Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (18 page)

Bob Mould, Sugar /
Hüsker Dü
:

Their music sort of scared me the first time I heard it, it’s really ominous and different. Pere Ubu seemed to really capture what it would be tike to live in an industrial city. Their music was like industrial soundscapes. They really presented the whole thing well, you couldn’t tell if they were factory workers or artists. The lyrics were really oblique, the melodies were different. It wasn’t punk rock but it was really energetic.

When Thomas released the songs as a single, it became necessary to play a live show to promote the record, and Pere Ubu got together again. One show led to another, then another, and by the time they recorded a second single in 1976, the band had settled into semipermanent status. Still, Pere Ubu was far from stable. The first notable departure was original bassist Tim Wright, who moved to New York and joined the no-wavers in
DNA
, a band that took Pere Ubu’s disjointed and dissonant sound to a new extreme. Laughner, who had been one of the group’s songwriters and creative leaders also left, to form his own band, Friction. In June of 1977, at the age of 24, Laughner died, succumbing to the excesses of substance abuse. He is best remembered for early Pere Ubu compositions as well as the Dead Boys’ “Ain’t It Fun” (which Gun N’ Roses covered), and two albums of Laughner’s solo recordings have been released posthumously.

While in Pere Ubu, Laughner had been a force toward more traditional rock styles. With him gone, Thomas’s more avant leanings gradually took hold – though Thomas preferred to define himself as pop. “I personally consider Pere Ubu to be a pop band, totally the same as Wings or the Archies,” Thomas told the punk zine Search & Destroy, “It’s just that we’re doing more modern and therefore better pop music. We’re not concerned with the pop music of the past.”

Scott Kannberg, Pavement:

They were a huge musical reference. Their songs are warped. To me they’re like classic rock, just as classic as Boston or whatever. I see a lot of similarities in our early stuff, with the tape loop electronic stuff running with a classic song.

With two standout albums released nine months apart, 1978 was the year Pere Ubu finally took off. Like their earlier singles,
The Modern Dance
and
Dub Housing
were well received in England and proved a major influence on post-punk. Though still capable of rocking, Pere Ubu’s quirkier side emerged: Thomas’s yelping and squealing of fractured melodies; abrasive, industrial sound effects (such as the seeping steam in
The Modern Dance
); Allen Ravenstine’s inventive synth playing; and a bizarre stage presence that seemed to come (like the band’s name) straight out of absurdist theater. Anchoring it all was Tony Maimone’s dubby bass and Scott Krauss’s always on-the-mark drumming.

Marceilus Hall, Railroad Jerk:

They were doing artistic things with instruments that had never been done before. Angular rock and high, dramatic singing. He had this way of singing I thought was cool because he was trying to sound helpless at times. That kind of desperation in the voice appealed to me then, and it still does.

Following 1979’s
New Picnic Time
, Pere Ubu underwent another significant change. When Tom Herman, whose angular guitar work helped define the group, quit the band, he was replaced by
Mayo Thompson
, who had been and continued to be leader of
Red Krayola
.
Thompson
’s presence, added to Thomas’s already well-defined eccentricities, made the albums
The Art of Walking
and
Song of the Bailing Man
Pere Ubu’s most challenging work.

By 1982’s
Bailing Man
, Krauss had been replaced by Cleveland – via-New York drummer Anton Fier, who’d just finished stints with the
Feelies
and Lounge Lizards. The band was plagued by infighting and, worse, a lack of inspiration. Thomas, who released his first solo album in 1981, decided to concentrate on his solo career, and Pere Ubu entered an extended period of inactivity. Though they would reconvene in the late ‘80s, their influence on subsequent generations of avant-rockers was already secure.

David Thomas’s 1987 solo album Blame the Messenger featured a band (called the Wooden Birds) that included former Ubus Allen Ravenstine and Tony Maimone (who later played with They Might Be Giants and Bob Mould), as well as Cleveland guitarist Jim Jones. Somewhat by default, this band – with the return of Krauss and addition of second drummer Chris Cutler (of Henry Cow) – became the re-formed Pere Ubu that resumed recording in 1988. Though initially they sounded quite close to their last incarnation, by 1989 the band had taken a more pop approach. In the early ‘90s, however, former
Captain Beefheart
guitarist Eric Drew Feldman (who later played with Frank Black, P.J. Harvey, and Belgian band Deus) joined the group, reaffirming their idiosyncratic roots. In 1998, after a period where Thomas led a band with none of the original members, Tom Herman and Jim Jones returned for the album
Pennsylvania
.

