Tom Verlaine's record collection is going public. The late Television frontman's 4,000 LPs are being sold through a partnership between Discogs and Academy Records, the Brooklyn-based store that acquired the trove.
The first batch drops Friday, June 26, with 1,000 records hitting Discogs online. Three more releases follow, including an in-store sale at Academy Records on July 10-11 and a final Discogs drop on July 31.
"It's a collection that was built by Tom Verlaine's ear, in his lifetime," Discogs' Russ Ryan tells Rolling Stone. "They're records that represent his love of music from all over the spectrum."
Verlaine was an obsessive collector. Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, his longtime friend, recalls spending weekends hitting secondhand bookstores across western Massachusetts in Verlaine's rental car. Moore visited Verlaine's apartment and witnessed the scale of the accumulation firsthand. "It was definitely a very intimate zone," Moore tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from London. "Jutta lived in the same building, but in a separate apartment, because the books didn't allow for more than one person to be living in there."
Verlaine's 50,000-volume book collection was so vast it occupied entire apartments. When his books went to auction in summer 2023, weekend sales events drew crowds drawn to his eclectic taste: art, physics, UFOs, theosophy.
His record collection reflects the same range. These records document a lifetime of hunting through Manhattan's sidewalk carts and secondhand shops. For serious collectors or those seeking insight into a punk-rock visionary's tastes, the sale begins this week.
