Enjoy six and a half hours of “Marquee Moon” guitar solos for mental health purposes

Tom Verlaine, the legendary guitarist of Television, ranks among the best players of all time. His angular riffs and staccato jolts of electricity helped reshape how rock music was conceived, played, and experienced. The sun (or the moon) of Tom Verlaine’s six-string universe is the epic guitar solo on “Marquee Moon,” the title track of their landmark debut, a solo he would rework, deconstruct, and make new every time he performed. Verlaine died last year, but his music continues to inspire creativity.

Critic Ty Burr sought to bring the vast galaxy of “Marquee Moon” solos a little closer to Earth and compiled 45 years of Verlaine’s “Marquee Moon” guitar solos into a single six-and-a-half-hour supercut. Why? “Because the world needs it.”

On his blog, tyburrwatchlist.com, Burr explains that “no one, not a soul,” wanted this because “it’s a profoundly, even exhilaratingly stupid idea, a slap in the face of what the late Verlaine accomplished.” Yet, he was compelled by Verlaine’s resilience and his goal of finding something new on his fretboard. Verlaine’s search for new sounds could help Burr make sense of, or at least distract himself from, a world seemingly going backward. “In my post-election slough of despond, this seemed the numbing agent required – this assemblage of samizdat music, a treasure chest of sounds you weren’t supposed to hear unless you were there, into a security blanket of noise to sustain me until such time as we could figure out the new rules of resistance.”

The playlist begins in 1974 with the song’s earliest incarnations and the demo produced by Brian Eno. Then, things move chronologically, following the band through the punk explosion of CBGBs, Verlaine’s solo shows, and Television’s reunions in the 2000s. During that time, Verlaine found new sounds and modes of expressing “Marquee Moon” every night.

“In 45 years of playing this song, in hundreds of venues and dozens of towns, Tom Verlaine never repeated an idea,” Burr writes. “Not once. You might hear the same notes, but played with radically different energy and attitude, or a riff would transform from concert to concert like a living thing, or sometimes he would reinvent the whole damn song or concept of what a solo even meant from the ground up.”

Burr warns that he’s not an engineer, so the sound levels between tracks aren’t perfectly balanced. He calls the crossfades “ugly” and the early tracks “pretty skronky.” So he offers some places to start: The second night at the Piccadilly in Cleveland, 1976 (17:45), a 1976 gig at CBGBs (29:53), or Boston’s Paradise club in 1982 “that ends with four minutes of musical Cubism” (2:06:52). Personally, the discordant funk of Portland ’78 (1:47:20) is the one for this writer.

“I’ve been extremely gratified at the response, both from fellow Verlaine/Television fanatics and anyone who seems to appreciate a grand and futile gesture in these troubled times,” Burr tells The A.V. Club. “I’ve been told I got the time codes wrong on some of the cuts in the YouTube version; aim to fix that in the next few days. Otherwise, just happy to help bring some beautiful noise to more ears.”

Check out “Marquee Moons 1974 – 2019” below and read Burr’s blog post at tyburrswatchlist.com.