Patti Smith Shares Eulogy for Tom Verlaine: “Had I Been a Boy, I Would’ve Been Him”

Tv frontman Tom Verlaine died final week, and, now, Patti Smith has paid tribute to the late musician and her former boyfriend in an essay for The New Yorker. Titled “He Was Tom Verlaine,” her eulogy particulars Verlaine’s upbringing in Delaware, the primary time the artists crossed paths in 1973, and their shared pursuits in poetry, composers, and the bustle of New York. She additionally recounted the primary time she noticed Tv carry out reside on April 14, 1974, at CBGB, writing, “What we noticed that night time was kin, our future, an ideal merging of poetry and rock and roll. As I watched Tom play, I assumed, Had I been a boy, I’d’ve been him.”

“He devoured poetry and dark-chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, downed with espresso and cigarettes,” wrote Smith. “Typically he would appear dreamy and faraway then immediately break into peals of laughter. He was angelic but barely demonic, a cartoon character with the grace of a dervish. I knew him then. We preferred holding arms and spending hours looking the cabinets of Flying Saucer Information and going to Forty-eighth Road and taking a look at guitars that he may by no means afford and using the Staten Island Ferry after three units at CBGB and climbing six flights of stairs to the residence on East Eleventh Road and mendacity collectively on a mattress gazing on the ceiling and listening to the rain and listening to one thing else. There was nobody like Tom. He possessed the kid’s reward of reworking a drop of water right into a poem that someway begat music.”

Verlaine and Smith dated within the mid-Seventies and collaborated collectively through the years, with the Tv guitarist contributing to Smiths albums Horses, Gung Ho, Gone Once more, and Easter. The 2 stayed shut pals lengthy after they broke up, with Smith noting in her New Yorker essay that “having no kids, [Verlaine] welcomed the love he acquired from [Smith’s] daughter, Jesse, and [her] son, Jackson.”

Verlaine died after a short sickness on the age of 73. Though he’s finest recognized for his seminal work in Tv, together with the landmark 1977 album Marquee Moon, Verlaine additionally launched quite a few solo information all through his life. Along with Smith, numerous musicians paid tribute to the late artist upon listening to of his demise, together with Michael Stipe, Sleater-Kinney, Blondie’s Chris Stein, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Flea, amongst others.