Melody Maker, June 18 1986
David Thomas at the first Carrot Festival, Warsaw, Poland - Melody Maker April 18 1987
Pere Ubu at the second Carrot festival in Budapest, Hungary

Melody Maker, April 2 1988

Melody Maker, June 24 1989
Finally, in 2002, I got to meet the great man. I was in the U.K. for the summer to research Rip It Up and Start Again - after various unsuccessful efforts, I got a call rather peremptorily summoning me to Brighton the next day. Bird in hand, I thought - I hastened down there with some hastily prepared questions. The encounter was one of the more cantankerous interviews I've done - but in some ways that made it more interesting than a straightforward "here's how we formed, then we made our first record" type data-dollop. We got into debating the history and philosophy of rock - class dynamics - America versus England. A rather bristly, frictional dialogue. We were in a pub near the sea front and at a certain point, Thomas said, "I'm going to talk to my friends" and went over to a barstool and chatted to an old geezer with a dog. Rude! I sat there for a bit and then packed up my tape recorder. Went for a slash and on the way back, I thought, "Shall I say goodbye? Nah!". Caught the train back.
So not the most cordial of encounters, but I'm glad I did it. And whoever said visionary geniuses had to be sufferable?
Below is the tided-up Q and A of our chat.
I read this memoiristic essay by Charlotte Presler about Cleveland in the Seventies
and she said that everybody in the scene was from an upper middle class
background. Or even upper class.
"I’m not sure who was from upper class, but certainly
we’re all from very strong middle class families. My dad was a professor. I had an academic upbringing and certainly an
academic path was indicated. I was extremely bright, in the top one percent in
my class."
Presler also said that most of the people weren't actually
musicians primarily, that they came to it from other areas, like art or
writing. Did you ever toy with other art forms apart from music?
"Nothing else particularly interested me. I was always
interested in sound, and then shortly after that I became interested in rock
music, and ever since I haven’t been interested in doing anything else.
Everything else is an inferior byproduct along the evolutionary path to rock
music, which is the only true artform. We were all taken with the expressive
capabilities of sound and rock music was the form that was making the most
inventive and expressive use of that medium.
Is it true that the first album you bought was Trout Mask
Replica by Captain Beefheart?
"No--the first album I bought was Zappa's Uncle Meat,
then I bought Hot Rats. Then Trout Mask
and Strictly Personal. All this was within about three weeks. The gang I hung
around with in high school was really into Uncle Meat. "
Beefheart was a protégé of Zappa's at that point?
"In Zappa’s version of history, yeah! We liked Uncle Meat because we were in high
school and in high school you’re into Surrealism and Dadaism. Uncle Meat was making use of interesting sounds. Zappa never moved beyond
that, his appeal was always directed at high school students. Absolutely Free
was all that hippy stuff--we weren’t particularly taken by that. Hippy was
pretty passé even then. We were two or three years post-hippy, and that two or
three years was pretty significant. We felt hippies were pretty useless as any
sort of social happening."
Zappa's always struck me as kinda cynical and sneery,
whereas Beefheart seems more… humanist,
maybe. Not a misanthrope.
"Beefheart was certainly much more angular. We liked
hard music. Or at least I did. I was more Midwestern oriented--I liked MC5,
Stooges, and all that Sixties garage stuff like Question Mark and The Music
Machine. Beefheart is very close to that sort of approach.. At that time if you
were looking for electronic sounds there was Terry Riley, Beaver & Krause,
Silver Apples, and all the German stuff. All of that was a component of bands
like MC5. There's always been a relationship between hard Midwest
groove rock and pure sound. So it was natural for us to do that."
So is that the genesis of "avant-garage" as a
concept? The Stooges started out doing abstract noise stuff with a Fluxus/Dada
edge, using vacuum cleaners and the like. Then they turned into a primal hard
rock band. They got less experimental as they went along.
"Avant garage was much later. We got tired of not
having a pigeonhole so in 1979, one of our friends was doing an art exhibition
at Cleveland Stadium of garages--literally a collection of fronts of garages. I
don’t know how he got them. He might have even called it the Avant-Garage
Exhibition. . We thought that was a good
name so we stole it, but only because we got tired of all the silly labels.
