PERE UBU Ring In The New Year Zero

PERE UBU Ring In The New Year Zero

FEATURES

by

John Gatta

The song came midway through the set at Cleveland’s Agora Metropolitan Theatre, as the energy level was reaching the breaking point. The portly figure of David Thomas led a celebratory pact of music, band and audience:

Don’t need a cure

Don’t need a cure

Don’t need a cure

Need a final solution

The crowd in front of the stage shouted the angst-ridden chorus of “Final Solution” with the kind of zeal brought out by waiting five years for the legendary Pere Ubu’s reunion. The show’s peak arrived and held steady for the next hour. At limes, the dedicated gyrated like puppets on a unified string to the combination of Thomas’s warblings and the band’s complicated, danceable rock ’n’ roll.

Those in the band dubbed this “The Avant-Garage Returns.” I prefer to give it a longer, expository description: the (thankful) reformation of Pere Ubu with all of its surprising and delightful musical highlights with the added bonus of a new LP, The Tenement Year (at the time of this writing, Ubu was negotiating for a label).

As for their separation and reconciliation, Thomas says, “We were working on the Song Of The Bailing Man album, and that was a difficult one to record. There were some personality things going on, but everybody bore down and concentrated to get it done. When it was finished it was like releasing a spring, a spring that’s wound too tight. So we all dispersed.

“Days turned to weeks, weeks to months and months to years. And nobody at that point had the strength of will to do what was necessary to solve the problems. A couple years ago we started working together more. It began to be talked about and more and more of us worked together ’til it finally happened last year (Ubus Allen Ravenstine and Tony Maimone worked on Thomas’s two Wooden Birds LPs). We determined that the ground had cleared and everything was go.

“Last year Scott (Krauss, original Ubu drummer) sat in with the Wooden Birds and that went really well. We started talking a lot about what was going on and what we were going to do. In the end, it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck and walked like a duck. So it was a duck.”

A brief Pere Ubu history lesson:

The band started in September of 1975 in Cleveland as an informal unit, which included late CREEM writer Peter Laughner, for the sole purpose of recording a single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”/“Heart Of Darkness.” Their name was taken from the lead character in Alfred Jarry’s early dadaist play Ubu Roi. “I named it Pere Ubu,” says Thomas, “because of Jarry’s production ideas that engaged the imagination, it sounded good and it doesn’t mean anything to most people.”

And things grew from there. Another classic 45, “Final Solution”/“Cloud 149,” was released the following year, and then a slew of albums: The Modern Dance, Dub Housing, New Picnic Time, The Art Of Walking, 390 Degrees Of Simulated Stereo, Song Of The Bailing Man and the compilation EP, Datapanik In The Year Zero. Regrettably, the masses weren’t paying attention, but critics and handfuls of faithful followers were. Ip Ubu, they saw a garage band style that happily zigzagged its way into the avant-garde. The music stretched the boundaries of rock, experimenting with the members’ vast array of influences, including ’60s pop, acid rock, dadaism, surf music and Cleveland.

“We never consciously set out to be different,” Thomas says now. “I suppose we were, by nature, different. We didn’t sit around and say, ‘How can we devise a sound formula that will revolutionize?’ No one ever does that sort of thing. When we got together for the first time and played, that’s what happened. ‘Heart Of Darkness’ is really the first Pere Ubu song. The personality on ‘Solution’ and ‘30 Seconds’ is Ubu, though they were songs from Rocket From The Tombs (an earlier Thomas and Laughner band). It sounded good to us. Plus we all came from bands that were doing music that was totally out of touch with what was going on at that time. Because we were more out of touch didn’t faze us or surprise us.”

Following six LPs, the difficulties within the band were too much and it was time to punch the clock and get out.

“We finished a phase with the last album,” he says, “and needed time to take a look around and see what we wanted to do next.” What they did was go away. For a long time, as it turned out.

A hefty portion of The Tenement Year was previewed at the Cleveland show— such titles as “We Have The Technology,” “Universal Vibration,” “Say Goodbye,” “Bus Man’s Honeymoon,” “Miss You,” “Rhythm King” and “Talk To Me.” The new tunes sound less overly experimental, polished yet containing a rawedged character. The material’s irreverent quality evokes an avant-garde Grateful Dead with itchy rhythms, scattershot guitar riffs and masterful synthesizer exploits.

But whatever you think of Ubu’s compositions, don’t label them, as too many have done in the past, “industrial music.” The tag angers Thomas.

“That’s a term applied by people who never saw us or couldn’t bother to figure out what we really did. Labels are irrelevant to what we do. We don’t sit thinking what this is. It simply is. To us it’s pretty traditional rock music. We’re always flattered when people think we’re avantgarde, so we’ll accept that. We experiment from time to time and set out to solve problems where we end up doing things in roundabout ways sometimes. But we don’t set out to do it just for the sake of doing it. We set out to accomplish and communicate something that can’t be communicated any other way.

“We’re not industrial music—never were, and have nothing in common with any of the other people who are labeled as industrial music. It’s just something that got stuck on us because people didn’t know how to deal with what we did. What we did didn’t fit anything and it had certain sounds and things attached to it. Ana we always talked about the Flats (Cleveland’s industrial section on the Cuyahoga River which is now known for its nightclubs in old warehouses) and stuff like that, so people thought, ‘Aha! Industry. Industrial music.’ But it has nothing to do with it.”

The members still have an affinity for the place that detractors call “The Mistake on the Lake.” Though Thomas lives in London with his English wife, he comes back to Cleveland to record—at Suma in nearby Painesville, Ohio because “We like Paul Hamann (son of longtime Ubu engineer Ken Hamann). He’s a brilliant engineer and that’s what counts”—and because the city provides a comfortable, homelike atmosphere.

“The things that drew us to Cleveland were the realities of the things, not the images. It’s awful hard to explain it in a few words. It has to do with our youth and with a particular year and vision we had that was very strong. Because of that and the fact that we knew we were unique in th&t we were one of the best bands in the world, we had a bonding that went on with Cleveland in the Flats.

“It was our home. The reality that we have, in that we know that Cleveland was never anything connected with anything that anybody else saw. The Cleveland that we know doesn’t exist. It’s in our hearts and in our minds. It’s like another dimension. That dimension will not be affected by anything anybody does. We lived in a Cleveland that doesn’t exist and we always will. We live in the ideal of Cleveland and it’s a very private vision, so nothing affects us.”

Not even, evidently, the second coming.