One of the most indelible moments in PBS's 1995 "Rock & Roll" documentary comes when we see the Velvet Underground's drummer, Maureen "Moe" Tucker, slapping her thighs-- bang bang bang bang bang, no variation, no emphasis-- and then half-grinning at the camera and explaining "That's 'I'm Waiting for the Man'." Tucker was the Thing of the Velvets' Fantastic Four, the B.A. Baracus of their A-Team, a hedgehog in a band of foxes: They were avant-gardists and songcrafters and texturalists, but she was an unstoppable brute-force musician who grounded and drove their first three albums and their live shows.
Her singular gift (and game-amateur singing voice) also made her the least likely member of the Velvet Underground to have a solo career, and after briefly rejoining the Doug Yule-led lineup, she drifted away from music for nearly a decade. Aside from a remake of the Velvets' then-unreleased "I'm Sticking With You" recorded in 1974 with the band's disciples Jonathan Richman and Willie Alexander, I Feel So Far Away picks up the story in 1980, picking over the four studio albums and other material she recorded over the next two decades.
For the most part, she stuck to comfortable territory: low-polish, uncomplicated rock'n'roll, with the occasional heart-on-sleeve slow one. Six of the songs on these two discs are Velvets remakes; two more are by Bo Diddley, and a third is named after him. There are covers of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", "To Know Him Is to Love Him", "Then He Kissed Me", and "Danny Boy". Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison all turn up in Tucker's groups here-- all three of them on "I'm Not". (Other guest stars include Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese, two Violent Femmes, and three Sonic Youth.)
Two discs of solo Moe is probably a surplus for anyone but Velvet Underground aficionados, although there are a lot of those. The only original song that really stands up alongside their canon is "Hey Mersh!", from Tucker's headlong 1989 album Life in Exile After Abdication, with Reed's lead guitar carving his initials all over it. There's also something to be said for 1982's Playin' Possum, a bunch of home-recorded oldies (plus "Heroin") on which Tucker played everything herself: It's loose, out of tune, and clearly done purely for the fun of flexing the old muscles. And if anybody's got the right to write a ripoff of the Velvets' "I Can't Stand It" (1991's "Too Shy"), it's the inventor of that cavewoman beat.
Tucker apparently quit making music about 10 years ago; she was most recently in the public eye about a year and a half ago, when she appeared on TV news as a Tea Party supporter. Her strongest political statements, though, appear here: "That's B.A.D." and "Spam Again", both of which concern the economic trap Tucker found herself in as one of the working poor. That a member of one of America's most important rock bands could have to struggle to support her kids with a low-wage job at Wal-Mart is an embarrassment for both the country and the music business.
