Maureen Tucker
Playin' Possum

“Things on the verge of falling have a very subtle charm, yet, alas, they will fall. Only art can keep them there, eternally suspended. Art, or perhaps a kind of divine nonchalance”

Teofilo Sbolenfi

___________________________

So, on a day just like a thousand other days, a girl returns home from work. She's in the car and at some point the radio plays the Stones.

Bam, really bam.

Because the surprise is such that she almost goes off the road. After all, since time immemorial, the best things present themselves without asking for permission.

The girl takes a while to recover, or maybe, well, perhaps she doesn't recover at all.

And, still in the throes of excitement, she can't help but stop by her best friend's place to tell her what happened.

So the two ladies head to the nearest store to purchase/acquire the object that brought such wonder.

Listening follows, of course.

But, soon after, her enthusiasm leads her to feel that mere listening is no longer sufficient. So she seeks a way to participate personally in that festival of the spirit and the senses.

The solution she finds is rather bizarre: she buys a snare drum, a drum, or another percussive gadget, I don't remember well.

And from then on, she spends most of her time, sometimes up to eight hours a day, banging on that gadget while listening to her favorite records (Stones obviously + other British invasion stuff + Bo Diddley).

There you go, that girl's name is Maureen Tucker and she is perhaps the happiest incongruity in rock history.

Small, petite, with a scrawny look, you see her and think, but really was she the drummer for the Velvet Underground?

Come on, it can't be...

With that little sister look standing in a corner while the older brothers play among themselves.

Or that astonished look that, amidst the scarifying antics of the other Velvet members, evokes a mix of insane innocence and unreal candor.

Something so jarring it makes her look like not part of the band but like someone who photobombed the picture.

And yet that minimal and petite being became the beating heart of one of the most important musical experiences of the last century. An obsessive and jarring, maniacal and wild, instinctive and relentless beat.

And I remember those trash cans she hurriedly acquired after her drum kit was stolen during a tour with the Velvet.

She and Sterling Morrison, the other “good” of the group, after a long search, chose the least dirty and smelly ones, put microphones underneath them, and off they went.

And, my dear friends, little Maureen, short as a matchstick, climbing up to reach those cans is truly the most perfect image to express the chaos of her drumming, as well as the happy incongruity between that chaos and her scrawny/little sister appearance.

Anyway, for the record, we're talking about the greatest drummer of all time. And never mind if the champions of technique for its own sake are turning up their noses, technique is a non-issue.

Pistols and Ramones, just to name two, had no technical limits and do you know why? Because they had the technique they needed, nothing more, nothing less. Just like a cat only needs to be a cat to be a cat. Clear?

So yes, I repeat, the greatest drummer of all time.

And also someone who lent her modest voice to a couple of Velvet songs that are practically a genre in themselves.

Which genre?

The Tucker genre...

_____________________

After the Velvet experience ended, Maureen, who never thought of becoming a professional musician, embarks on a whole series of jobs, the first at Warhol's Factory.

What she has to do is something like transcribing the dialogues from the genius's films.

Only those films are full of swear words and every time she encounters one instead of transcribing it she puts ellipsis. “I don't like that kind of language” she says.

Maureen has always been a good girl.

But truly good.

For example, when she was on tour with the Velvet, come hell or high water, on Sundays she had to be dropped off near a church and they always did so, they really did.

“Oh, they were always so kind to me”.

Anyway, I would've paid to see her wandering around the Factory, alone, without the Velvet who, unlike her, did fit the Factory type.

Like when she chatted with Warhol and his entourage of hyper-aesthetic people.

“Who do you think is going to buy them, Andy, your silver balls”

“Actually, Maureen, I sell them for three thousand dollars each”

“Come on!!!”

Anyway, once she's done at the Factory, the following jobs will be a little shittier

And she disappears for about ten years.

__________________________

Then in the early eighties someone gets the idea to have her record an album.

Nobody paid attention to the Velvet at first, but now, considered almost like a big bang, they're the band par excellence.

She, however, is completely unaware of this,

They let her read a few music magazines and, finally, she realizes: there is practically no one in the wave world who doesn't cite them as a major influence.

“Come on!!!”, says Maureen

Yes, yes, she really says “come on”

Just like that time with Warhol's silver balls.

___________________________

The album she records by herself in her living room, playing all (all!!!) the instruments.

Nine out of ten tracks are covers (Velvet, Dylan, and early rock'n'roll classics)

However, what emerges is incredibly personal, something between the Tucker genre and the Tucker genre.

It starts with a bit of naive velvettism, which is actually a delightfully crazy one-chord rhythmic feast.

Follows a cover of “Heroin” that I really can't describe to you...if not by saying that it sounds taken from the third Velvet album and not the first (and you'll only understand this if you're Velvet fans)

Then a couple of numbers like Holy Modal Rounders at the fairy congress, we could say lo-fi, we might say raggedy folk rock.

The whole thing quite off-key and under the grace of error, the kind that the good Lord (or whoever took His place) invented to overturn the obvious and the ordinary.

Then some whispered rock'n'roll hummed while preparing a potato pie. And even a couple of minutes of Vivaldi that only she could insert...

Vivaldi!!!

Above all, a little witch's voice (in her case a fairy) almost wave-like teetering between lullaby and rhythmic madness.

You reach the end with the sensation of having spent half an hour in a different world, more beautiful and more gentle than ours, because everything that shouldn't work works splendidly instead.

The secret must be the joy of making music, the amateurish fury/zeal that imitates without knowing how or not caring about how it's done.

They're practically all covers, as we said...

But the result (as good old Andy Partridge used to say) is the same as that old game, the telephone game: the phrase/song at the end is never the starting one. It is much, much better, or simply, it's something different.

Adventurous amateurs often arrive at unexpected places.

Though okay, you've got to like things that are a bit slapdash, those that seize the moment by going off-kilter. Think that to me (and I really think it’s just me) listening to this album reminds me a little of Barrett,

But no mad genius stories or anything like that...

Because Maureen is a God-fearing mother with five children, one who doesn't like swearing, one who, come hell or high water, goes to church on Sundays.

In short, she is a good girl.