Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.
Tucker is one of those great lost originals who’s somehow slipped through the cracks. In Vanity Fair in 2003 David Bowie listed his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs, as one of his 25 favourite albums of all time. (“I always found this album of stern, angry compositions enthralling, and often wondered what ever happened to him”). In 2024 critically acclaimed New York alt-folkers Big Thief joined forces with their label, 4AD, for a high-ish profile new album, Dance of Love.
It is from the latter that most, if not all his set comes (I admit, despite being a music journalist for 30 years, I’d never heard of him until a reissue last autumn of his 1974 album Over Here in Europe, which has since become a favourite… but I’m not fully familiar with his extensive back catalogue). Generally classed as a folkie, tonight, accompanied by electric guitar, bass, drums, keys and virtuosic steel guitar, he leans into country.
Zimmerman, clad in black with a pink open shirt as jacket, is headlining a Pitchfork Music Festival London event, a backdrop states as much. Prior, we’ve had opener Iji, a group led by Californian songwriter Zach Burba, who delivers half-an-hour of faintly funk-tinged, wordy alt-folk. I particularly like the last song - “Does the world need more regular songs? Stupid words full of stupid dreams…” – but cannot track down its title. Then half an hour of Irish singer Ellie O’Neill. Shyly mic-reticent, her delicate soprano-leaning pieces fuse Joni Mitchell’s most indulgent moments with an acoustic Bon Iver vibe. It’s absolutely not my thing but some would undoubtedly describe it as “beautiful”.
Zimmerman’s set is genially ramshackle, in that he regularly admits not knowing what’s next, or asks the band to count him in so he can find his place. But his songs acknowledge him as a living piece of countercultural history. He introduces the lovely, if hippy-twee “Old Folks of Farmersville” by talking of his grandparents' arrival in California during the dustbowl Thirties; he chats about living in Chelsea in 1968 (“It was different then”); mid-set he does a couple of beatnik-ish poems, asking the band to “jump around a lot” as they offer up a quirky soundbed.
Zimmerman has lived in Belgium for decades. The love of his life, wife-of-55-years Marie Claire, is on the front of Dance of Love (she also sings on it). She is sitting stage-side. Zimmerman relishes the jolly, Dixieland Vaudeville stoner throwaway “The Rama-a-lama-ding-dong Song” and the bouncing groove of “The Idiots Maze” but is at his best on lyrically literate, pensive slowies such as the gorgeous “The Season”, the country shuffle of “Lorelei” or the story-song “Burial at Sea”.
Summing up tonight in comparatives, he comes over as an Americana amalgamation of late-period Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, seasoned with Al Stewart’s prosaic attention to detail and pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd’s loose compositional virtuosity, all lathered with a heavy dose of Sixties peace’n’love. Zimmerman is richly present. It feels like a special evening, one that I will remember. Especially given what’s happening across the Atlantic. “And if you do a good deed to a stranger in need, forget it,” he huskily sings, “If a stranger does you a good turn, love it and live it, and never forget it until your dying day.” Amen to that.
Below: Listen to "Old Folks of Farmersville" by Tucker Zimmerman, featuring Adrienne Lenker of Big Thief