This thing of pigeonholing and calling things by generic names is in rock terms
a fairly recent event. In our formative years nobody did that, which is why
nobody thought it was that weird that Jimmy Hendrix opened for the
Monkees. The last time I saw the Stooges
they were opening for Slade. This notion of the latest trend was always a
fabrication of the English punk movement. When our parents or friends would ask
what kind of music we played we’d say, 'we're kind of underground'. Which mean
only that we couldn’t play and nobody came to see us. And then everybody was
also into film, so in early 1977 somebody started talking about it as New Wave.
But we always saw ourselves in the mainstream tradition of rock music."
So you didn't particularly like the term "New
Wave"?
"It’s an Anglo-European obsession with being new. We knew we were different."
Oh, so Ubu weren't motivated particularly by that proto-punk
sort of disgust with what rock had degenerated into during the early Seventies?
"Not at all. This is more or less an invention of the
punk music press. The early Seventies was one of the highlight periods in rock
music. There was more innovation between 1970 and 1974 than ever before. There
wasn’t this narrow vision that has come to characterize things since. The only
frustration was that we couldn’t get gigs. Only the copy bands were getting any
jobs, the cover bands. But then after we stopped whining and moaning, we
figured there are tons of bars, so there must be somewhere we could play. Then
we got off our butts and found this wretched little sailor’s dive in an
industrial part of town, the Pirate’s Cove. And started playing there.
So what makes the early Seventies the peak of rock
creativity as far as you're concerned?
"Eno. Amon Duul and Neu!. Kevin Ayers, The Soft
Machine. The Incredible String Band. The Stooges' Funhouse. John Cale. Things were beginning to move and accelerate.
Maybe people didn't notice it underneath all the other stuff, but it was
moving. Sabbath was too derivative of the blues. There’s a real difference between
Midwestern rock and that kind of heavy rock. It’s really night and day.
Midwestern rock is all based on a flowing riff pattern, not a ba-domp-ba-domp.
We liked groove rock that had the minimum of changes in it. Tom Herman’s famous
defining line was that he judges guitar parts by how little he has to move his
fingers. That’s a pretty Midwestern concept.
If the first half of the Seventies was so great, though, why
was there a need for punk?
"I may exaggerate because so many people dump on it."
Cleveland
was supposed to have extremely progressive taste--to have the largest
concentration of adventurous listeners in between the East Coast and the West
Coast. How come?
"Marc Bolan was considered in Cleveland to be conceptual art, because of
the sickness of his world view and the weird envelope of sound he was working
with. All his teen girlie stuff seemed to be very conceptual because nobody in
his right kind would do it seriously. There’s always been a struggle in Cleveland, a dynamic
between the Midwestern oriented people and the Anglophile people. West Siders
are always Anglophile. They're all Eastern European immigrants, Lithuanian and
Hungarian and Polish. Cleveland was the largest Hungarian-speaking
city outside of Budapest
for decades. These Eastern European immigrants were, working class, white
socks, accordions and so on, and that was of course considered to be the uncool
side of town. And we were on the East Side
where all the liberals and the blacks were. East Side
was considered to be the coolest part of town, but of course as time went on I
discovered that in fact the West Side was
cooler! I don’t know what made them Anglophiles.
It’s not my problem! But the Kinks and Syd Barrett were just massive on the
west side of Cleveland,
and the Bowie
stuff. The East Side tended to be more black people
and English people. The black people were into black music and the whites
tended toward Velvet Underground, MC5, and Zappa. The thing that bound the two
sides of the city was The Velvet Underground--that was the current, the
universal language. Everybody understood the Velvets, and we on the East Side were particularly Velvets orientated. The East Side was much harder.”
Was Cleveland
as grim and industrial in those days as the legend has it?
"I suppose so, but we didn’t sit there saying, 'Gee,
this is grim'. The river caught fire once--so? It’s a heavy industrial town. The mayor’s hair
caught fire in the Seventies but nobody ever tells you about that."
So where did the bohemian, or nonconformist, or unusual
people gather?
