Tom Verlaine and Unavailability

Little Johnny Jewel in the Piss Factory

Tom Verlaine of Television died last week. What this has to do with technology is how my own memories of his records remind me of a very different world.

Tom Verlaine was a guitar hero for those of us who liked treble over bass. I wore out Marquee Moon in high school like so many others, got Adventure and the Double Exposure bootleg, hunted down the vinyl of Verlaine’s first solo album and got Richard Lloyd’s Real Time. What I couldn’t hear was the track that was mentioned in any overview, their first single Little Johnny Jewel. It was finally added to a reissue of Marquee Moon in 2003, but before that, that song was rare.

Today, that level of unavailability doesn’t really exist for anything with any modest level of cultural cachet. There are still obscure records that I can’t track down (Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions from Mars?), but the idea of any sort of esteemed cultural moment being unavailable is an anachronism today.

I think people underestimate the ramifications of the loss of the ability to romanticize and hold in mind the unseen and unheard, to hold it in your head and fill in the blank space with your imagined ideal of what that mythic artwork might be. I’m not sure if I miss the capacity to mythologize an unheard track or unread book for years on end, but it does alter how you frame your experience of it when you finally do find it.

And to complement the anticipatory mythologizing, there’s the echoic mythologizing. When television shows only aired once, when some kind of ceremony or performance was required to have an aesthetic experience (even if it was just taking a CD out of a case and putting it into a player), the memory of the experience was something people held on to in the absence of an ability to reexperience it. That too is becoming vanishingly rare. I don’t necessarily miss that either, but there are (as guitarist Derek Bailey has said) certain types of focused attention that only come about if one knows that this is the only chance you will ever have to enjoy an artistic performance.

If when you play the record, both as somebody involved in improvisation and as somebody who runs a record company, if you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you’d have to bring into the listening. Like, if I play something I can only play it once. There might be a great similarity between each time I play, but I cannot repeat what I play. If you could only listen to it once, don’t you think it might concentrate the eardrums?

Derek Bailey

So this isn’t about some amorphous Benjaminian aura, but about the changing mechanisms of art’s creation and purpose. I can’t really quantify whether Little Johnny Jewel became better for me due to years of not being able to hear the damn thing, but that unavailability lengthens the amount of time a piece of art is on one’s mind, whether before or after the actual experience of it. The anticipatory beforehand is more intriguing to me because of the irony: if nothing else, all those years wondering about Little Johnny Jewel increased my investment in it. Now a kid can look it up on YouTube, assess it, file it away, and maybe come back to it later, because it will always be available.

I talk a lot about how the internet has led to a surplus, an abundance, and an end to scarcity of cultural product, but beyond the sheer ballooning volume of content, the immediate availability of any particular bit of content is a factor as well. Availability and abundance go hand in hand, but they are not the same, and availability may be the more insidious quality. To me, Little Johnny Jewel still feels different from Marquee Moon—because of that unavailabity.

I finally heard Little Johnny Jewel in the late 90s on some dubious ROIR compilation alongside Patti Smith’s Piss Factory, the other legendary unavailable New York 70s single. The sound quality was poor and I don’t remember anything else on the compilation, but that was the price you paid. Little Johnny Jewel was pretty fantastic.