DISCOGRAPHY

The Modern Dance
(Blank, 1978)
; an adventurous and fully realized debut.

Datapanik in the Year Zero
EP
(Radar, 1978)
; a collection of the pre-
Modern Dance
singles, not to be confused with the identically named box set.

Dub Housing
(Chrysalis, 1978)
; the creative peak of the early Ubu records.

New Picnic Time
(Chrysalis [UK], 1979)
.

The Art of Walking
(Rough Trade, 1980)
; with the addition of
Mayo Thompson
, the band digs deeper into eccentricity.

390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo
(Rough Trade, 1981)
; a live album capturing the early Pere Ubu lineup in all its ragged glory.

Song of the Bailing Man
(Rough Trade, 1982)
; the final studio album before the extended hiatus.

Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection
(Twin/Tone, 1985)
; an interim collection of early singles.

The Tenement Year
(Enigma, 1988)
; the strong return after a six-year absence.

Cloudland
(Fontana, 1989)
; a reflection of Thomas’s more conventional approach to songwriting.

One Man Drives while the Other Man Screams
(Rough Trade, 1989)
; a second set of live recordings, this one from the ‘78-‘81 incarnation.

Worlds in Collision
(Fontana, 1991)
; a less successful pop-oriented album.

Story of My Life
(Imago, 1993)
; their major label peak that ironically coincided with a return to eccentricity.

Ray Gun Suitcase
(Tim/Kerr, 1995)
; called their final album, it returned to a more challenging era of Ubu music.

Datapanik in the Year Zero
(Geffen, 1996)
; a five-CD box set that includes the first five studio albums, rare live recordings, and a disc featuring recordings of Ubu members’ side projects and other bands.

Pennsylvania
(Tim/Kerr, 1998)
; features the return of Tom Herman and Jim Jones.

RED KRAYOLA

MAYO THOMPSON

Mayo Thompson, Red Krayola:

We came from an avant-garde tradition that tries to push limits. We saw ourselves connected to an intellectual tradition more than a musical one. We didn’t want to be the same as everybody, just popular and part of the youth movement. We wanted to be the greatest and most radical of all. We saw our competition as
John Cage
and Miles Davis. We’d look at some of these ‘60s bands and say, “Oh, you think you’re wild? Have you heard Albert Ayler? Get serious.”

The Red Krayola (or Red Crayola as they were known in Europe, outside the reach of crayon trademark lawyers) has been around for over 30 years. Through each of its four distinct incarnations two things have remained constant: first, the inspired leadership of Mayo Thompson; second, obscurity. Despite the latter the Red Krayola have left their mark on a few key bands who’ve distilled certain elements and passed them on to a wider audience. It can be heard in the warbly eccentricities of
Pere Ubu
, in the psychedelia of Spacemen 3, in the Texas freakiness of the Butthole Surfers, in the Marxist pop of Stereolab, and in the post-rock music of Tortoise and Gastr del Sol.

Thompson formed the Red Crayola as a quintet in Houston in 1966, though the group was soon pared down to a trio featuring Thompson on guitars and vocals, Steve Cunningham on bass, and Frederick (Rick) Barthelme (now a well-known author of minimalist fiction) on drums. Gigging through 1966 and early ‘67, the group developed a dedicated core of fans, friends, and associated artists that called themselves the Familiar Ugly. A sort of Texan version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the group participated on stage in the Red Crayola’s “free form freakouts,” massive spontaneous cacophonies that also appear six times on the group’s debut,
The Parable of Arable Land
. The record also featured their International Artists labelmate
Roky Erickson
(of the
13
^th
Floor Elevators
), who played harmonica and organ on more structured garage psychedelia such as
Transparent Radiation
and
Hurricane Fighter Plane
.

