Waiting for the man

News out today that ex Velvet Underground drummer (sic) Maureen Tucker is a proud tea party member. The Douglas, Georgia sixty something showed up at a rally and started blasting cap and trade and global warming and Comrade Obama's pied piper like march of our country off the dark cliff's of socialism.

The woman has a right to her beliefs, as misguided as they seem to be to me. I will not attack them frontally, preferring to launch a back door ad hominem blow as is my wont. She is the lousiest drummer in the history of music and the Velvet's are the sorriest excuse for a band. Unless you count me of course. I will now describe my one attempt to play rhythm and my cataclysmic failure.

Picture impressionable prep school Robert, at a Smoke In at Central Park in Manhattan. Many hundreds of stoned hippies mill around and somehow a 20 or 30 foot joint gets rolled out of some foul mexican stems and seeds. The hippie anarchist David Peel is leading the charge (up against the wall mf'ers). Hippies, Yippies and Zippies add to the colorful cacophony and Peel decides that we need to march up to Martha Mitchell's apartment on Fifth Avenue. Mitchell is the shrill blond wife of John Mitchell, Nixon's Attorney General at the time. (Maybe 1972?) We carry the massive bomber on our shoulders with your's truly leading the charge next to Peel and decamp under Martha's tenth floor window.

Then nothing happens. A chorus rises up begging her to jump, certainly a draconian solution that will in retrospect probably solve nothing. Peel, who gained fame in my circle (he was friends with my late buddy Douglas Monroe and I believe Joe Saponara) for painting the cockroaches in his tenement walkup in fluorescent colors and watching the resultant light show while tripping, hands me a snare drum.

I have never played a drum before so the rudimental roll he was requesting was out of the question. He visibly winced, quickly assessed the rhythmic failure and shuttled it off to someone else, who may have actually been worse. We did happen to get our picture in Time Magazine. Martha never jumped, if you are curious.

And you know as bad as we both were, I think we still had more chops than Tucker.

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I must admit I was never a big Velvet's fan. Met Warhol once at the Peppermint Lounge. Never cared for him much either and he had horrible skin to boot. Liked some of Reed's later work (think Leonard Cohen, he also reached his peak in his 60's) and Transformer, an epic album, a lot. Loved Vicious.  Like John Cale and was privileged to see him several times. But most of the band, Reed included, could not play their instruments. I can humbly say that I am a far better guitar player than Lou Reed today and am ready for a battle of the bands challenge. Love him as a poet and quirky wordsmith.

I come from the other side of the world. I have a confession to make, I was never a casual heroin user. Never touched Heroin, not once, except the dilaudid given to me after a cancer operation. Got hooked in the hospital a couple times and it was no fun at all. No speed, downers, uppers, any recreational powders at all either except when they were administered to me on my hospital gurney. Except for that little diversion with the Andean chit chat powder for a brief spell in the late 70's. Drew a line, and said blechh. Never looked back. Of course psychedelic sacraments are a whole 'nother topic for a different day and a more enlightened age. Tried to follow the path of the righteous hippie, don't ask now, I know it's embarrassing.

*****

The Velvet Underground helped to make smack chic amongst a lot of impressionable young hipsters and the devastation should not be minimized. They were peddling a very dark vision. Sweet Jane, Waiting for the Man, Heroin, Sister Ray, it was bleak stuff all right. A drag through the shit without a sniff of a shot at redemption.



*****

I am happy that Mo lives in a country where her views are free to change and devolve. She can teabag and campaign for geritol subsidies for all I care. It's like the drug addicts that you meet at evangelical tent shows or N.A. meetings. They always pendulum farther out than a sane person would ever dare and they never find a safe or dare I say normal, middle spot. Now she is free to crusade from her new vantage.

What would Nico think?