We don't promote chaos, we preserve it: A conversation with David Thomas of Pere Ubu

Pere Ubu has been at the forefront of American avant-garage rock music since the mid-1970s. The group's first five albums (The Modern Dance, Dub Housing, New Picnic Time, The Art of Walking, and Song of the Bailing Man), as well as their early singles, defined an era of creativity and experimentation in music that, to them, was the natural progression of rock 'n' roll — from Elvis to the Velvet Underground to the Silver Apples and right to their doorstep. Pere Ubu's Coed Jail tour lands at the EARL on Tues., June 21, featuring songs from this seminal period. David Thomas, Pere Ubu’s leader, took a few minutes to talk about life in Cleveland in the '70s, touring in modern America, and the group's journey to the immovable pacific object.

So you guys are starting rehearsals for the upcoming US tour?

Yeah, I leave for America next Monday and we rehearse the week after that and set off on the road.

As far as the material goes, going back into these classic albums, is the approach to preparing the songs different from a normal tour for Pere Ubu?

Well, no – I mean you still have to learn the songs, but it’s a little less harrowing because you know the songs, even if you have never played them live. There are songs we are doing that we have simply never played live. The set covers five albums, and each of them has a different psychological state attached to the albums because that’s the way we do things, so it was a bit weird at first doing one song after the other jumping around in one existential state and immediately to another one and back to the other one. As a singer, that was a bit like being slapped in the face with a cold fish for a couple of days. But like most things in this world that involve pain, you get used to it.

I can understand that, because you are going from all these different eras, even though it is five albums, they're all different statements and such unique perspectives.

In the end I found it pretty interesting, and it’s just a matter of adjustment because you are used to going out with the latest album, and we always do older songs in the set, but generally to be honest with you we just pick the ones that are easy. I know people don’t want to hear that sort of thing, but frankly it’s true. This time, because we had to go out, and to prepare, we chose three to four songs per album, and, you know, you have to learn these songs. As I said, some of them we simply have never done. So it was alright, it was a worthwhile exercise.

So the band is up for the task.

We have a brilliant rhythm section, Steve Mehlman the drummer and Michelle Temple the bass player have everything totally broken down, and they never agree on what the structure is, one of them is saying “This is the one,” and the other is saying “No, that’s not the one,” and that sort of stuff. I’m really happy going out with Gary Siperko, the guitar player from Rocket from the Tombs. He's a Cleveland boy and a pretty magnificent guitar player. He is stunning, so I’m really happy going out with him with this material. He’s scared shitless, I think, as he grew up listening to us.

I don’t know if it’s easier coming from Rocket from the Tombs — playing that music — to Pere Ubu.

Well, they’re related music. Pere Ubu is based on Rocket from the Tombs, conceptually. Pere Ubu is based on Midwestern hard groove rock — one chord and the will to rock. The Tom Herman doctrine — the best guitar part is the one that requires you to move your fingers the least. The mistake people make is that there is this assumption that “Gee, we should do that for the rest of our lives.” That was never in the cards for us. That was our base camp, as it were, but the point of having a base camp at the Himalayas is that you advance from there and climb the peaks. In the end, that has to do with what Pere Ubu is. Pere Ubu tells stories. Pere Ubu, basically, without sounding too fancy pants about it, the idea is to imitate or replicate or communicate the human experience. If you’re going to have an ambition, it may as well be the stars, you just might get there. The human condition is based on physicality, that’s why fundamentally that hard rock groove basis of Pere Ubu’s music is there. We could go off and do airy fairy, a million notes and a hundred time changes, we’re totally capable of doing that stuff, but that’s not telling the story from a human point of view.

Pere Ubu's fan base is looking for ideas to be excited about and progress. You have done everything on your own terms, and the music itself has been so engaging.

