A short memory to share that I thought about a lot the day after I heard the news – Marie Claire laughingly told me in the green room of the show in London in 2024 about how she’d seen Tucker throw out several pages of his writing (I think his poetry) that he’d been working on and had grown frustrated by.
The next day she went to empty the bin and of course stole the pages to hide away until a few weeks later when he was no longer frustrated. They ended up being work he was grateful to have and proud of. I think about this because of how beautiful a thing it is to support someone’s art like that. In a loving and somewhat mischievous and playful way.
Ames
4AD was privileged to work with Tucker on his 2024 album with Big Thief, Dance Of Love.
His work was a sonic memoir; a tribute to the people, experiences and sounds that have shaped his 84 years. Both he and Marie-Claire were wonderful souls who loved one another deeply and brought light to so many people’s lives. We know we are not alone in saying how honoured we are to have known them both.
4AD Team
At breakfast with Zach, MC and Shane, we were discussing Tucker’s feelings about playing to large audiences and how he’d rarely done that. He told us about playing a folk festival in the pouring rain in Northern CA or the PNW or somewhere. It was early in his career, and he was really nervous. He sat down on stage to play and Derrol Adams, who had written the well-known song Portland Town, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “It’ll be okay.” And that’s how he got through it. They remained friends for many years, then Derroll passed away. Tucker said that when stage fright would creep up on him, he’d feel that same tap on his shoulder, and he knew it was Derroll telling him that everything was going to be okay. So if you should ever feel a tap on your shoulder…
Caity
It’s going to be impossible to sum up the influence that Tucker Zimmerman and Marie-Claire Lambert have had on my life. I have only known them for a little over 4 years, but I genuinely can’t imagine who I would be without that timeless time. I think it was on the first night we met that we, all three, decided time did not exist. And then we laughed, and in that laughter a parallel universe was born, expanding into infinite complexity before re-compacting into a psychedelic, little stone to hold. As Tucker put it, in a poem he wrote about our first tour, it was “THE FIRST HOUR AFTER TIME WENT PEAR-SHAPED & THE UNIVERSE OPENED ITS MOUTH & WELCOMED US INTO THE JAWS OF ITS COMPLETE & DELICIOUS ILLUSION”.
In other words, we became really good friends. Subsequent tours and the recording session at Adrianne’s house for Dance of Love were some of the greatest times of my life, and I have heard that Tucker said the same. When we all got together, it was a numinous high. I had to learn the word numinous to be able to describe it at all — monumental, spiritual, ecstatic, complex. You can hear it in the music. On long drives and late night conversations I became a vessel for their stories. I try to remember them all—Tucker hiding in the closet, listening to the same Bob Dylan 45 over and over again at Marie-Claire’s birthday party where they met in Rome—Taking LSD in the english country side with Tony Visconti, where Tucker showed Marie-Claire that he could reach up in to the sky and stop the movement of the clouds—Introducing Belgium to the game of Baseball— There are many more, and we made many of our own too — Watching Tucker play his first ever concert in the USA, after half a lifetime of European exile — Walking into a DQ in the So-Cal desert and playing his song Showdown at the Dairy Queen for the employees — MC would always bring up this one…
On a Drive between shows Marie-Claire mentioned her childhood friend who lived in the town we were driving through. I pulled over the car, looked her up and found an old address. So we drove over and knocked on the door to find the cutest old couple watching foreign films on their couch. “Christianne” said Marie-Claire, “Marie-Claire!!” said Christianne, and then the most beautiful hug of two best friends, reconnected after decades — I held Tuckers hand in a German hospital bed while the doctor inserted a catheter after a middle of the night painful episode. Outside in the waiting room MC told me stories of more difficult times from the past that she has rarely shared, this love wasn’t always easy, at times it was very difficult.
Tucker still sang that night in Berlin with the shredded voice of a toad. It was one of the greatest shows we ever played. Ask me about highway robbery, ask me about a cat named Sangha, ask me about the tiny robotic mice that scatter speaking the pre-recorded message “Be not unkind to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise”. Tucker and Marie-Claire lived long real love. They walked away from many chances for backwards, music fame, and shallow, fool’s “success”. Marie-Claire worked, teaching community language classes to support their life style (she spoke many languages, and her surreal wit seemed to appear sharp in them all). They just squeaked by ok, and at the end of their lives, when I was lucky enough to meet them, they were happy, curious, present, and full of sweet, weird, creative, playful life-force. I’ll miss them so much. You will too.
Zach Burba
