TALES OF LOHR: TRICIA ROMANO'S "THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE"
Thoughts on a new oral history of "The Village Voice"; plus, "Factory Roll Call" says hello, Moe
I came on the arts-journalism scene just as the golden age of American print media was segueing into the ongoing clickbait-and-algorithm-driven decline through which we are all regrettably living. Even so, like many writers before me, I have taken inspiration and enlightenment from the work and careers of the most powerful and iconoclastic print journalists, and from those newspapers whose names alone became bearers of a certain artistic and ideological standard. One of the reasons so many, including myself, have watched The New York Times’ continuing devolution into a particularly officious publicity wing of the MAGA movement with such dismay is because of our previous respect for its once unimpeachable high ideals, not to mention the quality of the work produced by arts and music writers who, amidst the Sulzberger-driven nepo-chaos, still attempt to put out material that is indeed fit to print. I will always have a warm place in my heart for The Chicago Sun-Times for helping bring the work of the great Roger Ebert to the wider world. And even before the 2021 visit that cemented New York City’s place in my heart and spirit, I knew that The Village Voice, the official weekly press organ emanating from the city’s longtime bastion of bohemian paradigm-shifting, was like no other paper before or since in the breadth of its coverage, the originality of its writing, and the combustible chemistry of the people who, throughout its checkered but estimable history, brought it to life.
Tricia Romano was a critical player in the latter years of the Voice’s initial lifespan, which ran from the 1950s until the paper’s original print run was shuttered in 2018. She spent eight years with the paper, graduating from an internship to penning award-winning coverage of the city’s musical and nightlife scene via her column, “Fly Life,” following in the footsteps of legendary Voice clubland gossip guru Michael Musto. Now based in the Pacific Northwest, Romano has gone on to a celebrated journalistic career, including a stint as editor in chief of Seattle’s own alternative newsweekly, The Stranger. But the lessons of her time with The Village Voice have obviously lingered and touched Romano deeply, and she pays warm but clear-eyed tribute to the paper and its people in her new oral history The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, The Radical Paper that Changed American Culture (PublicAffairs, $35.00). As a Voice veteran, Romano has been gifted with unprecedented access to a half-century-plus-deep bench of stellar writing, editorial, and creative talent, and all of them open their minds, hearts, memories, and big fat mouths to share this broad-ranging, cannily edited reminiscence of the rise and fall (and sorta-kinda re-rise) of a New York news and cultural institution.
Despite the specificity of her own focus within the Voice’s coverage, Romano is not content to simply anatomize the paper’s centrality in bringing the mysteries of the city’s club and nightlife culture into the daylight, even though Musto’s shared observations of his time in the clubland trenches, and Frank Owen’s recollections of his groundbreaking investigation into the murder of club-kid drug dealer Angel Melendez, are pointed and well-observed. (Melendez, famously, was killed, dismembered, and thrown into the Hudson River by club promoter and minor nightlife celebrity Michael Alig, a story chronicled in pitiless, stylistically freewheeling detail in James St. James’ brilliant 1999 book Disco Bloodbath.) Freaks goes all the way back to the beginning, when a cadre of crusading writers and journalists, most of them newly minted World War II and Korea vets, launched the paper as a pushback against the more conservative leanings of the Times and other daily news and information organs. The paper had heavy hitters on deck right from the jump, with Norman Mailer contributing his usual combative prose to 17 of the paper’s initial issues, and as the decades progressed and the culture inexorably evolved, from the love-and-protest heights of the sixties to the Reaganite amorality of the ‘80s, from the hip-hop music and cultural revolution to the irony-averse days of 9/11 and onward, or downward, to our current no-other-way-to-put-it goddamned mess, the Voice was there, helping the city make sense of it all and giving voice to revolutionary, radical, and contrarian perspectives to which no other news organ was providing vital column inches.
Romano’s book is often at its best when she simply lets her fellow Voice scribes sound off, at length and with all expected eloquence, about the special gifts their fellow writers brought to bear on making the paper as centrally influential as it was at its height. Nelson George, Lisa Jones, and other Black writers and editors make plain not only their signal importance in bringing Black popular music and art to the Voice’s readership, but also speak out in appreciative tones about the far-seeing, futurism-friendly, psychedelically effusive writing of the late Greg Tate, one of the paper’s most immediately distinctive and thrilling cultural-critic voices (Tate, who died in 2021, contributed original interviews to this book, and also suggested to Romano the Whodini reference that serves as this book’s title). Longtime Voice stalwart Richard Goldstein is particularly potent about how the evolution of the paper’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues helped shape his own journey as a once-closeted gay man (Goldstein came out publicly during his tenure with the Voice), and he is honest and fair in his recounting of the paper’s strengths and fallings-short in its addressing of the devastations of the AIDS crisis. Film critic and columnist Amy Taubin offers her own kingmaker’s flex as she shares how her early championing of Kevin Smith’s scrappy independent debut feature Clerks led to a singularly interesting and unconventional multimedia career. And there are affectionately bemused tributes to such unforgettable and talented contributors as out-and-outré ‘60s columnist Jill Johnston; stylishly sybaritic political gadfly Alexander Cockburn; crusading political reporter Wayne Barrett, an early thorn in the side of thoroughly thorn-worthy New York scumbags Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani; often imperious self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics Robert Christgau; and Christgau’s more rollicking and tragically short-lived counterpart, the incomparable Lester Bangs.
