Shaped in New York in 1973, Tv helped spearhead a rollicking, artistically bold punk motion primarily based out of CBGB, a paint-chipped East Village membership that grew to become a haven for bands together with the Ramones, Speaking Heads, Blondie and the Patti Smith Group. Though the group launched solely two albums earlier than breaking apart, its music — crystalline and stark, constructed on jagged rhythms and cascading twin guitars — influenced numerous rock acts on either side of the Atlantic.

Patti Smith, an occasional collaborator and onetime romantic associate of Mr. Verlaine, informed New York journal in 2005, “Tom Verlaine and Tv have been for me probably the most inspiring: They weren’t glamorous, they have been human.” Writing concerning the band and Mr. Verlaine many years earlier, in an article for Rock Scene journal, she declared, “He performs lead guitar with angular inverted ardour like a thousand bluebirds screaming.”

Mr. Verlaine, the band’s pale and lanky frontman, was a producer and singer-songwriter however was maybe finest generally known as a guitarist. His music drew on the blues rock of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones — particularly their pulsating single “19th Nervous Breakdown” — in addition to Indian ragas, Celtic melodies, the jazz of John McLaughlin and the classical recordings of Pablo Casals. In interviews, he appeared extra snug discussing his love of Twentieth-century composers like Morton Feldman and Krzysztof Penderecki than chatting about his rock-and-roll contemporaries.

Onstage and within the studio, he marshaled these influences into sonic explorations that defied style labels. Tv’s 1977 debut, “Marquee Moon,” featured a hypnotic title monitor that lasted greater than 10 minutes, showcasing the interaction between Mr. Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd in addition to the dreamlike imagery of Mr. Verlaine’s lyrics. “I keep in mind how the darkness doubled,” he sang in a dry tenor. “I recall, lightning struck itself.”

The British music journal NME described the album as “a 24-carat impressed work of pure genius,” and the document has since been hailed as one of many best albums of the Seventies.

“It’s a guitar rock album not like some other,” wrote All Music reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine. “The place their predecessors within the New York punk scene, most notably the Velvet Underground, had fused blues buildings with avant-garde prospers, Tv utterly strip away any sense of swing or groove, even when they’re taking part in customary three-chord adjustments. ‘Marquee Moon’ is comprised fully of tense storage rockers that spiral into heady mental territory.”

The band launched a extra subdued follow-up, “Journey” (1978), then broke up and reunited for a self-titled 1992 album, adopted by occasional stay performances that Mr. Verlaine combined in along with his eclectic solo profession. He put out greater than a half-dozen solo albums, together with the critically acclaimed “Dreamtime” (1981), and was coated by artists together with David Bowie, who recorded a version of his song “Kingdom Come.”

However ask him about Tv, and he would typically demur. He had little interest in fascinated about the previous, he stated, though in 2000 he supplied one principle for the band’s enduring legacy. “It’s sugar-free,” he stated, in accordance with the Seattle alt weekly the Stranger. “Which in fact limits the viewers! Incorporates no synthetic sweeteners! Which isn’t to say that it’s bitter.”

Mr. Verlaine was born Thomas Joseph Miller in Denville, N.J., on Dec. 13, 1949. He grew up in Wilmington, Del., and was consumed by music from the age of 4, when he heard his first symphony. “I keep in mind being completely transported by it, instantly considering that that is what I need to do,” he informed the Times.

He studied classical piano, then picked up the saxophone and guitar. He additionally immersed himself in poetry whereas attending the close by Sanford preparatory college, the place he met Richard Meyers, a fellow pupil and budding punk rocker who grew to become generally known as Richard Hell. Collectively they ran away from college, hitchhiking south towards Florida earlier than being picked up by Alabama police and despatched house.

By the early Seventies, the 2 males had reunited in New York, the place they noticed the New York Dolls carry out on the Mercer Arts Heart and determined to begin a band of their very own. Their group, the Neon Boys, developed into Tv, with a roster that included Lloyd, drummer Billy Ficca and Hell, a bassist with whom Mr. Verlaine battled over inventive management. (Hell left the band in 1975 and was changed by Fred Smith, who had performed with Blondie.)

Posters for his or her early concert events included a line of understated reward from Nicholas Ray, the director of “Insurgent With no Trigger,” who described the band succinctly: “4 cats with a ardour.”

“We have been actually distinctive,” Hell stated in an interview for Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral Historical past of Punk” (1996). “There was not one other rock-and-roll band on the planet with quick hair. There was not one other rock-and-roll band with torn garments. Everyone was nonetheless sporting glitter and girls’s garments. We have been these notch-thin, homeless hoodlums, taking part in actually highly effective, passionate, aggressive music that was additionally lyrical.”

By then, Mr. Verlaine had adopted the surname of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, whom he stated he had by no means learn. “I simply favored the sound of the identify,” he stated. His adopted initials, TV, have been mirrored within the band’s identify.

Mr. Verlaine leaves no speedy survivors. He may very well be inscrutable, turning down interview requests and telling Spin journal, “I like considering of myself as invisible.” He co-wrote a guide of poetry with Smith and performed on her debut album, “Horses”; contributed to the soundtrack of the Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There” (2007); and collaborated with guitarist Jimmy Rip, performing stay soundtracks for silent movies by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fernand Léger and Man Ray, amongst different administrators.

In 2006, he launched his final two solo albums, “Songs and Different Issues” and the instrumental assortment “Round.”

“I don’t determine with being a musician. I don’t observe — I’ve by no means practiced guitar in my life,” he informed Spin in 1987. “With my information, it’s only a matter of making an attempt to create one thing recent for myself in a really finite context, which is the pop track. I don’t know something concerning the individuals who purchase my information and what, if something, they get out of them.”