The Velvet Underground's Moe Tucker is having a party: A tea party

I got deluged with e-mails this morning from old music biz pals who are (pick one) outraged, depressed or scandalized by the news that Velvet Underground drummer Maureen (Moe) Tucker, an undeniable icon of cool in the 1960s, is now a "tea party" zealot. According to the Huffington Post, whose story is basically a rewrite of a piece from England's Guardian newspaper, a woman identified as Tucker was interviewed on TV earlier this year, complaining that Barack Obama is leading the country toward socialism. (When the Huffington Post reached Tucker at her home in Georgia, she confirmed her identity but wouldn't discuss her political views.)

Of course, in the '60s, pretty much every rock musician was in favor of socialism, not just because he or she was a share-the-wealth style outsider and idealist, but because he figured that at least under socialism he'd get paid some money (under music industry capitalism, virtually all of the moolah went straight into the record company coffers). Still, it comes as a shock to imagine that someone like Tucker, whose band was the epitome of counterculture cool, could now reemerge as an angry protester being quoted as referring to the president as "King Obama," adding that "I have come to believe (not just wonder) that Obama's plan is to destroy American from within."

It's startling, just as it would be for people on the right if a staunch conservative such as former Reagan administration cabinet member Bill Bennett suddenly surfaced, advocating legalizing drugs and raising taxes on the rich. I mean, the horror! I'm sure that the right will embrace Tucker as one of its own, taking great pleasure in seeing such a lefty cult hero having joined the tea party ranks. But if I were a liberal, I wouldn't be so surprised. After all, Tucker fits the tea party profile, being older, white and living in a small town. It turns out that the people who lost faith in the system when they were young are just as likely to lose faith again now.   

Photo: Maureen (Moe) Tucker, second from left, with Velvet Underground members Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed and John Cale. Credit: Gerard Malanga / Polydor Records

Comments

[Charles Middleton]

Wow! Liberal group think. So everyone on the left must think in lockstep.

[Tom]

Lou Reed was ,and is cool . Moe who?

[Carlos 001]

Age brings with it wisdom and becoming more conservative as you age is a natural progression. No surprise there. This article tries to pretend that just as many people can change from Conservative to Liberal as they grow older, but that is a just another lie that the LATimes, leftist propaganda machine that it is, shovels out to the public. No surprise in that either.

[JpRAustin]

looks like the drugs have finally worn off...Go Moe!!!!!

[Waldo Jeffers]

Q. What do you call a talentless loser who hangs around musicians?
A. a drummer.

[JoeLosFeliz]

Newsflash: Drug addled ex rocker now crazy!

If this is the sort of wisdom I have to look forward to in my old age, please kill me now.

[phil e.]

age brings with it a lot of things, not necessarily wisdom. some of these might be comfort, money, the inability to see and empathize with those less fortunate, the loss of ideals, fear of change. all marks of the tea party movement...

[tulsadave]

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

[mario]

All rock bands are full of people with odd character. Character is a deep and mysterious thing, and it changes over time. Tucker spent a few years laying out a backbeat underneath some very strong egos, making unpopular music that would last longer than the chart-toppers which outshone the Velvets' genius temporarily. When we'd hear about her later, she was always "a schoolteacher somewhere in the mid-West, I think" and we'd still picture her like an androgynous mystery. Old age brings out the real oddity in people's character, and bravery and a no-apologies attitude. I'm very sad to lose the myth of Moe to such a crass manifestation of a current collective movement--blech -- but who did I really think she was anyways? What compartment did I shut her up in? Definitely not a hippie, or a manic Sean Penn, or a cult-of-personality like Lou Reed, or any representative of anything "cool" holding court for young people to emulate. Maybe she's more like Johnny Ramone.... So I guess she was a mystery. The article of gossip here pigeonholes her someplace where we're not supposed to expect her to be. Who cares? She's free to be the kind of freak she wants to be. She's still a weirdo, just a grumpy older weirdo "on the wrong side of the aisle." The more we feed this idea of the tea party being "a movement," the faster it will move into that shadowy collective place where people lose their individuality, that black/white place of fear and finger-pointing and division....

[Mickey B]

So what? She's entitled to her political beliefs. There are plenty of right-wing rockers (Ted, Nugent, anyone?) It's the crackpots who post on here condemning the "leftist propaganda machine" who worry me more. Paranoid generalizations seem to be the right's default position. At least when the left generalizes, they don't think everyone's out to get them.