Television

Before he owned a guitar, Verlaine played saxophone, and in a 1975 interview he named the jazz players he'd absorbed: "Coltrane, Ayler, Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, I probably liked Ayler the most, who is probably the least modal of those, strangely enough." What he took from Ayler was a permission, not a scale: the saxophonist, Verlaine recalled, "used to say I got to get out beyond the notes." Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore later said it was Verlaine's own name-check of Ayler's live album In Greenwich Village that first sent him hunting through free jazz himself.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1965

Truth Is Marching InAlbert Ayler

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1975

Little Johnny JewelTelevision

listen forCue Ayler's 1965 "Truth Is Marching In," recorded live at the Village Vanguard, then "Little Johnny Jewel": both abandon a stated theme almost as soon as they state it, the lead voice roaming further from the beat with each pass instead of building toward a climactic solo. Verlaine's guitar never overdrives or bends notes the way blues players do; like Ayler's tenor, it worries at a repeated figure until the shape wears away, trading resolution for pure momentum.

During the Marquee Moon sessions, producer Andy Johns kept pulling Verlaine into the hallway to ask, "What kind of music is this? Is this a Velvet Underground trip?" Verlaine didn't disagree. Back in a 1975 interview, asked pointedly about the still-new song "See No Evil," he'd already granted the comparison: "the rhythm guitar/bass sound is sort of Velvet-y. They never really had any lead pattern going" — the same interlocking-guitar idea the Velvets themselves had built entire songs on, with no fixed hierarchy between rhythm and lead.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1968

White Light/White HeatThe Velvet Underground

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1977

See No EvilTelevision

listen forPlay the Velvets' 1968 title track "White Light/White Heat" against "See No Evil": neither leans on a single lead guitarist. Both guitars churn at the same volume and register, one holding a repeating figure while the second worries a variation against it, so the ear can't fix on a soloist the way it would on a blues record — a single guitar mass instead of the usual rhythm-and-lead split.

Guitarist Richard Lloyd's connection to Hendrix ran through his teenage friend Velvert Turner, one of Hendrix's own guitar students, who passed on everything he learned; watching Hendrix perform live, Lloyd said, "it was like seeing God." The two later collided badly — Hendrix, misreading a compliment, hit him three times outside a Manhattan club — but Lloyd came away calling it "a gift," the debt he paid off in 2010 with an entire album of Hendrix covers.

listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — When Jimi Hendrix punched Television guitarist Richard Lloyd (Lloyd on watching Hendrix perform) ↗share

1967

Third Stone from the SunJimi Hendrix

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1977

Marquee MoonTelevision

listen forCue Hendrix's 1967 "Third Stone from the Sun" against "Marquee Moon": both hang a whole side-long guitar excursion on one vamp, the rhythm section holding steady while a single guitar climbs, circles, and detonates far past where a pop song would fade out. Television never touched a wah pedal or fuzzbox the way Hendrix did — Lloyd and Verlaine's interlocking, clean-toned lines are the more austere descendant — but the same appetite for a guitar solo as a journey rather than a bridge is what Lloyd absorbed watching Hendrix live.