"Cleveland was a town of record stores. That’s why it
was the birthplace of rock music in 1951. Alan Freed was in a record shop, the
same shop that everyone in Ubu ended up working in at one time or another:
Record Rendezvous. He noticed all these white kids getting off on 'race records'
so he started doing hops. Everybody who was in a band worked at a record store
and all the record stores competed against each other to have the most complete
catalogues. To have everything of everything. There was a lot of specialized
interest. That's why the worldwide Syd
Barrett Appreciation Society was in Cleveland.
There were these strong cliques of people. It was a real hothouse environment. There
was only 100 people—musicians, girlfriends, sound guys who were your
friends—and everybody knew what you were doing. Everybody was competing to be
the best. There weren’t any places to play, so your reputation would be based
on the five shows a year you could play somewhere. Which meant that everyone
was very well-rehearsed. The Electric Eels, who everyone thought were totally
anarchistic—well, they were indeed totally anarchistic, but they rehearsed too.
Way more than any similar band would have. Everyone took it pretty seriously."
The Drome--that was the hippest record store of all of them,
right?
"It was the store that picked up on the beginnings of
the English punk stuff and the weird American stuff like the Residents and MX-80.
John Thompson, who owned it, was extremely supportive of local bands. He'd have
bands play in his store.. The other stores were owned by fifty year old men, so
none of them had the same focus, or they were stuck in the hippy thing. Johnny
was really into used car commercials and he’d build these television gameshow sets—he was totally nuts. We lived
together for a long time and the whole house was violent pink and festooned
with gameshow sets and cut-out characters.. He had a very modern, American
vision of things—that’s where the concept of Datapanik came from. Johnny and I
came up with that in 1976, this doctrine about Data Panic where all information
had become a drug-like substance, in and of itself meaningless, and the only
thing that mattered was data flow. I have to admit immodestly these ideas were far
ahead of their time."
So he was one of those catalyst figures, who don't make
music themselves but they foster and direct the energy.
"Robert Wheeler, who's our current synthesizer player,
and is a generation younger than me, told me he went into Drome when he didn't
know about anything and he picked up our single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo". This is just
when it had first come out. And Johnny said, 'you can buy that for $1.50 but
instead you could take that $1.50 and go see the band play tonight at the
Pirate’s Cove.' This was his attitude—and this bad commercial vision was the
reason for the Drome’s downfall a few years later. Johnny would rent this radio
theater, the WHK auditorium--an old radio theater from the 1930s that had been
abandoned and was on the edge of the ghetto. And this was where the first
Disasterdromes took places--shows he'd put on with Ubu, Devo, Suicide, and
other bands from other towns. He said the motto is, 'We call it disaster so
nothing can go wrong'. Bums and winos would be coming in and lurking in the
shadows. Somebody lit fire to the sofa. Stuff was always going wrong and people
were always complaining to him. After the first one like that he decided to
call it Disasterdrome, so you won’t be disappointed. Free the consumer from the
burden of anticipation. 'No, it’s not going to be any good, it’s going to be a
disaster'. They were extremely popular."
You were one of the few members of Pere Ubu who never lived
in the Plaza, the building co-owned by Allen Ravenstine?
"I lived with a girlfriend there--it was her place.
Everybody who lived there was a writer, an artist or a musician. It was the red
light street on the edge of the ghetto. The ghetto started one street over. It
wasn’t scary, but you had to be careful, you couldn’t wander around blithely at
night."
Early on you went by the name of Crocus Behemoth!
"I had a girlfriend who was in the Weathermen or the White
Panthers or something. She was very much taken with the Detroit MC5 thing. All
the people on the fringe of the political underground always had pseudonyms. At
the time I was writing for a local paper, Scene, and I was writing a whole lot,
so I had a bunch of pseudonyms., The way they’d come up with pseudonyms was
they’d just open up a dictionary and put their finger on a word, so she opened
a dictionary and put her finger on Crocus and then on Behemoth. That was the
name for the writing I did that was most popular so I was sort of known by
that."
What kind of writing was it?
"I was a rock critic. Endless bands, endless reviews. I
didn’t have any theories--some things I liked and some things I didn’t like.
Eventually I got to be thinking, if I’m so smart I can do this--music--better.
