Moe Tucker

Interview by Claudia Gonson

Claudia: How did you get involved with the Velvet Underground?

Moe: I had no idea—I was just playing drums very nicely in my room with no intention of making a career of music, no intention at all. The opportunity came up to play with them and sure, what the hell, this’ll be fun. So, when the Velvets were over it was sad. I don’t mean that I didn’t care that we weren’t going to play anymore, because I really did enjoy it. But it didn’t occur to me to look for another band to play with or anything.

You weren’t interested in starting another band?

When the Velvets were done, I just got a job. I never considered [the Velvets] as a career. If someone had said to me, during the Velvets, what do you do? I would have said, I’m a data-entry operator. I wouldn’t have said I am a musician. When the Velvets were done it was just, oh well, that was a lot of fun, too bad. I had no interest in playing with anyone else because it was an adventure to me.

Maureen Tucker by Jonathan Richman

I had the chance to see Moe Tucker play many times with The Velvet Underground from 1967 to 1970.

She was not just a good drummer. For those who were hypnotized by their sound she was one of the head hypnotists. Those attentive enough to notice her way with a beat and her electrifying sound as she stood there and hit probably all still remember it. Sometimes she'd use mallets on the snare drum. She turned the bass drum horizontal and she hit that with mallets, using it like a tom-tom. No one ever did this! It made her sound unlike any other drummer before or since. And for those of us who loved the sound of that band this drum style was much a signature of the Velvets as was any other of their sounds. It was raw and wild.

Maureen's records still have this raw party feeling. They're rock 'n' roll records. They don't get pretentious, you know. And she goes for that classic rough guitar tone from her players. Also, she's still the kind of person I like to see in the business. She's nice. She still sounds like a person when you talk to her on the phone, not an 'artiste,' if you know what I mean. And she's fun.

-the end

Do you call yourself a musician now?

Well, now I say it, yes. (In a dopey voice) I guess I’m a musician.

Did you have any idea of your uniqueness as a female drummer when you started out in the late 60’s?

It just felt natural. I wanted to do it, so I did it. I don’t remember anyone pointing out, good or bad, that there was a female drummer in the Velvets. That comes up now a thousand times more than it did then. One of my theories was that everybody was so drugged they didn’t notice.

Do you think some people just thought you were a boy?

You might not know from 400 ft. away, but one way you can tell, if you can’t tell any other way, is that my arms are like twigs and I’m, like, 5 feet tall.

How did you develop your particular method of drumming standing up?

I always play standing up because I then can get that style and sound I want. If you’re sitting you can’t (well, I guess you could if you had pretty long arms) use the bass drum as a cymbal, really. You ride along on the bass drum very often. I always hated cymbals. When I was first playing with the Velvets we did a lot of improvising stuff as opposed to structured songs, and I always hated cymbals. There’s so many drummers who are technically much better than I’ll ever be but they’re just so damn busy. I always think that the drummer’s just supposed to keep time—that’s basically it. I always hated songs where if you rolled at every opportunity, there would be a constant roll throughout the song. Or crashed a cymbal at every opportunity or every place where you felt like you should do that. So I consciously avoided it. While you’re crashing you can’t hear the vocal and you can’t hear the guitar part, you know? I just always felt like the drums shouldn’t take over the song. They should always be under there, obvious, but not taking over the song so that suddenly you realize all you hear is drums.

Do you consider yourself to be a mentor and an inspiration for young drummers today, especially women?

I’ve had a few people write and tell me they started playing drums because of me, they liked the way it sounded on Velvets records. Not particularly women, I don’t think. But it’s nice that especially in the last year I’ve noticed a lot of female drummers. There’s a group we just toured with from Atlanta with a female drummer.

Well, you are a hero to many of the women drummers I know.

That’s very nice to hear. It’s nice to think that some people are getting fun out of any instrument because they took some inspiration from you.

When did you decide to go back on the road?

Since '89 I’ve been touring with my own band, in Europe, three times. When I decided to try that first tour I had to quit my day job because they wouldn’t give me time off from work. When I decided I really wanted to do this, I had the agent who proposed the idea of doing a tour in Europe poke around and find out how much money we can make. Because I can’t come home with $500, I have a family to support. So he poked around and called me back a couple weeks later and said if you do about six weeks your profit should be about the same amount I made in a year at my job. After that, I continued to tour and live on Velvet royalties.

Do your kids consider you a famous rock celebrity?

Now they know about me. Before [the tour], they were like, Oh yeah, my mother used to play in a band.

Do any of them play music?

They don’t play drums, but my 16-year-old started playing guitar about a year ago, and he’s now one of those eight-hour-a-day types. He loves Jimi Hendrix, who would not be my choice. I keep saying, Why don’t you listen to Jimmy Reed or something?

Special thanks to both Moe and Claudia.

To find out more about Moe...

...check out the Moe Tucker Page.