Rip It Up and Start Again (12 page)

IN JULY 1978,
Stiff Records and
Sounds
magazine jointly announced a competition to win a trip to Akron, Ohio. The highlight of a weekend spent in the “rubber capital of the world” was a guided tour of the Firestone Tire Company. The runner-up would win some Firestone tires and Stiff’s
Akron
compilation, a sampler of local New Wave talent with a scratch ’n’ sniff sleeve—the odor, naturally, being rubber.

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a brief period, about eighteen months, during which Akron and Cleveland, its neighbor forty miles north, were considered the most exciting cities on Earth when it came to rock music. Indeed, when Gang of Four and the Mekons first started to get attention,
NME
hyped Leeds as “this week’s Akron.” Cleveland, declining capital of the steel industry, and Akron, undistinguished and largely unknown outside of the United States, both seemed
exotic,
albeit in a harsh, appropriately postpunk way. “Marvel at the desecration of the earth’s crust,” exhorted Stiff’s music paper ads, hailing Akron as the place “where the American dream ends.” Radar Records enticed music fans to buy Pere Ubu’s
Datapanik in the Year Zero
using pictures of poisoned fish in the pollutant-rich Cuyahoga River and the slogan “The beauty of Cleveland pressed into vinyl.” Journalists decreed the crud-choked Cuyahoga to be a new Mersey running through the two cities surely destined to be as important to late ’70s rock as Liverpool was in the sixties. The only catch was that each city was home to just one truly great band. Akron had Devo and Cleveland had Pere Ubu, but in the hype storm, lesser local lights like Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and Rubber City Rebels benefited in the form of media coverage and record deals.

The concept of industrial music usually gets attributed to Throbbing Gristle, but the Ohio bands built that buzzword, too. In 1977, as TG’s Death Factory began churning out grisly product, Pere Ubu talked about their music as “industrial folk,” while Devo described themselves as an “eighties industrial band.” Synonymous with companies such as U.S. Steel, Cleveland had been the engine room of America’s industrial revolution. But after the steel-hungry Second World War, Cleveland began to ail. “The mills didn’t modernize themselves after the war, so they weren’t as cost-efficient as foreign rivals,” says Scott Krauss, Pere Ubu’s drummer. The seventies oil crunch hit Cleveland, Akron, and the other industrial towns of northeast Ohio hard. Akron’s rubber and Cleveland’s steel had fed Michigan’s automobile industry, but as fuel prices soared, people turned to Japanese-made cars that didn’t guzzle gas.

There’s something special about cities that were once prosperous. The residues of wealth and pride make a rich loam in which bohemia can grow. Former affluence bequeaths a material legacy in the form of handsomely endowed colleges, art schools, museums, and galleries. Artists and slackers live cheaply in once grand houses that have grown shabby and low-rent, while derelict warehouses and empty factories can be easily repurposed as rehearsal or performance spaces. A husk from Cleveland’s heyday provided Ubu with their first regular opportunity to play live. A scuzzy biker’s bar known as the Pirate’s Cove occupied what had once been John D. Rockefeller’s first warehouse. Pirate’s Cove was in the heavily industrialized riverside zone known as the Flats, an area that Ubu waxed lyrical about in their first interviews, describing ore-loaded barges floating down the Cuyahoga, steel foundries pounding nonstop night and day, the glare from blast furnaces bruising the night in hues of green and purple, and belching smokestacks and lattices of piping silhouetted against the sky. “We thought it was magnificent…like going to an art museum or something,” singer David Thomas recollected some twenty years later.

It seems somehow symbolic that Pere Ubu owed their existence partly to inherited wealth. Synth player Allen Ravenstine used trust fund money to buy an entire apartment building called the Plaza in downtown Cleveland, and rented its thirty-six rooms out cheaply to artistically minded friends, including every member of Ubu: guitarist Tom Herman, bassist Tony Maimone, the group’s original cofounder Peter Laughner, drummer Krauss, and singer Thomas. An imposing Gothic building, the Plaza was just one block south of Euclid Avenue, known in the nineteenth century as Millionaire’s Row because the steel barons built houses for their mistresses there. Now fittingly Cleveland’s red-light district, the neighborhood wasn’t somewhere most people would willingly reside, but Ubu loved its ghost town ambience and saw themselves as urban pioneers reclaiming the deindustrialized wilderness.

