David Thomas February 1996

David Thomas writes the words and sings for Pere Ubu, the seminal industrial-folk-sci-fi-blues band from Cleveland. Their recorded releases include The Modern Dance (1978), New Picnic Time (1979), The Tenement Year (1988), and most recently Ray Gun Suitcase (1995).

DAVID R: Since moving to London, have you become involved in the music scene there?

DAVID T: Not at all. True confessions time: I’m not really a big fan of music. I’m a singer, that’s what I do, so music is a sort of necessary evil, and I have ideas about the way I like to hear it. Most music today is an attitude mall. You go down to the mall and you purchase this attitude or that attitude, like an item of apparel, and this passes for communication, and this passes for culture, and this passes for art.

The attitude mall characterizes the English music scene, which is dominated by a notion of fashion. Everything is this exchange of attitudes. Punk rock is to blame for much of that. The lie of punk rock was that anybody can be in a band. That’s baloney. Self-expression must be left to the professionals. We, for whatever our personal reasons, are uniquely capable of dealing with the massive amounts of pain and public humiliation that go into being creative people. Civilians can’t handle it, they go weird or they break down and need encounter groups. You have to be able to stand massive amounts of pain, a massive amount of public humiliation and failure, and keep coming back for more. So to me the English music scene is just dead, because it’s totally locked into mid-70’s attitude nonsense. Even if I were interested in connecting to the English music scene, I simply can’t.

DAVID R: Living in London hasn’t influenced the way you make music, either?

DAVID T: I don’t live there artistically. Artistically I live in a city that no longer exists. It doesn’t matter that I live in London because even if I still lived physically in Cleveland, the Cleveland that’s still in my mind doesn’t exist anymore. The town I knew, the Cleveland of the early 70’s to the early 80’s, before it became yuppified, was the last gasp of the industrial age. It was the end of the Rockefellers and the city was quite clearly the remnants of a civilization. Barring natural disaster or warfare, no city becomes a ruin overnight; in Incan or Mayan towns, people still lived there, the architecture of the town still represented the hopes and fears of the fathers, the builder’s vision of a civilization and of the world. When the people who live in such a place no longer understand what those buildings represent, when they no longer understand that vision of a civilization, then things begin to happen, and those things are vaguely interesting. Pere Ubu sprang from a certain community, the urban pioneers back in the early 70’s. Middle class kids moving back to the city. I knew the Cleveland of that moment, before they changed it from being a magnificent sort of lost view of the world to a boutique or a coffee shop. But the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company is still standing in my mind. The Universal Vibration Building is still standing in my mind.

DAVID R: These were actual places?

DAVID T: They were. I realize that people are suspicious because they think you’re stuck. But Pere Ubu isn’t stuck artistically or creatively. We just lived in a place and preferred that place. It was a place that meant something.

The thing to understand about Pere Ubu is that we perceive ourselves as a fold band. Our mission really is no more the mission of any other fold band, which is to document or reflect the human condition as perceived through the focusing lens of circumstance, time and place. We produce music – and always have – for a very small community in Cleveland. We’ve all gone our ways, of course, but somehow we're attached to a very small community, existing in a very particular place under very specific circumstances. I live in London now because my wife is English and it was time to move there. But the band rehearses and records in Cleveland, still.

DAVID R: Much more than some of the earlier releases, the production of Ray Gun Suitcase sounds as though you’re actively impressing your personality on the recording process, making it come alive as another synthetic material to be used as part of the band.

DAVID T: This is the first Pere Ubu record I’ve ever produced. Pere Ubu is really a sort of laissez faire group, but a perfectionist laissez faire group. That breeds a certain amount of tension. So we’re not really suited to studio work. We like to work very quickly, not hang around the place. I wanted to produce this record because I had considered that I’d figured it out. And how I though Pere Ubu should be recorded is analogous to something like Method Acting. We did Method Recording. The engineer and I spent a lot of time setting up the actual sound environment the musicians would be in. Some of that ends up on tape, but the purpose wasn’t that it would necessarily end up on tape, the purpose was to get the musician in a space where he would be reacting as you react on stage. On stage you’re in the moment all the time, which is the great power of live performance, everything is rolling, and whatever you’ve done in the last moment you alter in the next moment, and there’s no going back. There’s a really sharp focus – “I can really humiliate myself any moment now, I better pay attention” – which can be hard to attain in the studio, and it was my intention to preserve and foreground that immediacy and focus. That’s why, for example, there’re crickets on the record, not that we wanted them necessarily, but we were running mic cables out the windows and doors – Suma, the studio where we record, is located out in the country – and the guitar player would be doing a guitar part out in the woods surrounded by swarms or mosquitoes. Down the line in the control room we’d hear this whimpering voice saying, “There’s a lot of mosquitoes out here,” and our response was “get on with it and then you can come in!” So things like that would happen. We designed some wooden microphones and some blade microphones, almost anything can be a microphone, everything vibrates, so you can make use of that. We spent a lot of time on the sound of the room, for the purpose not of tape but for the musician.

DAVID R: The structure of Pere Ubu songs fascinates me. With a Pere Ubu song you never know where you’re going to end up. You use the song format but you introduce a lot of experimentation and what I would call drift-structures, different time signatures emerging within the same song, often layered over an unruly, barely controlled foundation of electronic hisses and squeals and yelps. There are song components and anti-song components competing within the same musical entity. Have you considered jettisoning the song format and working in a longer form?

