I heard that the best way to get over jet lag is to get out into the light and your body readjusts to the new time zone quicker. The problem is that it is zero degrees outside and sleeping times are so messed up that it is in fact during the light that you are sleeping. Arriving at 7.20 AM in the morning on a 6.20 PM flight from New York might be ideal if you were able to sleep seven hours on the plane, which never happens and even if it did, your body clock would still be telling you that the seven-hour sleep was just an unplanned nap and resorts back to American time almost immediately. The only thing to do when we arrived at Olivia’s parents’ house was to have some breakfast and then go to bed, waking up at 7 PM which meant we missed the light and had us up till 6 AM the following morning which means we went to bed again as the light was brewing. Waking up at 2.30 PM two days into being in Germany and I haven’t got close to going outside at all.

Olivia was going to see her friend so she set her alarm, shaking me awake in time for the Liverpool game (they lost) and then two seshes with Jed and Jeff, there was no outside in the light time. After Olivia had gone, I had a classic domestic slapstick moment before the first sesh with Jed. The game finished a little later than I thought so I told Jed post-flight shower was a priority and I also grabbed a sandwich (not concurrently) – an hour had passed, Jed was cool. I brought the last of my not-soggy sandwiches upstairs, my sugar-free Fritz Kola (a German classic) and a nice hot cup of tea. My computer was on the table and the bed that turns into a comfy couch was a little too far away for skyping so I thought, I’ll move it closer. As I dragged the table toward me, I knocked over the Fritz bottle, spilling cola on the carpet, I immediately, and quick as a flash, reached for the napkin on the table at the end of the bed not realising that the cup of tea was partly sitting on it. As I pulled it, I took the hot cup of tea with it, upsetting it on my hand, with the cup falling down and the whole thing spilling all over the floor. It was a battle on three fronts, Fritz on the carpet, my burnt hand and the tea everywhere. I won’t bore you with the cleanup.

All this happened as I was about to talk to Jed, already an hour past our initially agreed sesh time. I cleaned up and skyped Jed, I couldn’t hear him and he couldn’t hear me. So what next? I haven’t been using Skype so much because of my commitments to all the projects but now I’m back in Europe I’m immediately back in sesh mode with Jed and Jeff today, first day back. It took me a while to figure out that my ace computer speakers that sessioneer Fred kindly gave me wouldn’t work with my Skype, why is a mystery but I also had my little mono speaker which thankfully did work (I really didn’t want to be seshing with just the sound of the computer speakers). Jed and I worked on the 23rd song we have for the next Space Summit album. All we need to get started on the follow-up to Life This Way is the time and the spondoolies.

Music today has been Tom Verlaine’s third solo album Words From The Front (1982), one of my favourites of his solo works. I wore my Marquee Moon T-shirt today, it took on a new meaning.

Music Of The Daze

Arriving at 7.20 AM in Germany not knowing yet that we had lost Tom Verlaine. We’d left Jeanne’s hospitality and all our New York friends behind till the next time and taken an Uber to Newark airport. Jeanne had mentioned that she’d read that only 6% of Uber drivers get tipped (because it’s not a cash payment). I asked our driver what percentage Uber takes from the fare. Shockingly he told me 35%. So they lose a lot to the company and don’t get many tips, good to know, tip them when you get home. The plane was a new Lufthansa-acquired Dreamliner, one always hopes that they’ve given the new models a good run, the 737 saga was freaky. All was well on the flight, we arrived in Frankfurt and we sailed through passport control with my new Portuguese residency card. They told me I could stay in the Schengen area as long as I wanted with this card, so consequently, I received no German entry stamp in my British passport and was treated as an EU citizen. It feels like a privilege after all those Brits that have lost the right to live in Europe as they had been doing untroubled for years. Olivia’s dad picked us up at the airport and we were soon driving to Olivia’s 1000-year-old village in the Rhineland, quite a contrast to the last few days in New York.