The reason it is so engaging is because we don’t stop. We inherited a magnificent vehicle, got it out on the highway and opened it up to see what it could do, by which I mean rock music. After a while you come to a sign that says “satisfied city, exit one mile”, and you think to yourself "We could stop there and have a house and a family, everything would be pretty cool and it would be very satisfying," and there’s nothing wrong with that. But then we see the road disappearing over the hill, and you say to yourself “I have to know,” so you keep driving down that road, and eventually that irresistible westward urge meets the immovable pacific object, and that’s out in the future somewhere for me. At the moment I’m somewhere in Nevada, and eventually we’ll drive the once magnificent vehicle up on the beach of Bay City, with the muffler dragging and steam pouring out of the engine and the doors all dented in, and we’ll walk to the water’s edge. Certainly I hope the end comes pretty quickly so you don’t recall every one of those exits you passed along the way. That’s what Pere Ubu was always supposed to be. As young men in the early '70s coming of age, we could see very clearly the manifest destiny of rock and roll music. It was a straight line from Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel" to Pet Sounds to the Velvet Underground, and on and on. Then at the end of that decade of the '60s, with analog synthesizers coming into play, initially those things were these wimped-out Beaver and Krause explorations of something or other, or “well-tempered Bach” or whatever that stuff was. But then there’s people like Silver Apples that were coming along and saying “No, the synthesizer is a new instrument! This is abstract sound; this is something totally different from the narrative.” So we saw this procession heading towards us, and we were the ones standing there when the bus arrives, and you say to yourself “Okay, this is obviously what is supposed to happen,” and we set off down that road. It’s simply not my fault, and it’s simply not our fault that everything went bad. We did our job, we were standing there, we were paying attention, and just because other people weren’t, that’s not my problem.

You took the ball and advanced it up the field.

We were Jim Brown, the greatest football player of all time.

I wanted to ask about touring the United States these days compared to touring the US in the '70s and other eras.

It’s all pretty much the same stuff. The US is a huge place, and as far as Pere Ubu are concerned, there’s a strip on the east side of the country and there’s a strip on the west side of the country. Well, there’s more on the east side. The east side of the country goes up to the Mississippi more or less, but the West Coast is just a strip down that coast. It’s the same sort of venues and the same sort of nonsense and crummy hotels on the outside of town where we can stay cheap, and the same 500 mile drives. Do a soundcheck, do a show and go on.

What I always appreciated about Pere Ubu is that you have done the tours right. You’re not going to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, DC and then shuttling over to the west coast. On this tour you are playing Knoxville, Atlanta, Louisville, Columbus OH, etc.

We like Atlanta — working with Alex Weiss on this show. I’d like to play Billings, Montana. This is one of my great dreams. Not to disparage Atlanta, putting it in the same category of Billings, but to me Billings would be more exciting. Lincoln, Nebraska. I would love to play Lincoln, or some town out in Texas and on and on. We are road warriors, but we’re not that crazy. There’s a certain limit to how much we can tolerate, and frankly we never slept on anybody’s floor, and we’re not about to start now. I bet we could play Lincoln Nebraska, but you know how it is. We can’t stand going out that long. After about four to six weeks, it really starts falling apart. The intensity level at which we work, and go through the days on the road, it’s just too much. After three weeks we start to slide a little, but then we pick it up for the fourth and fifth week, and then the sixth week we’re just whimpering in the corner of our hotel rooms waiting to get a bran muffin at Dunkin Donuts.

There’s a reason why four weeks is the standard time to be out on the road. I wanted to ask about venues: What is your ideal venue when you like to play?

An ideal venue is a place where the people respect you, the stage and equipment are more or less okay, one way or the other, and that’s about it. We like going to places where the people want us to be there. It’s like Pere Ubu itself: You don’t join Pere Ubu unless you are the right kind of material. It’s not like you’re going to make a fabulous living in this band, or you’re going to have an easy life, or you’re going to be a pop star. It’s the same with venues, we tend to play places where they want us to be there, because there’s nothing worse than being in a place where they don’t want you to be there. It’s simply not worth it to us. Places like the Pilot Light in Knoxville and other places. They’re keen, they want us there. That’s good enough. Evidently the Pilot Light is very small, and I don’t care. What the hell do I care? There’s a really small venue in Ramsgate, England which is incredibly tiny. But it’s a brilliant venue, and the people there are just magnificent. Ramsgate is a teeny little pokey town out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s one of my favorite places just because the vibe is there.

