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After the explosion of commercialised popular music in the latter half of the 20th century, the metric by which a “good” band was determined didn’t always correlate with talent. If I were to scrape together the most studious, classically trained musicians, their music would be precise with perfectly timed melodies.

Still, it likely wouldn’t connect with contemporary culture with the same zeal we saw with The Beatles or Sex Pistols. In a similar way, The Velvet Underground produced music that had a monumental impact on western culture, but it wasn’t fully appreciated until after the band had dissolved in the early 1970s. 

The Beatles were lucky enough to be appreciated in their time, thanks to their pop-orientated beginnings. With mop-top hair cuts and sharp suits, they played to hordes of screaming fans in the early 1960s and eventually guided fans and peers toward something more avant-garde and timelessly impactful latterly in their careers. In contrast, The Velvet Underground set off with a vision of being a little left field. 

As we look back through the history of rock music, the bands that stand out were those that took a step forward, not necessarily those with heightened virtuosity. In The Velvet Underground’s case, they were lucky to have John Cale, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist from Wales, but his defining gift was his insatiable curiosity. With his contribution, the band pushed the boundaries of musical convention over their first two albums. 

The enduring significance of The Velvet Underground’s earlier work owes thanks to the mentorship and promotion of Andy Warhol and an unprecedented songwriting partnership between Lou Reed and Cale. However, the unsung hero behind the band was Maureen “Moe” Tucker, their sturdy hub and drummer. 

Tucker was truly one of a kind; her unique approach to beat-keeping was far from what one would encounter with a fully trained jazz drummer, but her raw, autodidactic style gave the Velvets their DNA. 

After the band’s first two albums, 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico and ‘68’s White Light/White Heat, Reed dismissed Cale. The controversial decision is often chalked up to Reed’s jealousy of Cale’s talent, but at the time, Reed insisted that he was dissatisfied with Cale’s increasingly bizarre and experimental direction. 

Cale’s absence left a hole in the band that was filled by Doug Yule, an extremely gifted musician who lacked Cale’s creative drive. This left Reed’s sole hand on the rudder. In 1969, the eponymous third album lacked the avant-garde extremities of the previous two while maintaining The Velvets’ gritty, New York sound and, in ‘The Murder Mystery’, took a notable step back to experimentalism. It was with 1970’s Loaded that things began to spiral into a cloud of obscurity. 

With Loaded, their sound had been polished, with all the rough edges they identified with now eroded. The album is by no means an unsatisfying listen, boasting some of the band’s most recognisable hits like ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’. Crucially, though, the band was missing its talisman. In early 1970, Tucker became pregnant with her first child, Kerry, and she was forced to take maternity leave to shield her unborn baby from the thunderous roar of her bass drum and prepare for dawning parenthood. With Tucker’s absence, the band drafted in Doug’s brother, Billy Yule. Tucker once recalled: “Billy Yule, fine drummer but … too normal”. 

This reshuffle is immediately apparent when listening to Loaded. Despite Billy Yule being a more technically gifted drummer than Tucker, the trademark sound of The Velvet Underground had taken a new blow following the loss of Cale. 

The twist in Tucker’s tonic was that she never played by the rules. In fact, she never had any major ambitions as a musician and only joined the band in 1965 to fill a temporary gap. Her method was unorthodox from the very start as she set her drums up with the bass drum on its side on a stand to play it by hand rather than the traditional foot pedal. “I don’t know who invented the foot pedal,” Tucker once told Modern Drummer. “I guess it allows you to play a crash at every moment; I don’t know who started that either. I guess a cymbal company!”

Additionally, Tucker would often opt for a mallet over the traditional drumsticks to give that characteristic dull thud. “I used to use a mallet in my right hand and a stick in my left,” Tucker told Modern Drummer. “Obviously, the mallet sounded better on the bass drum. On some songs, like ‘Heroin’, I used two mallets.” This unorthodox approach provided the glue to which the rest of the band adhered. 

Tucker’s decision to leave before the Loaded sessions didn’t come lightly. Over the years since, she’s expressed a degree of regret, saying that she, unfortunately, missed the album and the album missed her too. This sentiment was shared by Reed, who reflected in later years that he regretted recording Loaded in Tucker’s absence.

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