Mark Tucker IN THE SACK Sealed Private Avant Psych LP

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MARK TUCKER - "In The Sack"

Original STILL SEALED 1983 pressing

Tetrapod Spools LP TDS-64009

NOS from old record store stock

This original LP contains completely different edits/mixes than the recently reissued CD version!

Here's what Rob Hatch-Miller wrote in DUSTED MAGAZINE about IN THE SACK:

Listening for the first time to Mark Tucker’s In the Sack reminded me of the day I interviewed Daniel Johnston. I was excited to meet Daniel, but also nervous because I had absolutely no idea what to expect. When he sat down across from me, he was shy but friendly. Initially I was relieved that he was engaging me in a somewhat normal conversation. A few minutes later, his eyes wandered away from mine, and he started off on an incoherent rant about Nazis.

I can only guess that interviewing Mark Tucker would be equally uncomfortable. Tucker, a postman from the San Diego area who may or may not have believed himself to be the reincarnated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, recorded a series of notoriously weird private press LPs in his home in the ’70s and ’80s. Jim O’Rourke has described him as "a bootleg Brian Wilson," a totally apt description of Tucker at his best. The rough piano-driven instrumentals, especially the cover of Wall Of Voodoo’s "Can’t Make Love," are some of the album’s greatest moments. And a track Tucker sang backward phonetically and then reversed, a space folk love song to astronaut Sally Ride, is astoundingly great. Love, love, love… you may be picking up on a theme at this point in the review.

The title In the Sack is a triple-entendre, referring to Tucker’s profession as a mail carrier, to the "heavy sacks [we all] carry on our back at one time or another," and especially to his (possibly imagined) encounters under the covers. Tucker apparently had a painful break-up before he recorded the album, and his obsessive feelings about women dominate the album. For the most part the fixation is charming, but toward the end he starts to sound hateful and gets pretty unhinged. On "The Sale Is Made," one of two field recordings Tucker uses as interludes, a shopkeeper muses on the origin of human sin: The first woman, Eve. The next song, "Attractive," is an angry tirade about good-looking women who get a free ride in life. Musically, I actually like the track, a sloppy homemade funk song with echoing sped-up chipmunk vocals on the bridge. But the lyrics are totally creepy. In spite of the few painful moments like this, In the Sack is an idiosyncratic and enjoyable album.

And here's what Emilie Friedlander wrote in VISITATION RITES about In The Sack:

United States postal worker by day, musician and co-founder of the mythic Tetrapod Spools label by night, Mark Tucker is finally beginning to earn his due as one of America’s lesser-known outsider heroes. Batstew, his 1975 debut, is now a cult collectible, and De Stijl’s 2006 reissue of the album has expanded his fan base beyond the more obsessive collector contingent. With new CD reissue “In the Sack” (1983), Tucker’s second album, De Stijl reopens Tucker’s slanted and enchanted universe to the public. [Note: The item for sale is a copy of the original LP version, not the CD reissue]

Following Batstew, which doubled as an ode to girlfriend Eva Bataszew and a 1964 Cadillac hearse, Tucker struggled through a series of nervous breakdowns. The cover of In the Sack, released on Tetrapod Spools, signals the end of Tucker’s automobile obsession with an image of a postal truck crashing into a sand dune. And the beginning of a new one: among its many idiosyncrasies, Tucker’s second offering is arguably the only album ever made that can boast the U.S. Postal Service as a central narrative theme. If the open canvas sack in the foreground is any indication, In the Sack is as much about Tucker’s daily frustrations as a mail carrier as it is about his luck with the ladies—especially if we allow “frustration” to include frustrations of the sexual kind.

But asides from track four, which reproduces the boring bureaucratic details of a post office staff meeting, and track ten, a nine-minute rant against a male customer much richer and much more attractive than Tucker himself, In the Sack lacks the narrative focus of an actual concept album. More than tell a story, it recreates a headspace: one of a postal worker gone slightly “postal”, but who would rather search for creative ways to liven up his itinerary than go ahead and crash up the car. Resolutely Major key piano melodies set the soundtrack for a typical day out on the mail route, stumbling over a few tricky roadblocks, and ending, infallibly, on a note of reconciliatory schmaltz. Vibrato-laden vocals, recalling Van Dyke Parks at his most vaudevillian, combine with high-pitched whining, backwards song, spoken word, and passages of found sound, marking the manifold voices (and escape routes) of a man who spends his days walking and driving in circles.

Tucker clearly has a lot more formal musical training than most of the other outsider/real people artists who have made a comeback in the last decade (Kenneth Higney, Gary Wilson), and he probably could have dropped the mail gig and successfully pursued a career writing jingles for radio stations and children’s television shows. But writing TV music in the context of a rock album is a lot different from writing TV music for TV, and Tucker would probably have bristled at the very thought. Where else, other than in the privacy of his own home, could he have embellished his jazzy lounge numbers with the sound of sandpaper on wood, with one-man barbershop quartets, backwards love poems, Alan Vega shrieks, and recorded sound from a dinner at home with mom and dad? Where else could he have been free to create an album at once abysmally unfocused (to our ears, at least) and 100% his own?

The recent vogue for outsider music, and outsider art in general, is not without its ethical conundrums. One might argue that to laugh at the fruit of a troubled mind, even if we simultaneously experience it as beautiful, is to reduce “real people” and their art to a sideshow attraction. And to allow them to be exploited—or to exploit themselves—as such. But Tucker was aware of this way before Daniel Johnston ever became a household name, and he can be credited with a degree of self-awareness that most of his like-minded contemporaries would never own up to. “You’re selling your craziness,” Tucker’s mother famously complained upon the release of his first album. “So was Beethoven,” Tucker replied.

And who knows? Maybe one day misunderstood geniuses worldwide will be saying the same thing to their moms about Tucker.