Rob Sheffield
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Verlaine in 1982 Peter Noble/Redferns/Getty Images When the guitar legend Tom Verlaine died in 2023, at the age of 73, he was hailed as one of New York’s most influential musicians. He defined the city’s avant-garde-rock sensibility with his 1970s band Television, helping to kick off the CBGB punk scene. When he plugged his guitar into downtown Manhattan, in classics like “Marquee Moon” or “Breakin’ In My Heart,” he changed the way people heard music around the world.
But now, Verlaine’s personal record collection is opening up. Discogs is partnering with the New York record store Academy Records, which acquired his collection, for a public sale. The collection has an estimated 4,000 records in all. One thousand will go on sale online at Discogs on Friday, June 26, the first of four waves. There will also be an in-store sale at Academy Records in Brooklyn on July 10 and 11. The final Discogs drop is Friday, July 31.
“It’s a collection that was built by Tom Verlaine’s ear, in his lifetime,” Discogs’ Russ Ryan tells Rolling Stone. “They’re records that represent his love of music from all over the spectrum.”
Verlaine was not just a guitarist’s guitarist, but a collector’s collector — especially of books and music. You could always spot him prowling the sidewalk carts outside the Strand Bookstore. One of his book-hunting comrades was his longtime friend and fellow New York guitar visionary Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. “We would go book-shopping together,” Moore tells Rolling Stone, via Zoom from London. “I was living up in Northampton, Massachusetts, for close to a decade, and he would come up and spend weekends up there, him and [artist, scholar, and partner] Jutta [Koether]. He and I would take off together in his rental car and we’d go to all the secondhand bookstores of western Massachusetts. We did the rounds.”
Back in New York, Verlaine amassed a 50,000-volume collection. “I went up to his apartment a couple of times,” Moore says. “It was definitely a very intimate zone. Jutta lived in the same building, but in a separate apartment, because the books didn’t allow for more than one person to be living in there.”
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In the summer of 2023, after his death, Verlaine’s book collection went on sale — two Brooklyn garages packed to the rafters with books on art, physics, UFOs, theosophy, anything. The weekend-afternoon sales events became a phenomenon, drawing crowds to marvel at his wide-ranging tastes — not just hardcore music geeks or bibliophiles, but appreciators of New York cultural lore. He achieved a new posthumous glory as the ultimate urban-gourmet book fiend.
So the curiosity about his record collection has been raging away. “The thing that strikes you first is that it isn’t a trophy cabinet,” Ryan says. “It’s a working listener’s collection. The median record sits around $15, most of it lands between $10 and $50, and the range runs up to $1,000. So a fan can own a piece of Verlaine’s shelf without being a wealthy collector. There are crown jewels in here, but the body of it is the kind of records a real digger lives with.”
The collection contains records that were crucial in forming his garage-punk sensibility, mixing up 1970s urban grime with 1960s psychedelia. It includes free jazz from the New York avant-garde scene, such as Albert Ayler’s Bells, Marion Brown’s Why Not, Archie Shepp’s Magic of Ju-Ju, and Larry Young’s Lawrence of Newark. There are Sixties rock bands like the Sonics and the Small Faces, and pioneering hippie renegades like Love or the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
“For him, Coltrane was huge,” Moore says. “Jazz was really a music that he adored, and he also was really into that Nuggets era of garage-psych stuff. When Television first started playing, they were doing covers of ‘Fire Engine,’ by Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and ‘Psychotic Reaction,’ by the Count Five, at a time when that really wasn’t so much a thing.”
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The rock treasures here range from the Andy Warhol Factory (Nico’s 1967 Chelsea Girls) to Midwestern quarries (Slint’s 1991 Spiderland). There’s also Verlaine’s own private stash of Television records, and Patti Smith’s debut single, “Piss Factory”/“Hey Joe.”
But the collection reaches all over the world. Ryan describes it as “Portuguese fado from Amália Rodrigues, Senegalese dance music from the Star Band de Dakar, Italian pop from Adriano Celentano, soul and New Orleans R&B running through the middle with the Neville Brothers and Ernie K-Doe. This was someone listening to the whole world, not just his own corner of it.”
A handful of albums from Tom Verlaine’s vast record collection. Photo by Jordan Keyser Jordan Keyser* Born Thomas Miller in 1952, Verlaine moved to New York in the late Sixties with his prep-school buddy Lester Meyers. They became poets, roommates, and naturally started a band, changing their names to “Tom Verlaine” and “Richard Hell,” decadent aesthetes going for rock & roll kicks. “There was something so New York about it,” Moore recalls. “There was something very urban about that, at a time when urban music was an anomaly. I mean, the New York Dolls and the Dictators was one thing, but there was another sensibility with Television, because actually it dealt with the poetic aesthetic of urbanity, as opposed to the glitz and glam and trashiness of the New York Dolls.”
Television didn’t last long, making only two classic albums before splitting in 1978. But Verlaine remained a guiding light in New York music, on his own eccentric terms, inspiring experimental rads like Sonic Youth. “It was Tom who really initially got me interested in improvised jazz music,” Moore says. “Back in the Seventies, there was an interview I read with him where he name-checked Albert Ayler’s live Village Vanguard record [Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village], with a bit of a psychedelic swirl cover that Impulse! had done. It made me that much more intrigued for him to say that he was inspired by Albert Ayler. Of course, through the years, there would be other people signaling jazz and free jazz within the context of avant-garde music, rock & roll music, and whatever, whether it was James Chance or Mike Watt. I eventually became completely immersed in that world, or at least the history of it. And I certainly understood Tom’s sensibility and his approach to guitar, with this idea of sound and color and improvisation.”
Moore used to see Verlaine at CBGB with Television, but they met in the Eighties, when Sonic Youth were starting to make noise. “I had always heard Tom was a little bit of a thorny character, but he was immediately welcoming. And we just hit it off and became fast friends,” Moore says. “He had already name-checked Sonic Youth somewhere in an interview in the Eighties that really was completely gratifying for me. It was really early on, too, around Confusion Is Sex or Bad Moon Rising. He said, ‘The only interesting music in New York right now is LL Cool J and Sonic Youth.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, dude, you’re totally right in my alley!’ I really took that to heart. But we knew that we were completely different guitar players. He was a rather high-traditional-technique guitar player who had his own idiosyncratic way of approaching it, whereas I was just completely untutored and making something else with it. And so he understood that, and we really shared a lot of music together.”