DAVID T: No. I know where my talent is. I work with emotions, I work with poetic visions, images… and I find that I’m particularly capable of dealing with them in units, three or four minute pieces. We are a very traditionalist band. We see ourselves as within the traditional mainstream of rock music as an art. Within the structure there’s freedom. The structure means that you know where everything is all the time, and I think you need that as a player, to keep yourself focused, and I think you need that as a listener as well. Because then you can play with expectations. Structure gives you a few more color pots on your palette. Everybody knows what’s supposed to happen, so then when it doesn’t happen it can pose questions to the listener or answer questions for the listener. I’m a singer. I write the words and I sing the vocal parts. Without structure there’s a danger. Every creative thing you do has strengths and weaknesses, and the danger to working without structure is tedium and self-indulgence and dead-end paths.

DAVID R: The character of the synthesizers in Pere Ubu’s music is dirty, barely controlled, as opposed to the clean, severe synth-pop of, say, the Pet Shop Boys.

DAVID T: with analog machines you get dirt, that’s why we prefer them. But like medieval stained glass, it’s getting harder and harder to find them. The dirt, yeah, that’s part of why I’m attracted to the accordion or the melodian. The melodian particularly is an uncontrollable instrument. It’s always wheezing, it’s always banging, it can’t do something easily.

About what you’ve called this drift-structure: Pere Ubu is definitely a product of our time, a convergence of a number of things in the early 70’s, a number of strains. We were listening to abroad range of things. We were listening to all that weird Can stuff, and were listening to Harry Partch, and at the same time we were into the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, MC5, Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys…All this we thought was the same stuff, you know. Being kids in Cleveland, just buying these records, nobody was telling us that we had to compartmentalize all this stuff, that some of this was serious and some of this was froth.

DAVID R: Serious froth is its own category.

DAVID T: Right. To us none of it sounded like froth. We would say, “this accomplishes something, and this accomplishes something else, and why don’t we just put them together?” None of us sat down ahead of time and said let’s do this, that, and the other. It was just inventing. Edison went though hundreds of prototypes of the light blub before he got it. So, you know, we put’em together because they seemed like they should go together. In the process we discovered this neat machine that was capable of doing stuff. Then it became a matter of figuring out what it could do, and of doing it.

The way we structure our songs is a wonderful tool, a wonderful little engine. We don’t think about it much beyond that. Pere Ubu is not a narrative vehicle. What we do has to do with images. When we’re working and trying to describe a passage to each other we talk about how this part feels, how this part here the fellow’s thinking about every-day’s-a-holiday-now-that-she’s-gone-and-I’m-fine-everything’s-okay, and in the chorus there has to be this false sense of sophistication, a sort of Gershwin thing that happens where this is how he sees his life and then this part’s the reality. Or we talk about what happens when you look north standing underneath the Bride of Commerce statue on the Lorraine Carnegie Bridge blah blah blah – when the band puts things together we tend to talk in terms of images which boil down to a certain set of references to reality. A lot of the responsibility for implying this set of references falls to the synthesizer – and this is why we consider ourselves very traditional, because this is what Elvis was doing, this is the explanation of why he sang the way he did. He was sitting there in a studio with two other guys, one on guitar and one beating on a box for drums, and Elvis was hearing the sax parts and the strings parts and the horn parts in his head and singing according to what he heard there, and this is what accounts for the way he did it. Elvis brought abstraction to country western and blues. That was his greatest accomplishment. He invented abstraction in music. I’m sure he wasn’t the one who really invented it, there were probably people before him, but he’s the one everyone knows. That’s his power. That’s why Pere Ubu is traditional. We’re right down the line.

DAVID R: But the quality of abstraction Pere Ubu brings to the process has for some reason proven “difficult” for people, and I think that much of the reason is because we’ve gotten in the habit of making a split in music between a cool, ironical, and conceptual approach, and a hot, expressionistic, and emotional approach. Pere Ubu deftly combines both ideas, mixes them up to generate fierce pastels, balletic furies, aggressive fragility, vulnerable assertions.

DAVID T: Call it “real.” It’s nice to make things real. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t art supposed to reflect the complexity of the human condition? No one thinks simply. No one. We like to throw in the kitchen sink. We like to have everything in there. “More is better” is our undying motto.

What I think is interesting about Pere Ubu is that we manage to put together at times almost intellectual expositions using emotions and images. To me this is kind of neat about Pere Ubu, and about the work we’ve done.

DAVID R: It’s a personality-based kind of work. It’s not a kind of art that is a “structural analysis” or “contextual analysis” or “issues oriented,” but a kind of art that faces the difficult fact of personality. Personality seems to have become so difficult for people to handle, as a material in making art. It’s as if we’d really prefer personality to just go away. It’s too hard for us.

DAVID T: What I want out of music is personality and I want music that’s attached to a very specific sub-culture of a sub-mini-culture, to a very specific location on the planet. I don’t like homogenization.

I don’t like world music. In the 60’s we used to call world music MOR! Which brings up the whole issue of the best folk music being tedious because it’s about this specific group’s obsessions; anyone else’s obsessions are always tedious. The point is that as human type beings we all share the same hopes and fears, and what can be learned is the specific ways that individuals or groups of individuals deal with those, how they focus on those hopes and fears we all share, and what their perspective brings to light. So I want music that’s really very distinctive, and that’s really very rooted in personality, not just an individual’s self-indulgent personality but some way that reflects a community. Quite clearly, to me the musician must function to better society. The musician must function as a servant of society.

DAVID R: Should we reward the musician with induction to a hall of fame museum?

DAVID T: Rock music is a folk art. The point of a folk art is that it’s anonymous. The real life and vitality of rock music as an art is maintained and kept alive by thousands of musicians and little bands around the world that neither you nor I nor anyone else will ever hear of, so I can only find the notion of a museum absurd.