Amongst connoisseurs of revelatory/off the map private press sides, the recordings of Mark Tucker have long provided a functional model of the genre at its most beautifully fucked. Tucker’s second album, 1983’s In The Sack, was an apocalyptic/dystopian concept album that centred on the American postal system and that sounded something like a cross between a teenage Van Dyke Parks and a slightly less disobedient Half Japanese. But his debut album, Batstew, released on his own Tetrapod Spools label in 1975, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The whole concept for this fantastically unlikely recording seems to have been birthed via the conflation of a bunch of Tucker’s obsessions at the time, namely his car (which he referred to as ‘The Bat’) and his “She”, Eva Bataszew, an early girlfriend with whom Tucker had a relationship “riddled with paranormal phenomena”. The death of that relationship would later contribute to the deterioration of Tucker’s mental health and three bouts of hospitalisation for severe depression. The album was released in two runs of 100 copies each, including one personalised edition for Eva, where the title read Bataszew. “She never commented on it,” Tucker relates in the newly penned liner notes, “except to say that she played it for her cousin and he ‘didn’t get it’”. Tucker’s parents were similarly unresponsive. His father “never commented on any aspect of it but several years later, my stepmother asked me if I had written a song about a homosexual relationship, so apparently she had heard it. My mother, who had dreamed of me becoming a concert pianist – the next Rubinstein or Horowitz – hated Batstew in its entirety from the first minute to the last. She never wished to own a copy. After hearing the master tape of the proposed album, she told me ‘You’re selling your craziness’. I replied, ‘So was Beethoven.’”
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PAST TIP OF THE TONGUES
