Punk pioneer Tom Verlaine’s archives — including a trove of unreleased recordings — are now available to artists, researchers and fans at the New York Public Library.
The library has inherited hours of music, unknown demos and 145 personal notebooks belonging to the late Verlaine, who fronted the seminal 1970s band Television and helped turn Lower East Side dive bar CBGB into a storied and internationally known rock venue.
The collection includes song ideas and drafts for Television’s 1977 classic “Marquee Moon.”
The collection – which spans dozens of cardboard boxes and 40 linear feet — for use for the first time through the Library for the Performing Arts’ Music and Recorded Sound Division, officials said.
“Verlaine’s extraordinary music and its impact is worthy of wider attention and consideration,” said Roberta Pereira, executive director for the NYPL’s Library for the Performing Arts.
“There will be much for artists and researchers to study in this wonderful collection,” Pereira added.
In a news release, library reps noted there has been “almost no significant scholarship” specifically on Verlaine, and his archive will “undoubtedly become a key resource to begin the biographical and musical evaluation and analysis that he is due.”
The archive was acquired from his longtime partner Jutta Koether – who told The New York Times the archives are just a fraction of his unseen works, most of which he ordered destroyed.
Verlaine died at age 73 in 2023 following a “brief illness,” reps said at the time.
Born Thomas Joseph Miller, Verlaine and his band Television — co-founded by fellow rock icon Richard Hell — were trailblazers in the emerging punk and new wave scenes in lower Manhattan.
The New Jersey native adopted his stage name after French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.
The band’s debut album, “Marquee Moon,” has been repeatedly cited as one of the most important releases in rock music history, by artists including REM, The Strokes and Sonic Youth.
David Bowie covered Verlaine’s solo song, “Kingdom Come,” on his own 1980 album “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).”
Television broke up in 1978 and remained on hiatus until a 1992 reunion. The group toured on and off in the decades following, with their last gigs being in 2022 with Billy Idol.
Verlaine’s archive joins the lines of other influential musicians such as Lou Reed, John Cage, Leslie Gore, Arthur Russell and more at the Library for the Performing Arts’ Music and Recorded Sound division.
In a letter in support of the acquisition, Patti Smith said: “It is impossible to speak of Tom Verlaine without giving prominence to his deep relationship with books. It was through a shared passion for books that we forged an enduring friendship, collecting volumes on everything from poems of Rumi, French literature, ufology, detective novels, to mystical and spiritual literature.
“I cannot imagine a more fitting place for Tom’s precious papers than the New York Public Library. There he will be in the company of so many beloved writers from Virginia Woolf to William Burroughs to Lou Reed.”