We arrived at Olivia’s childhood village and Olivia’s mum had prepared a mega breakfast for us with endless choices of cereals, oat milk, avocado, cheese, bread, croissant, veggie ham, camembert, toast, tea, juice. We ate and chatted for a while and then decided at 11.30 AM that we should hit the sack, goodnight. We didn’t get up till 7 PM and now comes the fight with jet lag. We came down and Olivia cooked some food, we chatted again with Gerd and Siv until they went to bed and we were wide awake, left with the news of Tom Verlaine’s death to mourn. I wrote all about my experiences and reminisces with Tom and that took up the rest of the night.

We have to carry on optimistic even when our heroes leave us because mortality sits further forward in your mind when you reach your sixties and you need to think of the end of your life as an opportunity to consolidate all your thoughts, take advantage of all your experiences and present them back to the world in some useful form. What one man considers useful of course might not be another’s version. Oscar Wilde famously said “All art is quite useless” but he was being witty and pedantic. Bringing music to people is rather useful I think but perhaps not as much as being a nurse.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

From tomorrow I’ll be starting with sessions again as the 24/7 of the US is done. We will be here in Germany till Friday, 3rd February. So please be in touch if you want to sesh on, but be quick for a time, I’m expecting to be quite busy with seshes over the coming weeks before our UK tour starts.

Music today has been Tom Verlaine’s second solo album Dreamtime (1981). More classic angular and unique guitar.

Music Of The Daze

We left New York on the 27th to arrive in Germany on the 28th to read that Tom Verlaine had died. The other end of the sphere of classic original and inspired guitar players, I played with him most nights on the US tour in 1988 where he opened for the ex-band acoustic and we played Cortez the Killer as an encore (electric of course), trading solos. He travelled on our bus and I spent a substantial amount of time in his company which led to me playing guitar (uncredited along with Jay Dee Daugherty) on his 1990 album The Wonder. Verlaine was a great inspiration to me as he never seemed to hit the notes that others chose. He was that intoxicating mixture of high competence and risk, emotional and raw, and able to sustain long guitar solos that were always disappointing when they stopped. It’s all in the fingers and I remember his wiry hands, he was tall and slim, almost a statue. He was thoughtful and always very kind to me, he gave me books about the French writers of the previous two centuries because he knew I was interested and once when his guitar broke he used my 12-string acoustic and made a point of telling the audience it was mine and how grateful he was for letting him use it.

When I acquired my Jazzmaster, it was Verlaine that I had in mind. He famously used a Jazzmaster on the Television albums Marquee Moon (1977) and Adventure (1978). I used it for many years as my main guitar. I wanted something between a Strat and a Rickenbacker and the Jazzmaster was it. When I was in Australia in June I bought a Television – Marquee Moon T-shirt at Egg Records in Newtown, re-stocking my ageing, shrinking T-shirt collection with the new blood of old classics. I also bought a Doors shirt and a T. Rex shirt, all now incredible characters who have passed away, and not just the front man (three of T. Rex are gone, two of The Doors). When I arrived in New York in November, my first walk around Manhattan, I thought this is where I will wear my Television shirt. Two people said “great band”, most didn’t have a clue, some maybe silently approved but you really got the feeling of how New York’s rock ’n’ roll underground has changed (obviously) drastically since the glory days of CBGB’s. Verlaine and Patti Smith’s rock ’n’ roll poetic spirit has turned into hip hop poetry and a new generation’s approach to art, there’s no more sense of the French giants like Paul Verlaine, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire that they championed.

As it happened I was in Strand Books on 12th off Union Square just some hours ago buying Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil In The Flesh (Le Diable Au Corps). I have a copy of it already, amongst the book collection in England but it has been so long since I read it that I bought it again, figuring it would be a different translation (maybe) and as I suspected it was as great as I remembered it. As it happened I barely remembered the story at all but discovered (I’m 70 pages in) that it is in fact a classic of early 20th-century French literature. It’s a semi-autobiographical story about a 16-year-old boy who falls in love with the 19-year-old wife of a soldier fighting at the front in World War I. It was controversial at the time and written by a teenage Radiguet, intellectually advanced in his years, so much so that he became a protege of Jean Cocteau who declared him a genius. Unfortunately, Radiguet succumbed to typhoid fever at the age of 20 in 1923, one wonders what other classics he might have written, one other book, Le bal du Comte d’Orgel was released posthumously in 1924.

