“All my stuff was falling apart”: Maureen Tucker’s life before The Velvet Underground
Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, in August 1944, Maureen Ann ‘Moe’ Tucker was always going to be an inspiration. Quite how she would make a name for herself was probably not what anyone had in mind for her, but then, even from an early age, it was clear she’d succeed at anything she’d put her mind to. It was possible that music was one of those avenues, as she was a talented instrumentalist from an early age. However, who was to know she’d want to put her mind to inventing alternative rock with Lou Reed in her band, The Velvet Underground?
For Tucker, music was her calling from the very beginning. By high school, she was playing the clarinet and teaching herself how to play guitar by playing along to her favourite rock ‘n’ roll records. However, everything changed when she heard ‘Not Fade Away’ by The Rolling Stones. That song convinced her to pursue not just pop music but the cutting edge of rock.
It could have gone a lot worse, too. As she said in an interview with Legs McNeill for Vice, “I was driving home from work and ‘Not Fade Away’ came on the radio. I almost died. Actually, I had to pull off the road. I was on the Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown and I pulled off the road, I just couldn’t believe this. Holy shit, I thought. What’s this?” ‘Not Fade Away’ wasn’t just her gateway drug into rock, though; it was also the song that inspired her to take up the drums.
Something that began as a way of having something to do while listening to her Stones records became a full-blown passion very quickly. Soon, Tucker was spending eight hours a day on a cobbled-together drum kit made up of a single snare drum and a single cymbal. This was after dropping out of Ithaca College and finding a job as an IBM computer operator, a job that, in the early 1960s, involved a lot less typing and a lot more punching holes in cardboard.
This life suited Tucker: working a high-paying job during the day and then playing music in the evenings with her friends. However, then she got word that one of her childhood friends, Sterling Morrison, was in a band who’d just lost their drummer days before one of their early gigs. He knew that Tucker had become obsessed with playing the drums and decided to give her a trial run at a concert they were playing at a high school dance in New Jersey.
The way Tucker describes the gig, it couldn’t have gone much worse: “Our set was only about 15 minutes at the most, and in each song, something of mine broke. All my stuff was falling apart! The foot pedal broke in one song, and the leg of the floor tom started going loose. I thought, Oh shit, I’m going to ruin this!” Fortunately, it was exactly what the band was after, and they invited Tucker to join the band almost immediately after the gig.
This was precisely what she was looking for. By 1967, she’d left her job with IBM despite it paying $100 a week, around $1000 in today’s money, to throw her lot in with The Velvets for $5 a night. It was a career decision that literally reached local newspapers at the time, but since that band is one of the most influential to ever pick up guitars today, it’s more than worked out since.