And I did. I didn’t have any dreams of being a rock critic--I became a writer
because I’d dropped out of college and I knew this guy who’d been at the
college paper who was the editor of Scene, so I got a job doing art layout.
Then they needed somebody to copyedit. Soon I was rewriting so much of the
stuff they said we can all save ourselves some time if you just review the
stuff yourself. I had no particular desire. It was just a job I could get."
Calling the band Pere Ubu… you were a big fan of Alfred
Jarry?
"Not a big fan. I’m aware of what he did. All that Dada
and surrealist stuff is the stuff you do in high school. After high school it
doesn’t have much relevance to anything. Jarry’s theatrical ideas and narrative
devices interested me."
Didn't you have this thing called the Theory of Spontaneous Similitude that was
related to Pataphysics?
"Maybe. Spontaneous Similitude just grew out of a joke,
although I suppose it has a serious core. You could complete the phrase, "I
am like…" with the first thing that comes into your head and it still
makes sense. Which is not much of an
idea but it has a certain relationship to the Surrealists and Dadaists. For
human beings there's no alternative to meaning. That’s the serious point of it:
there is no such thing as non-meaning for humans, so if you say "I am like…"
and fill it in with anything, a listener will make some sense out of it because
there is no alternative. That’s clearly the foundational element of sound as an
artistic force. Any sound you hear, there is no alternative but to figure it
out."
Wasn't there a kind of split down the middle of Ubu between
the weirdo "head" elements (your voice and Ravenstine's synth), which
were kind of un-rock, and the more straight-slamming physicality of what the
guitar, bass and drums were doing, which rocked hard?
"Why is there a split? You want there to be a split but
there isn’t one. How many minutes ago did we talk about the genesis of the
Midwestern sound? That it’s a combination of pure sound elements and hard rock.
We don’t see that they’re separate. This is a corollary of the inability of
most foreigners to understand the nature of rock music. You want this
separation of what you would call pop versus what you would call serious art.
There wasn’t a separation as far as we were concerned. We liked Marc Bolan as
much as we liked Lou Reed,. One wasn’t intrinsically more serious than the
other. This idea of pop versus art was
alien to us."
So you thought what you did would be embraced and you'd end
up on Top Forty radio?
"We thought we were the mainstream. That’s not the same
as being popular. What we were doing was mainstream, what the Rolling Stones
and Toto were doing was weird and experimental—40 or 50 year old men going on
about teenage girls. That’s weird. What we were doing was aspiring to a mature
fully-realized artistic form that spoke for ordinary people and their lives."
Oh, so the idea of being deliberately esoteric or
avant-garde had no interest, was redundant, as far as you were concerned?
"We were making popular music. That’s why we did
singles. Whether people liked it or not was not our problem. In the pure,
platonic meaning of the word, we were pop."
Well, Ubu were pretty popular at one point, I guess.
"Nah, nobody’s ever liked us."
But in the UK,
around the first couple of albums and tours, you had droves of people coming to
the shows. There was a big buzz about Ubu in 1978.
"Only because of herd mentality. That’s not cynical,
it’s realistic. We were on the edge of being popular but we were fundamentally
incapable of being popular, because we were fundamentally perverse and
uninterested. This is the strength of our upbringing. This is why all
adventurous art is done by middle class people. Because middle class people
don’t care. 'I’m going to do what I want, because I can do anything else better
and make more money than this'. If you sit down and make a list of the people
you consider to be adventurous in pop music, I’d bet you lots that the vast
majority of them are middle class."
What about the Beatles?
"Do you really think The Beatles were working class?
Really? The Beatles were not working class. The Rolling Stones…. Sit down and
make a list."
Well I agree with you to the extent that the traditional
slant of looking at rock as an essentially
working class thing… it's not total bunk, but it has been woefully
exaggerated thing. Art students and university students have always played a
big part in rock history. At least from 1963 onwards.
"The notion of street credibility is a recent aberration.
It's all designed to create commercial niche markets. Since punk this
compartmentalization has been designed to aid advertising executives to target
their products at the market. That’s not what music and art is about."
So presumably you had no time for the Clash going on about
tower blocks and kids on the street.
