Tom Verlaine, Influential Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 73

Tom Verlaine, whose band Tv was one of the influential to emerge from the New York punk rock scene centered on the nightclub CBGB — however whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting had been by no means simply categorizable as punk, or for that matter as every other style — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73.

His dying was introduced by Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Mr. Verlaine’s fellow musician Patti Smith. She didn’t specify a trigger, saying that he died “after a short sickness.”

Though Tv achieved solely minor business success and broke up after recording two albums, Mr. Verlaine — who went on to report a number of solo albums and reunited with the band periodically — had an enduring affect, particularly on his fellow guitarists.

“Tom Verlaine is the guitarist to say as of late should you’re a younger rocker with some pretense to intelligence and originality,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1987.

The layered, usually ethereal sound that Mr. Verlaine and the opposite members of Tv developed was a far cry from the stripped-down method of the Ramones and different main lights of the punk scene. However that scene — which additionally included bands as disparate as Blondie and Speaking Heads — was by no means as one-dimensional because it was usually portrayed.

Mr. Verlaine, who was additionally the band’s lead singer and did a lot of the songwriting, studied piano and saxophone as a baby, and his music had roots in all the pieces from the free jazz of John Coltrane to the Rolling Stones’ hard-driving “nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.” His usually impressionistic lyrics mirrored the affect of poets like Paul Verlaine, from whom the person born Thomas Miller took his stage identify.

A whole obituary will observe.