This amongst all those other French classics will have all been voraciously read by Dylan, Patti and Tom – Gide, Sartre, Nin, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, Camus etc. Thus giving them their poetic sensibility in relation to their music which permeates it through and through. You got the impression that no one really knew Tom that well, I knew him a little. I ran into him once in a Starbucks in Manhattan. “Tom,” he looked at me puzzled from a faraway place. “It’s Marty,” I said. He clicked into recognition and greeted me with a wry smile. He always seemed somewhat far away. He’s lost his brother to drugs and I never saw him indulge in anything but coffee and cigarettes, almost as if that’s what he lived on, something like Frank Zappa and perhaps that’s what got him in the end.

He was a great inspiration to me and one of the highlights of my musical career is when he sat me down and patiently showed me how to play Friction. I played and sang it at one of The Beat Goes On shows at The Bottom Line presented by my friends Ed Rogers and Jeanne Stahlman. I hung with him another couple of times after seeing Television live at Cirkus in Stockholm and then at the next show in London. I remember he came up to my room at the hotel we were staying at to check out the albums I had bought. I never did get to talk to him again after that chance meeting in the coffee shop. I saw him live with a modern version of Television in Santiago in Chile and I also saw him once at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn on October 15th 1999 playing Music For Films (with film) with Jimmy Ripp. I recorded it on my minidisc player, so somewhere I have a bootleg copy of that show. I also saw him playing guitar with Patti Smith at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. He sat down for the whole show and wore a hat, haha, he was great. Last but not least he once told me that he’d played on Bowie’s Scary Monsters (Bowie had covered his song Kingdom Come) but nothing he did was used. This isn’t quite the version he told me:

“Tom Verlaine, who came to the overdub sessions in New York, wrote it. We asked Verlaine if he would like to overdub some guitar and he agreed. He asked if it would be okay to rent some guitar amps. It looked as though Verlaine was a little down on his luck and lugubrious in those days—and maybe he didn’t own a guitar amp. The next day David and I were met with the sight of Tom Verlaine auditioning every guitar amp in New York City. No exaggeration—there were about 30 guitar amps in the studio. He would play the same phrase in one, unplug his guitar and move to the next amp. We talked to him about the part and he said he had some ideas, but he was searching for a good sound. Hours drifted, we had lunch, watched some afternoon television and left Verlaine still auditioning amps at 7 p.m. I don’t think we ever used a note of his playing, if we even recorded him. We never saw him after that day. Again the backing vocals pulled the track into some kind of psycho-Ronettes area”. – Tony Visconti (Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy)

Music today is Verlaine’s debut solo album, released in 1979. Rest in peace, Tom, it was a pleasure knowing you, learning from you and being inspired by your unique approach to the guitar. Thank you!

Music Of The Daze

Last full day in America, last chance to take in the special atmosphere of New York City so we headed out to soak it up. We needed lots of brain sponges for today’s jaunt as we headed into Manhattan on the PATH for the last time (until the next time). It was a little windy but not as cold as yesterday and no snow turning into torrential rain, yuk. We stopped off for a quick brekkie and walked to 7th Avenue and took the 1 train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center where we visited the New York Library to see the Lou Reed exhibition. Lots of pix and posters, films, interviews, records, tapes, guitars, poems, lyrics, tickets, receipts, an overview of Lou’s life. I did see him live once at Casino de Paris, February 21st 1992 on the Magic and Loss tour when Michael Blair was playing drums with him (Michael played on I Can’t Cry on Spirit Level, 1992).

From there we walked alongside the park and down towards MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), where we spent a fascinating few hours. Where to start, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, van Gogh’s Starry Night, Dalí, Picasso, Kandinsky, Miró, Modigliani, Seurat, Monet, Matisse, Dix, Picabia, Rousseau, Klimt and so on, that was one floor. The Americans Warhol, Pollock, Rothko on the floor below seemed less interesting to me but the 5th floor was a hard act to follow. It was like The Beatles supported by Jay-Z.