Another by-product of Ravenstine’s inherited fortune was his expensive EML 200 synth, and the fact that he could take two years off to learn to play it. Living in a house out in the country, Ravenstine clocked in for eight hours of practice a day, just as if it were a job. The EML resembled an “old-fashioned telephone operator switchboard, full of jacks to plug in,” recalls Krauss. Because it had a touch-tone dial instead of a keyboard, Ravenstine immediately bypassed the prog-rock style of synth playing—twirling arpeggios and Bach-like folderol—and got right into the messy business of molding raw sound. “He’d make a noise like a five-pound can with a whole bunch of bumblebees inside,” says Krauss. “Then he’d change the sine wave and it’d sound like a beach with a whole bunch of people on it. Ten seconds later, it’d flip to a freight car noise. The imagination-activating level was absolutely amazing.”

Like Ravenstine’s smeary blurts of electronic abstraction, David Thomas’s high-pitched bleat immediately marked Ubu as not your average bar band. Whinnying like some peculiar asexual monster, Thomas sounded like Captain Beefheart if his balls had never dropped. Unlike Beefheart, there was no blues in Thomas’s throat. “I had all sorts of rules I would follow because I was obsessed with not ripping off black music,” he says. “So I had rules where I would refuse to bend a note or extend a syllable past one beat.” Often he favored a kind of dyslexic vocalese. “I was totally obsessed with the abstract. That’s why early on you can’t hear anything I’m singing.”

If Thomas and Ravenstine were the quirk-out elements in Ubu’s sound, drummer Krauss and bassist Maimone created a solid but inventive foundation for the freaky stuff, resulting in a sound the band punningly described as “avant-garage.” Guitarist Tom Herman, alternating between heavy riffing and sculpted arabesques of twisted metal, shifted around somewhere between the avant and the garage. “David at one point drew a line across the stage and said, ‘This is the intellectual side of the band and that is the tank side’—‘tank’ as in warfare,” recalls Krauss. The rhythm section was designated the muscle, Ravenstine and Thomas the scrambled brainiacs, but Herman stood dead center, in no-man’s-land.

In the 1970s, Cleveland prided itself as being the first musically sophisticated city west of New York. According to Thomas, the city was “a real hothouse” of connoisseur cliques defining themselves through unusual taste. “Everybody in bands worked at record stores, and each store competed to have the most complete catalogs,” says Thomas. Besides ultrahip record shops like Drome, the city was blessed with one of the most progressive radio stations in America, WMMS. Its early seventies playlist reads like John Lydon’s Capital Radio show: Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Soft Machine, even Peter Hammill’s band Van Der Graaf Generator.

In high school, Thomas’s tastes leaned toward the progressive. He was a massive Zappa fan (especially loving the tape-splicing studio collages of
Uncle Meat
) and regarded Beefheart’s
Trout Mask Replica
as a sacred document. The Stooges and the Velvet Underground were common ground across the Cleveland prepunk scene, as much for their attitude as for the music’s raw-power pummel. “We were two or three years posthippie, and those two or three years were pretty significant,” says Thomas. “We felt the hippies were pretty useless as any sort of social happening.” This was the generation that treated
Creem
’s Lester Bangs as a prophet, bought cutouts of LPs by the Velvets and the Stooges, and closely studied Lenny Kaye’s
Nuggets
anthology of sixties garage punk. In Cleveland, a whole protopunk scene developed based around these sounds. Like Ubu, though, the primitivism was studied—artistic gesture rather than lumpen impulse. In the early seventies, the Electric Eels wore safety pins, rattraps, and swastikas several years before the U.K. punks did, and called what they did “art terrorism.” The Styrenes’ performances even featured modern-dance and spoken-word elements.

Pere Ubu were arty as fuck, too. The name came from the monstrously cruel and scatologically crude despot in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play
Ubu Roi,
in its day as scandalous as punk. Thomas explained the choice by saying, “I am in a lot of ways a grotesque character”—a reference to his corpulence and gnarly features—“and the band has a grotesque character. What we are is not pretty.” Thomas also admired Jarry’s “theatrical ideas and narrative devices,” such as his use of placards with words to set scenes as opposed to actual stage props and backdrops. Thomas developed similar alienation effects for Pere Ubu’s performances. Between-song patter might entail him thinking aloud, “Maybe I should get into some sort of audience rapport here?” At one point, Ubu’s live shows included “Reality Dub,” not a song but the simulation of a highly realistic-looking onstage accident.

