Tom Verlaine, the inventive guitarist, singer and co-founder of seminal New York proto-punk band Television has died aged 73.
Verlaine died on Saturday in New York City, surrounded by close friends after a brief illness, the Lede Company public relations firm said.
Television influenced many bands while playing at downtown New York music venue CBGB alongside the Ramones, Patti Smith and Talking Heads in the 1970s.
Famous fans and fellow musicians paid tribute to Verlaine on social media, heaping praise on his innovative rock guitar playing.
"Tom Verlaine has passed over to the beyond that his guitar playing always hinted at," Mike Scott of The Waterboys tweeted.
"He was the best rock and roll guitarist of all time, and like Hendrix could dance from the spheres of the cosmos to garage rock. That takes a special greatness."
Though Television never found much commercial success, Verlaine's jaggedly inventive playing as part of the band's two-guitar assault influenced many musicians.
Television issued its groundbreaking debut album Marquee Moon in 1977 — including the nearly 11-minute title track and Elevation — as well as the follow-up Adventure a year later.
"Marquee Moon has become something of a holy grail of independent rock in the years since. It has been a clear influence on such artists as Pavement, Sonic Youth, the Strokes and Jeff Buckley," Billboard magazine wrote in 2003.
Increasing tension between Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd led Television to disband after its second album.
The group would reunite for a self-titled 1992 album for Capitol Records and sporadic live appearances.
"We wanted to strip everything down further, away from the showbiz theatricality of the glitter bands, and away from blues-iness and boogie," Television co-founder Richard Hell wrote in his autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.
"We wanted to be stark and hard and torn-up, the way the world was."
Verlaine released eight solo albums, his most commercially successful being his 1981 solo album Dreamtime, which peaked at number 177 on the US Billboard album chart.
He frequently served as accompanist to former partner Patti Smith.
Smith shared a tribute on Instagram, posting a photograph of the two of them together: "Farewell Tom, aloft the Omega."
Other tributes online included those from The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs as well as Billy Idol, who said Verlaine made music that influenced the US and UK punk scene.
Verlaine was born Tom Miller — later taking the last name of the 19th-century French poet Paul-Marie Verlaine after he met Hell, born Richard Meyers, at a Delaware prep school.
They were tall, skinny, sardonic kids who dropped out and made their way to the East Village, where they worked in bookstores and wrote poetry together.
"He was noted for his angular lyricism and pointed lyrical asides, a sly wit, and an ability to shake each string to its truest emotion," said a statement from his publicist.
"His vision and his imagination will be missed."
Verlaine's songwriting skills have also been hailed by contemporaries such as The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster, who described Television's Venus as a perfect song.
AP