Though
Parable
captured the group in its early stage as a conventionally structured – though certainly unusual – rock band, the Red Crayola wanted much more. As art students without much musical experience, from the start the group intended to work more in an avant-garde art context than as a rock band. Their reference points were experimental music and free jazz, as well as their “general revulsion for the lack of nerve of most people in the world.”

After collaborating with guitar improviser John Fahey in California, the group returned to Houston at the end of ‘67 and made a second record, a radical departure they called
Coconut Hotel
. A vigorous deconstruction of traditional pop elements, the record featured tracks like
Vocal
,
Piano
, and
Guitar
– formless demonstrations of the various sounds each instrument could make – as well as 36 different
One-Second Pieces
that explored the various permutations a band could represent in a single instant. It was closer to the experiments of
Cage
than a rock album, and the group’s label wasn’t sure what to do with it. When Barthelme left the group and Thompson returned to California, the record was shelved, not to be properly released until 1995.

David Grubbs, solo / Gastr del Sol:

I was very fortunate to hear the Red Krayola first when I was in high school. Their songs prompted question after question. Why fragments? Where are the handrails? What is that sound on
The Shirt
? (This was an important adolescent acousmatic experience.) The song
Music
obviated punk’s fourth wall. I was scandalized by it in the best possible way.

In 1968, International Artists convinced Mayo to return and make one more album.
God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail on Her
, which featured Thompson and Cunningham (and a new spelling of Krayola to avoid trademark infringement), was slightly less extreme than
Coconut Hotel
but sufficiently bizarre to ensure its commercial failure. Though it was the most successful integration of the group’s experimentation and art song style, by the time it was released the group had ceased to exist.
God Bless
did, though, point to the more acoustic, song-oriented approach Thompson took when he made a solo album in 1970. The tuneful
Corky’s Debt to His Father
featured the cream of Houston musicians, but, like
Coconut Hotel
, was not formally released at the time. A lost classic for many decades, it was finally made domestically available in 1994.

Jim O’Rourke, solo / Gastr del Sol:

Corky’s Debt to His Father
helped increase my interest in songwriters. It always struck me how wonderful that record’s arrangements were. It helped move me away from wanting to do tape music, and into producing records and making arrangements. Mayo has so many divergent interests – sociological, linguistic, musical – and the music is so much a result of him trying to put it together.

Thompson relocated to New York in the early ‘70s and, through an association with artist Robert Rauschenberg, met a radical collective based in New York and London called Art & Language. “They were the nastiest piece of work around as far as conceptual art was concerned,” Thompson recalls. “The hatchet boys, the hit men, with the fastest tongues and sharpest language.” Soon Mayo was writing songs to the group’s poetry, which was full of obscure philosophy and Marxist theory. “I gave them a copy of
Corky’s Debt
and asked them what they thought. ‘The lyrics are highly personal and don’t mean anything to anybody but you.’ And I said, That’s probably true. Do you have a better idea for lyrics?’ And they gave me the material for
Corrected Slogans
.”

Credited to Art & Language and the Red Crayola, 1976’s
Corrected Slogans
featured a cast of a dozen writers, singers, and musicians doing songs like
The Mistakes of Trotsky
,
Thesmorphoriazusae
, and
Don’t Talk to Sociologists
. Both philosophically and musically, the record had little to do with any rock tradition before it (though decades later, Stereolab’s lyrics come close).

Because Thompson was more closely aligned with the European branch of AGL, he moved to London in 1977 and made two more records with the group, ‘81’s
Kangaroo?
and ‘83’s
Black Snakes
. Thompson also got a job with influential indie label Rough Trade, for whom he produced records by the
Raincoats
, the
Fall
, and
Pere Ubu
(a band he would also join in the early ‘80s). And he continued making Red Crayola records with guest musicians such as Lora Logic (of
X-Ray Spex
), Gina Birch (of the
Raincoats
), Epic Soundtracks (of Swell Maps), and Allen Ravenstine (of
Pere Ubu
). Following 1984’s
Three Songs on a Trip to the United States
(which featured regular Crayolas Jesse Chamberlain and Ravenstine), Thompson put the group aside once more while he worked as an executive for Rough Trade (he marketed the Smiths’ Queen Is Dead). By the late ‘80s, Thompson found himself in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he worked as a jingle writer and made another Red Crayola album with German collaborators.