Pere Ubu formed from the ashes of Thomas’s and Peter Laughner’s previous band Rocket from the Tombs, a less obviously art-warped proposition modeled on the raw power of the Stooges and MC5. Pere Ubu’s inaugural act was recording one of Rocket from the Tombs’ least characteristic tunes as a single. In Ubu’s rendition, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”—an attempt to create the “total sonic environment” inside American bombers as they set off on their World War II mission to flatten Japan’s capital—became even more eccentric. It starts out like some loping, rhythmically sprained hybrid of Black Sabbath and reggae, speeds up a bit, dissolves into free-form splinters, flips back to avant-skank, lurches into a sort of doom-laden canter, then expires in a spasm of blistered feedback. Over six minutes long and almost prog in its structural strangeness, “30 Seconds” sounded about as far removed from the Ramones as, say, Yes did. Nonetheless, when the single—self-released on their own Hearthan label—began to circulate in early 1976, Pere Ubu found themselves lumped in with punk, then gathering momentum as journalists continued to hype the New York CBGB scene while monitoring the early stirrings of insurrection in London.

While they felt kinship with Television (the New York scene’s most psychedelic, least punkoid band) and other American eccentrics such as San Francisco’s the Residents that were coming through the door opened by punk, Pere Ubu were suspicious of the English scene. “Our ambitions were considerably different from the Sex Pistols’,” sniffs Thomas, who regards that band’s brand of rebellion as puerile and destructive. The British, he believes, attached fashion and politics to something that was purely about music and artistic experimentation. Pere Ubu didn’t want to piss on rock music, they wanted to contribute, help it mature as an art form. “Our ambitions were to move it forward into ever more expressive fields, create something worthy of Faulkner and Melville, the true language of human consciousness,” Thomas says loftily. U.K. punk’s class-war rhetoric didn’t compute. Ubu were proudly bourgeois. “My father was a professor. I had an academic upbringing and certainly an academic path was indicated. This was the strength of our middle-class upbringing.” Although their music was dark and disorienting, Pere Ubu’s underlying spirit was constructive and positive. “Things are rough, things are weird, there’s no sense in ignoring that—which is why Ubu music isn’t all sweetness and light,” said Allen Ravenstine in one interview. “But you gotta
confront
the problems.”

Pere Ubu may have disdained the U.K.’s alternately politicized and nihilistic versions of punk, but it was British audiences who most fervently embraced Ubu’s music. The band’s next two singles, “Final Solution” and “Street Waves,” sold very well in the U.K., and Ubu’s first tour there in the spring of 1978 was greeted as the Second Coming. Emerging bands like Joy Division and Josef K were in the audiences, assimilating Herman’s fractured guitar, Maimone’s baleful bass-as-melody approach, and the ominous atmosphere of songs like “Real World” and “Chinese Radiation.”

Back in America, Mercury Records A&R man Cliff Burnstein had decided that Ubu would be the ideal signing to launch his new subsidiary label, Blank. Inspired by New Wave’s pared-down, no-frills aesthetic, Burnstein had developed a fresh approach to breaking bands: Record them cheap, so that sales of only 25,000 were required before label and band started earning. This was a break with the standard seventies major-label approach of extravagant recording and promotion budgets. These costs, recoupable against royalties, saddled the artists with debt, which left them vulnerable to corporate pressure to dilute their sound so that the company could get a swift return on its investment.

With outside interest in the Ohio scene reaching its peak, Blank released Ubu’s debut album,
The Modern Dance,
in March 1978, while in April U.K. label Radar Records put out
Datapanik in the Year Zero,
an EP that made widely available for the first time the best tracks from the three Hearthan singles. At the height of both their acclaim and artistic power, Pere Ubu sealed the impression of their creative floodgates having been hurled wide open by unleashing a second, even more impressive album only seven months after the debut.
Dub Housing
got its evocative name not from any reggae leanings, but a stoned eye’s view of Baltimore as the band drove through the city in their tour van. “In Baltimore they had these row houses, and somebody said, ‘Oh, look, dub housing,’” says Krauss. The vistas echoed endlessly, paralleling the way that drum hits, guitar chords, and horn licks were turned into reverb trails by dub producers like King Tubby.