TUCKER ZIMMERMAN : TEN SONGS

 

  1. Bird Lives
  2. October Mornings
  3. A Face That Hasn't Sold Out
  4. The Roadrunner
  5. Children Of Fear
  6. The Wind Returns Into The Night
  7. Running, Running From Moment To Moment
  8. Upsidedown Circus World
  9. Blue Goose
  10. Alpha Centauri
    Bonus Tracks :
  11. The Red Wind
  12. Moondog
  13. La Rinascente
  14. Non C'e Niente Mai
  15. En Memoire De Jean Genet
  16. Les Visions De Rimbaud
  17. The Red Wind

Label : RPM

Release Date : 1969

Length : 73:12

Review (Rockastaria) : When David Bowie placed Tucker Zimmerman’s 1969 album Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman on a list of his 25 favorite albums – alongside acknowledged classics by The Velvet Underground, James Brown, Little Richard and even Steve Reich – readers of the 2003 list could have been forgiven for wondering, “Who is Tucker Zimmerman?” It’s taken some time, but the RPM label has finally unearthed Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman – in an expanded edition that could now be titled Seventeen Songs. Zimmerman’s collection of self-penned, forceful folk-rock was produced by Bowie’s frequent collaborator Tony Visconti, who also played on the album. But the superstar artist’s connections to Zimmerman didn’t end there. The future Spiders from Mars – then known as Ronno after lead guitarist Mick Ronson – released Zimmerman’s “Fourth Hour of My Sleep” on a Visconti-produced single. And Zimmerman had actually played Bowie’s Beckenham Arts Lab, jokingly billed as cousin to Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan! (All kidding aside, Bob’s influence on Tucker can be detected in the harmonica and guitar work throughout the album.) Zimmerman came to Britain from America in 1968 with a degree in music theory and composition under his belt as well as a songwriting credit on a Butterfield Blues Band album. Gigging throughout Europe under various names, he attracted the attention of EMI’s Regal Zonophone imprint. Regal Zonophone paired him with Visconti, who had been producing for the label, and the pair recorded a reported 80 demos. A single was initially released, “The Red Wind,” featuring Zimmerman supported by future Beach Boy Ricky Fataar on drums, Visconti on bass and Rick Wakeman, later of Yes, on organ and piano. Though the single didn’t make waves, the label proceeded with an album. Wakeman and Visconti joined another impressive cast of musicians including drummer Aynsley Dunbar and guitarist/sitar player Shawn Phillips for Ten Songs. The atmospheric, haunting and edgy folk-rock of Ten Songs, like “The Red Wind,” failed to catch on with the public. Tucker Zimmerman would make five more albums through 1983 even as Ten Songs gained collectable cachet. RPM’s reissue adds seven bonus tracks including the mono and stereo versions of “The Red Wind,” non-album B-side “Moondog,” and four previously unreleased recordings from the period. Kieron Tyler has provided the excellent new liner notes and Simon Murphy has remastered from Rob Keyloch’s transfers from the original analogue tapes.

Review (Louder) : It’s not hard to hear how and why this genre-scaling and wrathful album should have exerted such an influence on then-emerging Dame David Bowie. From the opening Bo Diddley revamp Bird Lives through the scowling garage folk of Children Of Fear, Zimmerman, in exile to avoid the draft, mines disgust with American culture and politics magnificently. Ten Songs, long unavailable and here augmented with two pre-album singles, is a still-pulverising broadside, with unsettling closing epic Alpha Centauri hanging heavy in the air, long after its final chord is strummed. As late as 2006, Bowie still rated Ten Songs alongside such essential influences as Little Richard and The Velvets’ first album. Time for the rest of the world to catch up. It’s definitely worth the effort.

Review (AllMusic) : Though American, singer/songwriter Tucker Zimmerman was based in England at the time he recorded this debut LP in the late 1960s. Despite a mightily impressive support cast, it's rather awkward folk-rock that's reminiscent of some similarly tentative efforts by New York folkies of the mid-'60s to get into a more contemporary, mildly electrified bag. Though all of Zimmerman's accompanists were major musicians -- Rick Wakeman (organ), Shawn Phillips (sitar, electric guitar), Aynsley Dunbar (drums), and fellow American expatriate Tony Visconti (bass, six-string Spanish guitar), the last of whom also produced -- it feels like they're holding back, whether under instructions or because they're not wholly at ease with the material. Zimmerman has a declarative, tail-end-of-the-folk-troubadour-era vocal and compositional style that might bring to mind minor American artists of the era like Jake Holmes and Patrick Sky. Some of the more theatrical songs sound a little like the most Kurt Weill-esque material Judy Collins recorded in her Baroque folk-rock phase. Others (especially "Alpha Centauri" and "October Mornings," the latter of which is decorated by some nice Mellotron touches) are in the rough vicinity of early Tim Buckley-like haunting earnestness; and "A Face That Hasn't Sold Out" and "Bird Lives," uncharacteristically (for this album at least), see him try his hand at all-out ballsy blues-folk-rock. He's not close to being in the same artistic league as Collins or Buckley, though, and his songs, though wordy and ambitious, aren't all that articulate, falling into inchoate rage in "Children of Fear."