1896 saw the premier of literary bomb-thrower Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, with its anti-hero Pere Ubu. The play promptly caused a riot, and Jarry—who once said “One can show one’s contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one’s life a poem of incoherence and absurdity” was undoubtably pleased. His goal—to the extent that he had one—was to see the hidebound and the conventional art of his time dead and buried. “Art,” he said, “is a stuffed crocodile.”
No one has ever accused Cleveland’s Pere Ubu of being a stuffed crocodile. The band that would make a virtue of clang and clamor rocketed from the tomb of the Mistake on the Lake’s Rocket from the Tombs, a promising band that collapsed over the usual creative differences.
Tombs’ members split into factions—David “Crocus Behemoth” Thomas and a collection of new players here, Stiv Bator and Company’s Dead Boys (originally Frankenstein) over there. (A third band, Friction, which was fronted by Rocket linchpin Peter Laughner, would collapse without recording an album after he rocketed his way into his own tomb at the ripe old age of 24, the result of booze and drugs.) Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys couldn’t have been more different. The latter band fit comfortably into the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids mold; Pere Ubu followed their namesake straight into the revolutionary absurd.
Thomas’ notion was to create a clamorous and fractured sound, and to do so he enlisted an initially reluctant Alan Ravenstine, whose synthesizers, atonal saxophone, and innovative tape manipulation techniques spelled the difference between Pere Ubu and its contemporaries. The result was the band’s 1978 debut The Modern Dance—arguably the most innovative LP to emerge from the post-punk era.
Pere Ubu set out to produce excellent songs that they then proceeded to render exceedingly strange by virtue of various disruptive forms of pure dissonance. And occasionally they jettisoned song structures altogether. Take “Sentimental Journey,” which eschewed melody for a musique concrete approach that combined electronic squeals and fuzz, deliberately fractured guitar, drum cacophony, atonal saxophone, strange muttering, groans and incantations, and sounds of madcap laughter and breaking glass. You won’t find its equal in the late seventies—indeed, you have to go the whole way back to the 1967 Velvet Underground warped experimental track “European Son” to find its equal.
For the most part, however, Pere Ubu were content to take top notch songs and fuck them up by all of the the means at their command. Songs like “Real World” boast structure, melody, vocals and all of the trimmings, and would meet anyone’s conventionality test if it weren’t for Ravenstine’s commitment to doodle all over the damn thing with his variegated palette of noises.
As for Thomas–whose vocals split the difference between David Byrne and that borderline insane person you see coming down the sidewalk in your direction causing you to cross the street to avoid him—adds a sprung quality to the proceedings: “OUT in the real world/In REAL time,” he sings, following this repeated refrain with lyrics along the lines of “What’s that talk? Girl talk!” and “Birdie Go Fly Fly/Bye Bye!” Laughner holdover “Life Stinks” may have all the makings of an excellent song that would raise no eyebrows, if it weren’t for the chaotic racket produced by guitarist Tom Herman, bassist and pianist Tony Maimone, drummer Scott Krauss and Ravenstine, natch.
“Modern Dance” has a vaguely motorik beat going but veers off the Autobahn when you reach the part where things stop dead and crowd conversation, laughter and applause lead into a Wright guitar so electric fence frazzled you’ll want to keep your livestock out of the room while it plays. “Laughing” opens with some meandering saxophone and casual guitar vamp, but just when you expect it to go on for like that for four and one-half interminable minutes, Pere Ubu launches into a breakneck rocker over which Thomas tosses off lines like a “My baby says/In the desert sands/Our hearts are brighter than the sun/My baby says/When the devil comes we’ll shoot him with a gun.” Bullet holes in the bedroom indeed.
“Street Waves” is a slightly more conventional affair, or at least starts as one. Forward momentum, a savage guitar solo—what’s not for your typical New Waver to like, although the space wind adds a touch of the weird. Then everything stops and you’re enveloped in a cosmic wind with some strange machine operating in the background, and like David Byrne you’ll be tempted to ask “How did I get here?”
“Nonalignment Pact” opens with a wonderfully piercing note before opening into a song every bit as good (and straightforward) as the legendary songs (“Final Solution,” “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” and “Heart of Darkness”) on 1985’s Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection, which compiled some of Pere Ubu’s early singles and B-sides. “Humor Me” is Pere Ubu’s commentary on it all—”Another day?” sings Thomas. “Well SUFFER/For that’s the way of the west/SUFFER/Oh/Oh it’s a joke!”
The sedate “Over My Head” features some muttering, one very weird saxophone (or it a a synthesizer?), and intermittent cymbal crash, followed by a long and mathematical guitar solo by Herman. And then things turn full circle and you get more of the same. “Chinese Radiation” also opens on a conventional note, before devolving into crowd cheers and applause as Thomas gets all excitable and causes you to scurry into the nearest dry cleaners to avoid him. It ends with a stately piano and Thomas going full Red Communist—”He’ll be the red guard/She’ll be the new world/He’ll wear his grey cap/She’ll wave her red book.” Revolutionary love never sounded so… unsexy.
Alfred Jarry once said “It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one’s own bedroom.” Pere Ubu was the gun in the bedroom of American New Wave, shooting bullet holes in the wall framed with the portraits of their era’s counterparts. Everyone else sounded positively rearguard, reactionary even, in comparison.
Pere Ubu produced an oddball clang and clamor you could hear the whole way to New York. It can’t be said that bands like Televison, the Dead Boys, Suicide, Patti Smith, and their counterparts didn’t take chances. They took enormous chances. Pere Ubu didn’t take chances—they stole them at gunpoint. Is it possible to mug an entire movement? Is so, that’s exactly what Pere Ubu did.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