There is also plenty of entertaining, sometimes snarky dish about the Voice’s editorial and ownership figures, a regularly rotating cast of characters whose tastes and neuroses often shaped the fortunes of the paper as much as those of the writers they supervised. David Schneiderman, a suit-and-tie type whose initial hiring was faced with threats of mass writer walkouts, is portrayed as a sometimes prickly but committed editor and (later) publisher whose trust in his writers was frequently headache-inducing, but more often than not rewarded. Schneiderman’s predecessor, Marianne Partridge, was unceremoniously fired as as a result of the paper’s purchase by the odiously influential Rupert Murdoch, Partridge a stand-in for the frequently quixotic nature of the Voice’s push against the fatcats in all walks of life…and for the Voice’s own frequently perilous position as a voice of dissent in a capitalist system. Karen Durbin, a compelling combination of glamour and staunch feminism, is evoked in all her talented, sometimes troubling complexity. The late Don Forst, who ushered the paper through the late ‘90s and contributed the notorious and legendary “The Bastards!” 9/11 cover headline, is alternately celebrated for his veteran-newsman’s drive, and excoriated for the frequently regressive sexual and sexuality-related statements and ideas he expressed. And Romano and her contributors cover, in aptly scathing terms, the ascendance to the owner’s suite of New Times Inc., whose principal partners, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, would see their empire collapse in the wake of accusations and trials for money laundering, conspiracy, and (thanks to their online Backpage classified ads service) prostitution and sex trafficking.
The details regarding the tenures of Forst and the New Times crew emphasize one of the key strengths of The Freaks Came Out to Write: its presence as a valuable reminder that, even with all its progressive bona fides, The Village Voice was subject to just as much ideological inconsistency, conflict, and conservatism as so much of American life before, during, and indubitably since. The Voice’s union was the first in the nation to offer health insurance benefits to same-sex couples, but that didn’t stop Murdoch, during his ownership tenure, from constantly pressuring the paper to make their news coverage less overtly gay. Pugnacious music and cultural columnist Stanley Crouch takes his fair share of blowback for his staid views on hip-hop and Black street culture (editor Martin Gottlieb shares an anecdote about Crouch scoldingly confronting a group of youths playing rap on a radio in a subway station), and veteran columnist Nat Hentoff’s forced-birth advocacy comes in for no small amount of criticism, as does fellow old-school writer Pete Hamill’s staunch support of the “self-defense” rights of subway shooter Bernhard Goetz. For all its celebration of Tate, George, and other Black scribes, The Freaks Came Out to Write likewise gives full voice to frustration with the paper’s persistent lack of BIPOC representation amidst its editorial ranks. Even the newspaper’s cartoons were not immune to the contaminations of ill-thought-out courting of controversy, as Goldstein bitterly recalls in his account of a strip, created by the award-winning Jules Feiffer for the paper’s first Gay Pride issue in 1978, that foregrounds the N-word in its punchline. It’s a reminder, not overtly stated but unmistakable, that even a highly prized progressive bulwark like The Village Voice is mounted and maintained by people, with all the failings, prejudices, and ignorance that such creatures are sadly prone to. One cannot help but think of how someone like Manohla Dargis, The New York Times’ brilliant chief film critic, must feel about sharing newsprint space with a publication that feels that one should drop out of a national election for the crime of being old and looking it, but not for the crime of 34 actual crimes (which, by the way, you’re apparently allowed to commit as many of as you like, as long as you order those crimes on official stationery).
Ultimately, however, despite the occasional inconsistencies of its outlook, the story of The Village Voice, as brought together by Romano in The Freaks Came Out to Write, is a powerful and hopeful one. It is a chronicle of a group of difficult, daring, principled, problematic, and (yes) freaky people, long-haired and otherwise, applying themselves to the cause of calling it as they saw it, looking into corners often unexplored, putting the word out about what they found there, and holding back as little as possible in their mission to share those discoveries with New York City, and soon the world at large. The book ends, inevitably, on a bittersweet note, as it details the current status of the Voice: Still existing online, but appearing in print only intermittently, a still-breathing but inarguable echo of its former lofty self. Truly progressive print media is on life support, and the prognosis is increasingly bleak. One hopes that Romano’s tribute can serve as a clarion call to the next generation of Greg Tates, Jill Johnstons, Wayne Barretts, and even Michael Mustos to saddle up, put pen to (literal) paper, and not let the bastards, or even “The Bastards!,” grind them down. Where have you gone, Village Voice? Our nation turns its lonely, frightened, angry, desperate, but defiant and ready-for-battle eyes to you.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
MAUREEN “MOE” TUCKER (1944 - )
No discussion of the seminal woman instrumentalists in the history of rock music is complete without an enthusiastic tip of the cap to Maureen Tucker, known as “Moe” to friends, loved ones, and the world entire. The drummer for the classic lineup of The Velvet Underground, Tucker brought to bear a style, with her singular kit setup and walloping disdain for subtlety, that helped transform popular music, paving the way for both the punishing sonic innovations of punk and the hard-driving charge of latter-day arena rock.