About the new box sets, Architecture of Language and Elitism for the People, I grew up listening to the Datapanik in the Year Zero box set, which was such a great package. I always liked that you kept the albums in print. It seems like there has been a conscious effort to ensure your recorded output is available and you’re not this obscure and elitist band.

Well, we are obscure and we are elitist. I’ll defend being elitist. We’re not East Coast, smug, arty-type elitists. We are people who believe that rock music was meant to be a new kind of literature. That it’s supposed to be intelligent, and it was supposed to accurately reflect the interests of real people. Though we always did music exactly the way we wanted to do it — we always understood and felt deeply that the people in Cleveland down in the flats in the '70s that were coming to see us, were working people. We had to fill four sets a night, we’d take two sets and another band would take two sets, but we were the headliners so we went on first. The other band would think “Oh they are so magnificent and magnanimous, they’re going on first and we are headlining.” Little did they know that we understood that our fans — going to these shows — were working people. They had to get up in the morning because it was Thursday night and they would walk out after we were done. So we’ve never compromised for an audience, we play for ourselves. The audience is an irrelevancy, and again people don’t like to hear that, but we could be playing in front of a bunch of zombies for all it mattered. But we understand that the audience has paid good money, they’ve paid — part of their lives going off to work some crummy job, they don’t want to work has been spent so they can come to see us. That’s a massive obligation, it’s not an obligation to play the songs they want to hear, or do a certain kind of music. It’s an obligation to get out there and give them 100% of what you have. I don’t mean to sound like Bruce Springsteen, but we came from that sort of environment.

So there is this theory that I had with Cleveland and the great bands that came from that town in the '70s: Pere Ubu, Rocket from the Tombs, Electric Eels, Pagans, Mirrors, etc. You have mentioned in past interviews that one of the things that made Cleveland at that time special was the record stores and access to great music, and perhaps a good venue I would imagine?

No, they were pretty funky. The Pirates Cove was a very funky place. The audience often had to stand on chairs because the water pipes or steam pipes had burst and flooded, it was funky.

So in the modern era being, exposed to new music is not so much through your local record store, but online through social media and other Internet sources that everyone has access to. In this era can any town be Cleveland in the '70s, or can no town ever be Cleveland in the '70s?

No town can be that. It was a unique event. I long ago said that the future would return to the days of the '50s when record company guys would drive around with a bunch of records in the back of their car and go to the shops in town and sell the records out of the back of their car. In a way it has returned to that. I’m not a big Internet fan, I was involved in the very beginning of it because it solved a number of issues. Look, I don’t have a phone, I don’t have a TV, I have dozens of old Mac SE/30s and SEs because I never throw computers away. We often say the world changes and Pere Ubu doesn’t. We’re on that highway, heading to the immovable pacific object, that’s all that concerns me. The rest of you people unfortunately are involved in this mess that frankly I’m happy that I’m too old to be bothered with it. I’m old and I’m free. I don’t care if I’ve got food stains on my clothes anymore. I don’t care if my clothes are crummy, and on and on and on. I don’t care. I certainly would not want to be a young musician now, because I think the pressure to conform is immense, and most of the stuff that is produced now just conforms. I mean the “independent stuff” — I’m not talking about pop, because pop always conforms. The indie stuff is just all conformist. All the men sing like women and all the women sing like little girls, and everybody’s using baby talk. You have these thug sort of rap stars who are speaking in baby talk – baby stinkin’ talk! But then I’m aware of sounding like some old man. I’m not some old man just yelling at the neighborhood kids. I’m doing stuff. I’m out there, I’m moving, I’m going down that highway, my foot’s to the floor, when I hit the wall I’m going full speed.

It’s not your problem to solve.

I warned everybody, I said “This is all going to end badly,” and nobody paid attention, so that’s fine.

Pere Ubu plays the EARL on June 21. $20-$25. 8:30 p.m. The Earl, 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.