Tucker Zimmerman: A Life, A Song and A Dance

In 2003, David Bowie said that Tucker Zimmerman was “way too qualified for folk [music],” before declaring that the picker’s debut album, Ten Songs By Tucker Zimmerman, was one of his all-time favorites. The two musicians, born in different countries but in each other’s orbit in 1960s London, were not friends by any means. “Looking back, I wonder if he had any friends,” Zimmerman wonders from his home in Belgium. “He held off. He was a very reserved person.” In their time knowing each other, Bowie helped Zimmerman get a couple of gigs around the city. “He knew I needed money, and I had to play under assumed names—because I couldn’t get a work permit,” Zimmerman adds. The British didn’t want him there “living off their bounty.”

Sometimes, Zimmerman and Bowie would sit on their producer Tony Visconti’s rug and trade songs back and forth, and Ziggy was present for almost all of the Ten Songs recording sessions at Trident Studios but discreetly so—curiously studying not just what Zimmerman was doing at the microphone, but what Visconti was doing as an engineer. “He was in the control room the whole time,” Zimmerman recalls. “I’d be down below, and I’d climb the stairs to listen to a playback and David would be gone. I watched him while I was recording, up through the window. He’d be peeking around the edge of the window, but when I went up the stairs, he was gone. Tony says, ‘Oh, no, he’s out in the hall. He doesn’t want to bother you.”

Zimmerman was born in 1941 in San Francisco, California and his grandfather on his father’s side, whom he never met, was a violin maker. “A violin came down to me at the age of four,” he says. “I got violin lessons when I was a kid, and I sort of moved up through the years with different instruments—piano, trombone.” Zimmerman began playing piano at age eight, though he claims that he “never became a good piano player” because he hated practicing. “I was more interested in copying stuff I heard on the radio, like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Fats Domino, the ‘piano man’ from New Orleans,” he says. “In New Orleans, the piano music was great—probably still is! But my teacher never wanted me to go there.” Eventually, Zimmerman had to play piano as a composer when he went to City College and San Francisco State University. He continued his lessons from childhood, firmly entrenched in music’s role in his life because he “wasn’t going to do anything else,” but admits to me a lingering truth: “I still don’t like piano. I resent it, in a way, because I knew I’d never be a great pianist.”

While the United States was embroiled in a burgeoning Vietnam War, Zimmerman was sent to Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship to study composition and theory under Gofreddo Petrassi, one of the most important Italian composers of the 20th century, who’d served as the musical director of the La Fenice opera house and taught master composition courses at Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Being in Europe as war unraveled wasn’t a hotbed for nurturing Zimmerman’s creative liberties, because he considers himself to be a “compulsive writer” who will “write no matter where.” Instead, being across the pond freed him, both physically and mentally, from the pressures of America. “I didn’t want to go to Vietnam,” Zimmerman says. “I got drafted, and they wanted me in the Army. I got the draft notice and everything, and I just didn’t show up. I got away, escaped, and I didn’t go back.”

Zimmerman reveals that he wasn’t a very good student while on his scholarship. “I was more interested in writing songs rather than composing for an orchestra,” he says. “I was more interested in just looking around and being there. I really loved being in Rome, it was a great place to live—and I think it still might be.” Zimmerman got along with the Italian people and their culture quite well in those days, believing that he fit right in with them. He’d only visit Petrassi on Wednesday mornings, always arriving at his office with “very little to show him.” “He sort of gave up on me,” Zimmerman bemoans, before perking up. “I used the scholarship as a free ride, but I made use of it. I didn’t waste it. I wrote a lot of songs, and my head got around to the right place—as to what I wanted to do with my life.”

While in Rome, Zimmerman had very little reference for what was happening in America, musically. LPs were available, and he’d hear rumblings of news coming out of England, but he could never compare himself to anybody. In his second year of scholarship, he began gigging at clubs around the capital, and nobody else around him was writing sonatas but dreaming of becoming a folk and rock singer-songwriter. Zimmerman met Visconti in London once his schooling in Rome had run out, after he and his now-wife, Marie-Claire, went to “the only place I could go to make music, make my songs and record my songs”: London. If he returned to the States, he would’ve been arrested for draft-dodging. At the time, Visconti was still a relatively green producer—having worked with Marc Bolan’s not-yet-abbreviated band Tyrannosaurus Rex on a few records but not yet made a splash with Bowie or the Moody Blues—and Zimmerman had written some tunes for other artists, namely the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (“Droppin’ Out”). “He helped me a lot,” Zimmerman says of the producer, “more than just getting me on record and getting me into a studio, taping. He supported me financially in many, many ways. I owe so much to Tony. Not only was he sneaking me jobs under the table in the studio, as a studio musician, but we became good friends.”

Zimmerman is based in Belgium now—Liege, to be exact—because Marie-Claire hails from there and the couple was kicked out of England around Christmas of 1969, which he just calls “1970.” “I couldn’t prove that I was making money,” he says. “I was, but it was under the table. The nearest point was across the channel into Belgium, from Dover to Ostend. We had to escape pretty quickly, because they wanted us out.” They had a week to get their stuff together and leave, and Visconti loaded their possessions into his car and drove them down to the ferry. “I didn’t know where else to go, and Marie-Claire suggested we go to her parents’ house.” Fleeing by force turned into something unexpected, though, as Visconti wrote ahead to Radio Luxembourg, sent them a copy of Ten Songs and told them to “pay attention.” A disc jockey named David “Kid” Jensen liked the record and invited Zimmerman to come down and spend an evening playing through it.

“During the session, I got three phone calls from clubs in Belgium asking if I would come and play. I said, ‘Yeah, of course,’” Zimmerman says. “That evolved into 12 gigs, and that evolved into 24 more gigs. I was playing all over Belgium and all over Germany within a year. I knew it would be foolish of me to even think about going back [to the United States]. I was making good money, and I knew trying to get a start in America would have been very, very difficult.” Zimmerman was in a unique position in Belgium, since he was a “lonely American” playing to so many young people who were, in his eyes, “looking to America for some sort of cultural guidance.” The previous summer, Woodstock had happened, and that cultural apogee had begun flooding into Europe and summoned Zimmerman to gigs in Switzerland, France and Holland. “They really wanted to have some American to hang onto, and I was one of the very few that came and played for them,” he insists. “I had really good audiences. They were mostly students, especially in Germany. I was accepted really very warmly.”

Last year, Big Potato Records released a re-issue of Zimmerman’s 1974 album, Over Here in Europe—a project that finds the self-proclaimed “songpoet” toddling in various experimental champaigns, namely that of the Ondes Martenot, a theremin hybrid that players like Jonny Greenwood have come to embrace 30, 40 years later. “When I went to Paris, I knew I wanted an Ondes, because I’d loved the sound of that instrument since I was a student,” he says. The LP sees Zimmerman’s rollicking, wind-beaten folk disposition converging with electronica ambitions. He’s never been one to shy away from reinvention, following whims and conquering them rather than leaning on tried-and-tested formulas.

Over Here in Europe, still bound by Zimmerman’s penchant for plucky, sing-song instrumentation (“Good Old Days” has a droning undercurrent shadowed by a Vaudevillian accordion), was a primitive step, as synthesizers were a rarity and MIDI was still nearly 10 years away from standardization. And none of it ever seemed unusual to him. “When somebody asks for a recording, I just take what I have around me at the moment and use it,” he says. “That’s the principle of the rule I have for recording: Just don’t go too far out of the way to make it do anything special. Take what you got and go with it.” Since making Word Games in 1983, Zimmerman claims that he’s filled a box with “over 500 song sheets.”