From there we walked to 5th Avenue and took a bus down to Union Square. I needed one more trip to Strand Books where I bought a new copy of Cocteau protégé Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil In The Flesh (1923). The In Deep Music Archive isn’t just a music library, I have a damn fine collection of books as well and this edition will sit beside a different translation. Radiguet was considered a prodigy in literary circles but tragically died of typhoid at the age of 20 in 1923.

From Strand Books we wound our way through the streets to meet friends Ed and Melani, Don & Laura. We talked music all night and Ed turned me on to music I can’t remember. A nice dinner and farewells, a walk through the chilly streets to the PATH train with Don and Laura and we three managed to get on the PATH with a minute to spare. Back to Jeanne’s, the cats and the horror of packing, fitting in more than we have space for.

Music today has been Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss (1992). It was his highest-charting UK album, reaching No. 6.

Music Of The Daze

Today was meet sessioneer Matt in Manhattan day, but this time I was in the hot seat! Matt is an acupuncturist and he has been helping me with my hands – and back, legs, arms, neck, haha. It all started with a conversation about my thumbs hurting and general discomfort in the one place where I do not need to have any issues. So, when I first arrived here in New York Matt told me to come over and he’d see what he could do. All those needles, releasing muscles, electric jolts, and a lot of the pain dissipated, especially in the lower back area. Today, three months later, a second session seemed most needed as I had hand pains again, especially in one finger with a pain in my palm at the finger’s base, today with one needle that pain went away. A needle in my tense shoulder and I felt it in my head, connecting the migraine eye issues with muscle tension. Today my body was so sensitive I felt every needle in my legs, it didn’t matter what part of my body was being worked on. Some of the electricity jolts today were intense, like touching the electric fence that keeps the cows in the field. Thanks, Matt, relief all ‘round.

The rain was pouring down but we went for a coffee and a chat about the universe followed by a visit to Academy Records where I picked up Blue Cheer’s second album Outsideinside (1968), The Best Of The Raspberries (1976), Geoff and Maria Muldaur‘s Sweet Potatoes (1973), and Julie London‘s Julie (1957).

We walked down to the West Village in the rain, stopping off at T-Mobile to inquire about keeping our US phone number. We taught the girl to say “Sound” and she taught us how to say “Dope” and “Lit”. We carried on in the rain on our way to Caffé Reggio for a dose of the atmosphere in there, Olivia ordered an undrinkable hot chocolate and I had some pesto pasta which was $17, I was going to have the avocado toast but it was also $17, it just seemed so ridiculously expensive for the cheapest snack in the universe that I went for the pasta instead, haha, cheapskate. On reflection, I imagine that pasta pesto must be one of the cheapest hot meals to make too. I don’t understand how Julie London’s record from 1957 can be $7 cheaper.

From there we went to West 4th subway and caught the train to 47-50th Street where I wanted to go back to Rough Trade to pick up the Patrick Sky album I’d seen – A Harvest of Gentle Clang (1966), Mandrill’s Composite Truth (1973) and Stackridge’s Do The Stanley (1976) but there was a hip hop producer signing records and there was a long queue from outside in the rain through the record racks. Initially, the staff didn’t really want me looking for records amongst the queuing, but they relented when they tried to find me the Patrick Sky record and couldn’t find it. I noticed that everyone in the queue was in their twenties or younger and Olivia noticed that they were 99% male.

We left into the worsening rain and the Patrick Sky record got some water damage. Matt had given me a pile of CDs for the archive, water had seeped into the cases of two or three of them. The rain was getting worse and worse and the wind was up, it was cold, getting inside was so welcome, taking off wet clothes. Being dry was suddenly the greatest thing ever, getting your records wet the worst.

Music today was Julie London’s Julie (1957), her sixth album, produced by her husband-to-be Bobby Troup, both appeared in the seventies hospital drama Emergency. London stopped making records in 1969 as her acting career took off, leaving behind a treasure of 29 studio albums and a vague memory of her early hit Cry Me A River (Troup wrote Route 66). London died in 2000 aged 74.

Music Of The Daze