Artist Tucker Zimmerman is a bit of a musical Forrest Gump. In his 83 years he has sipped coffee with the Beats in San Francisco, taught David Bowie how to record in a studio and now he has made an album with Big Thief. Dance of Love is a freewheeling album that brings intergenerational hippies together into one common feeling.
Zimmerman was born in San Francisco in 1941, just a month before Pearl Harbor, which changed his life. His father wanted to fight in the war. His mother wanted her husband to stay home with the family. His father left, standing up for his country, but abandoning infant Tucker. Fatherless, Zimmerman was sent outside of the city to Sonoma for school. Information at that time and place was limited. But that all changed when Tucker moved back to San Francisco at 17 years old. It was the late ’50s and Lawrence Farlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore was ground zero for the Beat Generation, which now included Zimmerman. “They opened my mind,” he says. “It opened my mind to the idea that I could also write. that I could also create.” Inspired by the Beats, Zimmerman applied and was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study music in Rome and he sailed off.
In Rome he took on the sacred cow of Italian literature, Dante, and attempted to set the writer’s words to music. There he also met the love of his life, Marie Claire. After studying for two years to become a musical scholar, Zimmerman says he didn’t have the gumption to teach. “I’d been writing songs for two years, mostly for myself. I didn’t feel that I had anything to teach.” He couldn’t go back to the United States because he had been drafted to be, as he said, “cannon fodder for the war in Vietnam” and would be arrested for desertion if he returned. And so instead he fled to London to look for opportunities to become a folk musician.
Shortly after moving to England he met Tony Visconti, who helped him secure a recording studio. Visconti had met a young, then-unknown musician who was interested in being in a recording studio to see how things worked, so that man was invited to sit in on the entire recording of Zimmerman’s album Ten Songs. The musician was a young David Bowie.
“David helped me get a few gigs illegally,” said Zimmerman of Bowie. As a draft dodger, Zimmerman couldn’t go by his real name — he performed under a pseudonym and said he was from Canada. “David helped me out a couple times. I really respected him as a person. Not so much as a songwriter because I didn’t like his songs very much, but I respected him as a person.”
After a time, like in Italy, Zimmerman couldn’t prove to the government that he was an economic good to the country, so he fled again, this time to Marie Claire’s family in Belgium. There the pair has lived for the past 40 years, writing poetry, releasing albums and living a hippie beatnik lifestyle.
Last year Big Thief lead singer Adrianne Lenker was getting a stick and poke tattoo of a spiral at her friend’s place in the Rocky Mountains and Tucker Zimmerman’s 1980 album Square Dance was playing in the background. “I saw [Adrianne] shortly after and she played the album for me, recalled Buck Meek, guitarist for Big Thief. “We couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard it and it instantly became our favorite album.”
Soon after being exposed to Square Dance, Big Thief were going on a European tour. They found out that Zimmerman lived in Belgium and wanted to invite him to open for them so they wrote him a letter. He didn’t respond.
Evidently, over the years people had made wild promises to him. “None of it worked out. They were all fantasies,” Zimmerman said with disappointment. But Big Thief persisted. They sent a second letter and reached out to Zimmerman’s son. He told his dad to take this one seriously. Zimmerman listened to his son and got connected with the band. “And I have no regrets. I am so glad I overcame my hermit tendencies.”
Now that Zimmerman was open to collaboration, Lenker suggested an album. Zimmerman was in. Big Thief and Zimmerman went to a cabin in the woods of New England for two weeks where they lived together and made music every day. “In this period, I felt we were like children again,” remembers Marie Claire. When they made music they sat in a circle. “Tucker had his twelve-string and we had a two-inch tape machine, a couple dogs and a week of play,” said Meek.
“My favorite memory was when we were recording ‘The Season,'” Zimmerman said with warmth in his voice. “It was raining and the windows were open. I heard thunder in the background. The heavens opened up. We kept that take.”
Tucker Zimmerman’s Dance of Love, the record made with and produced by Big Thief, is released on the 4AD label October 11.