"That’s alien stuff. That’s your problem. All this is
nothing to do with rock music. It has to do with the aberrations of European
social structures. To do with a guy wanting to sell clothes. From the beginning
punk rock was designed as a commercial exercise to create a market. This is the
reason why it’s weird when it came to America, because what was going on
in America
was things like Television, Pere Ubu, The Residents, MX-80. It was operating on a totally different level than the Sex Pistols.
Our ambitions were considerably different than the Sex Pistols. Our ambitions
were to take the art form and move it forward into ever more expressive and
mature fields, with the goal of creating the true language of human consciousness. To create
something worthy of William Faulkner and Herman Melville. What was the damn
ambition of the Sex Pistols?"
But don't you think a lot of rock music is about baseness
and vulgarity?
"It’s about vulgarity if you think ordinary people are
vulgar. I don’t think so. I think the poetry of the ordinary man is great. If
you believe that art forms or social progress must be frozen in aspic and
maintained at its adolescent, easily manipulated stage, then sure you’re right.
But there are a lot of us who feel folk music should aspire and evolve to
greater things. The best way of keeping something manipulable is keeping it at
its adolescent stage. Because adolescents are the most gullible sons of bitches
on the entire planet. You can get a kid to do anything. So if you want marketing, yeah, let’s keep it
all about how blue jeans and spiky hair is going to make you different. If you
want that kind of world—that’s the world you got. Punk music won. But that’s
not what we were trying to do. We exist in a different place. One of us lives
in a real world and one of us lives in a fantasy world. Well maybe you live in
the real world and we live in a fantasy world, or maybe we live in the real
world. It’s a question of what you want and what you get.
"There’s all sorts of kinds of music and ways people
appreciate music. To some people it’s nothing more than a soundtrack to a
mating ritual. To others it’s a language of poetry and vision. Not everybody
has to pursue poetry and vision through the same medium. Some understand things
visually or conceptually. The world would be an unpleasant place if Pere Ubu
was the only kind of music you could listen to, because frankly it’s hard work
sometimes and that’s the way we make it, so that it’s hard. I don’t sit around
listening to our music, it’s impossible. Because it requires you to sit there
and listen submit to it, and to be engaged in it. It doesn’t make good
background music."
I get the distinct sense that you don't much care for the
English approach to rock, but at the same time Pere Ubu were much better
received in the UK.
"Only because of the size of the country. I think the
English are the most civilized of all the Europeans. They’re responsible for
most good stuff. But you wouldn’t have
this confusion if we were talking about reggae or Chinese folk music. Nobody
would in their right mind argue an English band could play African tribal music
as well as African tribal people. So where do you get this idea that English
people can play rock music--the folk music of America-- in any authentic way?
Some years ago a magazine paid me to go to Siberia
to see what was going on and I met [Russian rock critic] Artemis Trotsky. He
said, 'The most ordinary amateur garage band in America has more authenticity and
fire and soul than the most adventurous band from England because they’re playing the
music of their blood.'"
Hmmm, do you really think rock music is folk music? It's so
heavily filtered through the mass media. Bands learn from recordings much more
than from their geographical neighbours. It's mass culture, not community
music. Folk music doesn't change that much or that fast, whereas look how
insanely rapidly rock mutated and diversified in just a couple of decades.
"Both your points are baloney. Folk music is passed
from one generation to another. It doesn’t matter if the medium of its passing
is a record, the nature of it is that it’s a passage. And involved in any folk
music is a series of common themes and obsessions. Well that's certainly true
of rock music, where people write songs that are continuations of other
people’s themes. Images are created---seminal things like Heartbreak Hotel.
That image has possessed writers endlessly from the moment it was heard. I’ve
written probably a dozen songs based on Heartbreak Hotel. Read Greil Marcus's Mystery
Train, it’s all about this passing on of communal images. The notion of being
down by the river, the railroad, the worried man. The worried man stretches
back hundreds of years. 'Worried Man Blues' by the Carter Family from 1920 probably has roots back in Babylonia. You’re confused by the commercial exploitation
of the medium, which has nothing to do with the reality of the its function. Because
a folk music is of the people. In any bar you can find ordinary musicians
playing rock music of such high quality that it puts to shame stuff from other countries. That's because it’s in
their blood."
