Autumn's Guide to Cool Girl Drummers: Witch Baby

"'Witch Baby, come out and play drums for me,' Cherokee said. 'You are the most slinkster-jamming drummer girl and I want to dance.'"

I first discovered Witch Baby in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books in the nineties. She was a bit like a wilder version of me. The dark haired tomboy. Always hiding and snail-curling. Covering herself in protective mud. I never played the drums, but I could have. Maybe. Witch Baby teaches herself, playing with her hands. Later she joins the Goat Guys, her step sister Cherokee's band, and finds a rhythmic partner in her childhood crush, Angel Juan, who plays bass. He calls her Niña Bruja and they forge an alliance that's never severed even when Angel Juan goes away.

"She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling into the universe."

Witch Baby has two books of her own, Witch Baby and Missing Angel Juan, but you should read all five of the original Weetzie Bat books (collected in Dangerous Angels). And the sixth one, Necklace of Kisses, where Weetzie has a crisis and Witch Baby shaves her head and goes to college in Berkeley. Witch Baby is the best girl drummer cause she lives inside her rhythms, expressing all her inner turmoil and desire. She's the mud-caked, cool-jamming, purple-eyed girl who fends off clutch pigs, photographs dreams and talks to ghosts.

This is part two in the series, Autumn's Guide to Cool Girl Drummers

Maureen Tucker and the Velvet Underground

"I was sitting drumming thinking thumping pondering the Mysteries of Life." --Lou Reed

Autumn Meredith, Leather Trio Productions: Two cool things happened in 1967. My parents had their only child, me, and the first Velvet Underground album came out. I got the album when I was sixteen at this used record store in North Beach where Cindy's boyfriend, Billy, later worked. I always thought that the coolest thing about the Velvets was their drummer, Maureen Tucker. In those old pictures she always looked kinda sweet and tough with her bangs and dark clothes. And she played drums with such understated simplicity that you hardly even noticed how good she was or how perfect her style was for the band unless you listened really close.

After the Velvets broke up Moe settled down, had a bunch of kids and then got divorced. But she never stopped playing drums. In 1987 that 50 Bejillion Watts label put out a Maureen Tucker mini album called MoeJadKateBarry. Jad Fair of Half Japanese sings and Moe plays primitive drums like only she can. They do old Velvets songs, a Jimmy Reed cover and one original. It's one big crunching dirge of a record.

Now everyone knows that the only great album released so far this year (1989) is Lou Reed's New York. And of course Lou got Moe to play drums on two songs. The real cool one is the song dedicated to Andy Warhol, "Dime Store Mystery." Moe's drums sort of fade in and out of the mix, but whenever they pop out you can hear them thumping along with Lou's voice and guitar like two old friends rediscovering each other. Her drumming is so much tough primitive pounding and so unlike all those oversampled drum machine sounds on so many records these days. Maureen Tucker's drums are "shrieking screaming whispering the Mysteries of Life." Yeah, whispering. Keep on pounding Moe.

Album Network, February 10, 1989