The Rolling Stones song that inspired Television’s Tom Verlaine to pick up a guitar
Punk might have come of age in New York, but there is an argument to be had that it was, in fact, born in Kentucky. It was there, in Lexington, that Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell grew up in the shadow of a shrouded brick block narcotics treatment facility known on the streets as Narco. This reprobate fortress was frequented by artists like William S. Burroughs and housed a covert section of the counterculture movement in the sleepy town on the doorsteps of two young proto-punks playing with toy guns in the neighbouring fields.
Eventually, in October 1966, the two young buddies of Verlaine and Hell fled Lexington to find the permanent housing of counterculture rather than the repair centre for the foolhardy few who stepped one toke over the line. For a few weeks, Tom ‘Verlaine’ Miller and his best pal thumbed their way across the South in a serpentine path of wavering circumstance soon to be cut short when they were apprehended by the police.
But from these first speculative steps into the no-mans-land of wayfaring adolescence, an attitude of independence was instilled in the 16-year-old daring duo, and like chickens with ambitions of batter-free longevity, they were convinced that there was a better life for them outside of Kentucky. They lived and breathed rock ‘n’ roll as they have done ever since. In time, Verlaine would become one of the great textured guitar players of our time.
And at the beginning, there is one Rolling Stones anthem that encouraged him to pick up an axe in the first place. As a boy, he was trained as a classical pianist. The guitar seemed a little more vapid to him when it came to rock ‘n’ roll, but the atmospheric ways of Keith Richards would soon change all that. The track that changed his mind was the Stones’ 1966 epic: ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.
The song, in many ways, had a proto-punk feel to it. As Mick Jagger said of the track himself: “We had just done five weeks hectic work in the States and I said, ‘Dunno about you blokes, but I feel about ready for my nineteenth nervous breakdown.’ We seized on it at once as a likely song title. Then Keith and I worked on the number at intervals during the rest of the tour. Brian, Charlie and Bill egged us on – especially as they liked having the first two words starting with the same letter.”
The mixture of blunt acerbic wit and rhythmic guitars clearly remained at the forefront of Verlaine’s musical motivation as he continued to peddle guitar music in a similar fashion thereafter.
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