Americans don't have a "blood"! The USA is
an unsuccessfully melted melting pot.
"Yes we do. Only recently since Oprah Winfrey and the
doogooders have taken over has it been less successfully melted. I would argue
that, compared to everybody else, it’s totally melted. It has to do with the New World versus the Old World,
disposing of the Old World’s nationalistic and
socialistic prejudices. This notion that you reject the past and throw yourself
into the modern, into the future, is at the same time the strength and the
weakness of America.
Once Edison invented the phonograph, Elvis was
only a matter of time. Edison invented rock
music, he created the magnetic age in which we still live. Robert Johnson wouldn’t have been anything
without a microphone--music became intimate, you could create quiet songs, the
singer could be perceived as a mortal individual with hopes and dreams. All
this is fundamental to the creation of rock music. Also fundamental is the
American landscape. It's a music of perspective and space. That’s why all rock
has to do with the car. In Europe they had
iambic pentameter, in America
they had the automobile. All of sudden the ordinary man had a poetic vehicle."
But wasn't there a period when Pere Ubu itself tried to
break with rock'n'roll? Starting with New Picnic Time and intensifying with the
Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, it got pretty abstruse and un-rock.
"We got abstract, but you’re assuming that everything
has to say exactly the same all the time. The road has no end. The road is a
Moebius strip. We’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves. One of our abstract
albums might have been us looking at a glass from the bottom, but if you’re
going to know what a glass is then at some point you’re going to have to look
at it from that perspective. One album that everyone considers abstract —Art of
Walking—was to create an image of water going down a drain. The idea was to define
the meaning of the song by coloring in everything but the thing you’re talking
about. We’re obsessed with always pushing it, looking at the bottom of the
glass. But you don’t want to look at the bottom of the glass if you want a pop
career. Well we don’t care. We’re middle class. We don’t care. We’re free."
There was a point in the later Pere Ubu where you imagery
shifted from "industrial" to pastoral.
"That's not Pere Ubu, that’s my solo work. That was
because people came along and said you write songs about cars. I’m a perverse
sort of person so I’ll say, 'Okay, I’ll write a bunch of songs about
pedestrians and call my band The Pedestrians'. I’m going to do whatever I want.
I always look for the other side of the coin. Whatever everybody is saying is
true is probably not. It's never let me down."
On the Art of Walking, you have that line about "the
birds are saying what I want to say". Have you ever listened to Oliver
Messaien? He did all these symphonies based on his transcriptions of bird
songs.
"I don’t pay attention to instrumental music. Music
exists for the singer. The only exception is the instrumental in the middle of
a show where the singer can get a drink and go to the bathroom. That's the sole
purpose of instrumentals."
That's bit of a limited view--I mean, oops, there goes most
of jazz, nearly all classical, a fair bit of African music…
"Yeah. Because those were inferior evolutionary forms.
Since Thomas Edison invented rock the whole point of music is the singer…. I’m
a contrarian, I’m going to stick to my own silly path."
Have you never been interested in doing abstract stuff with
your voice?
"I did that a lot in the beginning—that’s why you can’t
hear anything I’m singing because I was totally obsessed with the abstract. I
had all sorts of rules I would follow because I was obsessed with not ripping
off black music. Like Brian Wilson, I wanted to create a white soul music. I
had rules where I would refuse to bend a note or extend a syllable past one
beat. Until I realized I’d made my point, and it was limiting to keep going. I
like there to be words and meaning."
I think you once said that Pere Ubu became obsessed with not
repeating Dub Housing, the second album?
"No, we’re obsessed with not repeating ourselves in
general. But this particular incident occurred after Dub Housing. Our manager
was very successful, he had just signed up Def Leppard. And he said to us, 'All
you have to do is repeat the same album two or three times and you'll be
stars.' And I said, 'What if we can’t
repeat it? What if we don’t know what we did?
What if we don’t want to?'. And our
big time manager said, 'As long as you make good albums you’ll get signed. But
you’ll never be successful'. Our eyes all lit up and we said, 'That sounds
pretty good!'"