graduate of the Reemco
School of Numbness.../A new czar in the nothing regime") are his brief but
searing guitar solos.

Like the French symbolist poet from whom he copped his professional surname,
Tom Verlaine creates intensely moving pictures of that no man's land shared
by the real and the unreal. Unlike the defeated woman in "Fragile" ("She
said 'Oh no I guess it is my fate/To live a life I can't communicate/How
painful ... painful ... but giving up is ok'"), he's seldom been at a loss
for the right words or the most evocative sounds. And, in spite of the pain,
he's never given up. Our dreams won't be quite the same. (RS 358)


DREAMTIME  Boston Phoenix, October 17, 1981 by Michael Howell 

There's a Reason kicks off with a lumbering martial rhythm; Verlaine's
guitar doesn't even come into the mix until the first chorus. He skates
along, scattering high notes until the return to the original rhythm. Then,
like Bobby Orr playing with a sluggish opponent, he glides alongside in
imitation, throwing off four or five notes to the rhythm's one, yet always
keeping the pace. Verlaine tires of this sport, however, by the time the
chorus repeats and administers a dazzling coup de grace. First, sustained
single notes are bent around the thumping rhythm; then he breaks into a
three-note riff, but it's repeated eight times, and with each repetition the
center note inches higher - an audible turn of the screw. When Verlaine
finally releases into a starburst of high notes, you feel you've survived an
experience no one warned might be dangerous.

Tom at the Pantheon  By Steve Anderson  Village Voice, June 22, 1982

Performing with confidence at the Ritz last week, Verlaine rampaged through
rockers like "There's a Reason" and "Always" and deftly controlled the
furious, protracted rave-ups. The solos, all improvised, were still fearless
cliff-hangers. 

Where the Wild Things Are By Jon Pareles Village Voice, Oct. 7, 1981 

He's one of a handful of players who can still hear the electric guitar as a
fantasy instrument, a dream: a guitar that can hit harder and sustain longer
than any acoustic version bound by physical laws. Most guitarists who reach
a certain level of agility use the fretboard like a keyboard, forgetting the
visceral, while the best noisy plunkers-Keith Richards, for instance-have no
use for lyricism. But Verlaine's dreamscapes demand both extremes: when
things get too ethereal, he digs in blues licks like pitons sharpened with
John Cipollina's trebly vibrato; if the bottom gets too gritty, he floats a
time-stopper pause out of Miles Davis. Verlaine is no guitar hero-just the
opposite. Instead of redoubling a bass riff for maximum impact, he'll play a
counterpoint; when a chord progression threatens too tidy a conclusion,
he'll shift into modal scales (Dorian instead of minor, Mixolydian instead
of major) that dissipate the momentum. And when he wants to build a
crescendo, as he does in "There's a Reason" on Dreamtime, he can toss off a
sequence that, for its lift and sculptural proportions, might as well be
spun-steel bridge cable.

-----Original Message-----
From: tv-owner@obbard.com [mailto:tv-owner@obbard.com] On Behalf Of Rex
Broome
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 6:32 PM
To: tv@obbard.com
Subject: Re: (TV) WTF, Tom?

I'll have to spend some time with those liner notes...indeed I had the
Infinite Zero release with the bonus tracks.  And the vinyl which sounds
best of all.  I find it an infinitely fascinating record.  That "meters in
the red" approach is almost never done with those kinds of guitar sounds...
it's usually all overdrivey or distortiony "wall of noise" type tones that
get pushed that way.  It's very intense to hear these more natural tones
get that treatment... same thing holds with the drums, which sound "big"
but don't have the off-putting artificial sheen that usually comes along
with that.  It's all very unique.  I always have it in my personal Top Five
Albums, and today I think it's jumping into the top slot for a while.  It's
a record that clobbered me over the head the first time I heard it, but
still continues to reveal new layers and sound different with every spin
decades later... that's rare.

So agree with Leif about the way "There's A Reason" opens the
record...classic.  On par with "See No Evil", even and even more
captivatingly sinister.
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