Lou Reed on the “genius” on Moe Tucker: “She started a whole new way of drumming”
As important, influential and inventive as The Velvet Underground were, very few people cite the members of the band as being exceptional musicians. The entire point of the group wasn’t to demonstrate flair or technical proficiency; it was entirely about the raw and unfiltered delivery that they angled for, and there are few other bands that ever mastered this to quite the same degree.
In lieu of this lack of flair, the songwriting abilities of Lou Reed and John Cale were beyond compare, and the amount of music that could only exist as a result of their pioneering endeavours is staggering to think about. The band never relied on winning over the masses, and certainly didn’t enjoy much in the way of commercial success during their lifespan as a band, but the fact that they’re still talked about as though they were as important as The Beatles goes to demonstrate just how influential they were.
Punk bands in the 1970s began dismissing the notion of needing to be ‘good’ at their instruments, and simply began to focus on creating music that captured a moment rather than labouring over how polished something should sound. It’s probably fair to say that we have The Velvet Underground to thank for this shift in attitude away from skilful and scholarly musicianship, and it’s something that still remains part of the ethos of burgeoning bands today.
If we’re going to focus on the aspects that Reed brought to the group, it was turning guitars into a wall of noise instead of playing lead breaks with crispness and clarity, and placing more emphasis on dissonance in the use of chords rather than having everything sounding pristine – what’s more, songs didn’t have to follow a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, be done in the space of three to four minutes or have chord patterns that happened in groups of four. They felt there was no reason why they couldn’t write songs that were 17 minutes long and only had two chords, and so that’s exactly what they did.
However, while many people have come to realise Reed’s genius over the years, it was another member of the band who he believed was more deserving of the label, largely due to the fact that nobody seemed to understand the importance of their contributions
Speaking to Classic Rock Magazine in 2004, he was asked about how intrinsic Moe Tucker’s “metronomic drum style” was to The Velvet Underground, to which he responded with a barrage of effusive praise for the percussionist. “I think Maureen Tucker is a genius drummer,” Reed declared, “And it is astonishing that people have not noticed. She started a whole new way of drumming, a different way of drumming, a style of drumming which, later, some of these ideas were incorporated, whether they heard her or not.”
Reed elaborated on how much Tucker was unlike any other drummer he had worked with, and how her refusal to conform is what made her so unique. “For instance, with electronic drums you remove the tyranny of the high hat,” he continued. “Every one of these drummers comes with a trap kit, he’s been taught to drum, and he’ll play a hi-hat straight through your song. You say to him: ‘We don’t need a high-hat every single note here, don’t play it all the time.’ Well, they can’t, because when they’re trained, they’re just doing that.”