A native of Queens, Tucker was compelled to pursue music after encountering the sounds of the progressive African drummer Babatunde Olatunji. She took up the drums in 1963, at age 19, teaching herself how to play by accompanying popular tunes on the radio. Two years later, her percussive explorations were recalled by a college friend of Tucker’s older brother Jim, Sterling Morrison, a guitar player for a then-rising rock ensemble recently christened The Velvet Underground. The band’s original drummer, Angus Maclise, had quit on the eve of their first paying gig, declaring his refusal to sell out by accepting money for making music. Tucker was drafted by Morrison to fill Maclise’s spot, and from the start, she looked and sounded like no other drummer in rock music. Her standard kit included few (or usually no) cymbals, a pair of toms, a snare, and a bass drum, turned so the skin faced up to the ceiling. Tucker opted for mallets rather than sticks, and stood rather than using a stool, for better access to that upturned bass drum. The resultant cacophony, heavy-footed but meshing masterfully with Morrison and Lou Reed’s guitars and the whining electric viola of John Cale, was primitive, powerful, and immediately arresting.
Tucker was behind this singular percussive array when Andy Warhol first saw the Velvets play live, during a December ‘65 stand at Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village. The Pop artist soon signed to manage the group, taking them on as a sort of informal “house band” for his Silver Factory studio. Tucker and her bandmates became Factory fixtures, even though the quiet, essentially conservative drummer was always an unusual fit within the hedonistic-bohemian mix of personalities that haunted the East 47th Street loft space. She appears in the Factory-shot 1966 short music documentary The Velvet Underground & Nico: A Symphony of Sound; sat for a pair of Screen Tests that would frequently be projected over the band as they played during Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia “happening” events; and contributes her titanic sound and bulldozing rhythmic sense to the first three Velvet Underground studio albums. She also occasionally played bass guitar during live gigs, and contributes vocals to two tracks on the band’s eponymous 1969 album: The bizarre, partly spoken-word exploration “The Murder Mystery,” and “After Hours,” a thoroughly charming album-closing ditty that became a concert staple, always drawing loving ovations when Tucker would step up to the mic.
Tucker was something of the glue of the Velvets, helping the band maintain after the rancorous departure of Cale, and being arguably the bandmate with whom the always-difficult Reed enjoyed the best, most cordial relationship. It is thus unfortunate that a pregnancy prevented Tucker from contributing to the full tracklist for the band’s fourth album, 1970’s Loaded, and from joining the group for their two-month summer live stand at Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan, a booking that culminated in Reed’s departure from the group he had co-founded. Tucker returned to the band following Reed’s withdrawal, and toured with them under the new leadership of Cale’s replacement Doug Yule, until 1971, when Tucker, the last remaining member of the “classic” lineup, likewise left the Velvets. Marriage and children were calling, and she divided the next two decades between Arizona and Georgia, where she raised her family, worked for a time at a Wal-Mart distribution center, and enjoyed the luxury of creating music professionally if and when it suited her.
In the years since the initial run of the Velvet Underground, Tucker has released four albums under her own name, on which she sings and plays both drums and guitar. Reed appears on two tracks on 1989’s Life in Exile After Abdication; Morrison can be heard on 1991’s I Spent a Week There the Other Night and 1994’s Dogs Under Stress. She has also played with the bands Paris 1942, Half Japanese, and the Kropotkins. In 1990, for the first time since Cale’s 1968 departure, Tucker joined him, along with Reed and Morrison, for a surprise reunion performance at the opening of a Warhol exhibition in the suburbs of Paris. The musical chemistry remained, and the band formally reunited for a 1993 European tour that resulted in a double album, Live MCMXCIII. But the tensions between Reed and Cale also returned, and Tucker’s steadying presence was unable to keep the reunion from dissolving, with planned American tour dates and new studio recordings scuttled. Tucker, Cale, and Reed would all play together again one final time, in 1996, to mark their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Morrison had succumbed to cancer the previous year, and the remaining three original Velvets came together in touching tribute, performing a song called “Last Night I Said Goodbye to My Friend.”
Tucker has continued to make occasional music, such as her contributions as drummer and producer to musician / filmmaker Alex McAulay’s 1999 album The Life of Charles Douglas. She joined an all-star band, including fellow Velvet Underground surviving member Cale, at a 2017 Grammy Awards event at which the VU received a special Grammy Merit Award. (The setlist for the show included two Velvet Underground classics, “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Sunday Morning.”) Both Tucker and Cale also shared memorable recollections in Todd Haynes’ 2021 documentary on the history of the band, but she made even more surprising headlines for a different interview she gave in 2009, at a Tea Party rally in Georgia. Always somewhat out of step with the circles in which she is most famous, Tucker is today a Republican, and has spoken in official Tea Party press materials about Barack Obama’s intentions “to destroy America from within.” Her drumming style, it seems, is not the only primitive thing about Moe Tucker.
