"It's like first grade where you make all your mistakes and people see it and yet some people see that there's something there that's really valuable. That's the way it went for more than 2 years almost 3 years of playing"
About this Quote
Tom Verlaine frames artistic growth as public awkwardness, and the “first grade” metaphor is doing more than nostalgia. First grade is where you’re watched, corrected, compared. You’re still learning to hold the pencil, and everyone can see the crooked letters. By likening early playing to that classroom, Verlaine underlines a brutal truth about bands like Television coming up in the mid-70s: development didn’t happen in private rehearsal rooms so much as on sticky club stages, night after night, with an audience acting like a jury.
The intent is disarmingly practical. He’s not romanticizing “rawness”; he’s admitting that competence arrives through embarrassment. “People see it” is the key phrase - a reminder that failure isn’t just internal self-critique, it’s social. That’s a musician’s specific anxiety: you can’t debug a song the way you debug a paragraph. The mistake happens in real time, and it becomes part of the room.
The subtext is also a quiet defense of the scene that allowed it. Verlaine points to “some people” who could detect value inside the mess, the early adopters who reward risk before it becomes polish. It’s a sideways argument for patience as a cultural practice: audiences, peers, club owners willing to host the learning curve. In a music economy that now demands instant competency and content-ready identity, Verlaine’s timeline - “more than 2 years almost 3” - feels almost radical: not genius descending, but a community tolerating the sound of someone becoming.
The intent is disarmingly practical. He’s not romanticizing “rawness”; he’s admitting that competence arrives through embarrassment. “People see it” is the key phrase - a reminder that failure isn’t just internal self-critique, it’s social. That’s a musician’s specific anxiety: you can’t debug a song the way you debug a paragraph. The mistake happens in real time, and it becomes part of the room.
The subtext is also a quiet defense of the scene that allowed it. Verlaine points to “some people” who could detect value inside the mess, the early adopters who reward risk before it becomes polish. It’s a sideways argument for patience as a cultural practice: audiences, peers, club owners willing to host the learning curve. In a music economy that now demands instant competency and content-ready identity, Verlaine’s timeline - “more than 2 years almost 3” - feels almost radical: not genius descending, but a community tolerating the sound of someone becoming.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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