Creativity Quote by Tom Verlaine

A single Coltrane record becomes a conversion experience here, and Verlaine frames it with the casual specificity of adolescence: “around seventh grade.” That detail matters. Seventh grade is the age when taste stops being inherited and starts being chosen, when a kid can hear not just “music” but a new way to live inside sound. The phrase “turned me on” carries the era’s vernacular and its implied taboo: discovery as initiation, culture as contraband passed hand to hand. It’s less about formal inspiration than contact highs, the moment an aesthetic hits the bloodstream.

Coltrane, in this telling, isn’t a distant genius; he’s an accelerant. Verlaine doesn’t say he studied or admired or was influenced. He “took up saxophone” as if the instrument were the only adequate response, a physical act demanded by what he’d just heard. That’s the subtext: great art doesn’t merely entertain; it recruits. It asks for a body, a practice, a lifelong submission to difficulty. Coltrane’s music is famously rigorous, ecstatic, and unsparing. A seventh grader choosing the sax in that wake is choosing intensity over ease.

In context, it’s also a neat origin story for a musician associated with the jagged intelligence of punk-era New York. Verlaine links that later, sharp-edged minimalism back to jazz’s maximal spiritual charge. The line quietly dismantles the false border between “punk” and “serious” music: the genealogy runs through a record someone hands you, and the dare it contains.