David Thomas - Rock's Own Ubu Roi

The Pere Ubu (named after Alfred Jarry's play “Ubu Roi”) are one of the most important bands of the new wave. Formed in Cleveland in 1975, they rose to prominence on the underground scene with their multifaceted “art rock”, topped by a unique voice, that of David Thomas. Their masterpiece “Modern Dance” (1978) is a concept album about alienation and anguish in industrial civilization. A “modern dance” that starts out from the wild energy of garage rock, but is then contaminated by endless harmonic variations, amid bursts of free-form playing (horns, cacophonous keyboards, crackling guitars, psychotic vocalizing) and sudden shifts of tempo, all topped by Thomas's furious, schizophrenic singing. Thomas, born in Miami in 1953, embodies the grotesque mask of Jarry's “Ubu Roi”. A hulking crooner who commands the stage with an imposing presence, yet is torn apart by paranoid complexes and schizophrenic impulses, from which he tries to escape into his “parallel life” as a Jehovah's Witness.

A rock critic since 1972 under the pseudonym Crocus Behemoth, Thomas moved in hard-rock circles (MC5 , Stooges , Blue Oyster Cult) and sang in other bands before forming Pere Ubu in 1975 (together with Peter Laughner, who died of an overdose in May 1977 at just 24 years old). From then on, the Cleveland band became a classic of the American underground, with an original sound that, although partly inspired by Velvet Underground , Captain Beefheart and the Stooges, proved to be absolutely unique. A sound that critics would come to worship, and that would influence an entire school of post-punk bands including Rem , Hüsker Dü and Pixies . David Thomas has alternated his work with Pere Ubu with a solo career and one with the Two Pale Boys, which have cemented his reputation as a brilliant vocalist and one of the most striking “masks” in rock. Here's what he had to say in this long interview

There's no denying it: the venue is fitting. Granted, without fear of contradiction, that there was no such intention, they couldn't have picked a better one. A former psychiatric hospital hosts David Thomas and his Two Pale Boys on July 5th at Arezzo Wave. We show up for the interview well aware of how hard it is to communicate – let alone talk – with this genuine living legend. We know the Man, after all: and watching him during the soundcheck confirms exactly what we expected. Introverted, solitary, subtly haughty, irritable at times, fully aware of the intellectual weight he carries around.

We enjoy watching him in peace as he snacks on peanuts and cognac while waiting for his turn at the soundcheck; we get a kick out of seeing him in a blood-red butcher's apron, stroking that strange accordion-like instrument called a malodeon; we grasp the full measure of the man when he gets annoyed, moody as a diva, and storms off the stage; we're a bit intimidated when we're finally waved over to start, just as we'd almost given up hope.

David sits there with his eyes closed, and you can't tell whether it's out of solemnity, or quiet amusement, or – jaded as he is – simple awareness that he's facing the usual pack of hacks who just happened to show up for the all-expenses-paid five-day junket, as defenceless as a lamb awaiting questions that will insult common sense and intelligence. Right now, he holds us in contempt. Well, we've got to start somewhere.

How did the collaboration with the Two Pale Boys begin?

I already had a band in the United States and wanted a similar one in England too, so I asked my manager to find me a couple of suitable musicians. He suggested Keith Moliné and then Andy Diagram.

You didn't know them?

No, although they were already playing in other bands. First the manager suggested Keith on guitar and I said right away: "Ok, he's in". At that point it was the two of us and a violinist, who however left the band after a few gigs. I asked who we could get and Andy's name came up. Even though I had no idea who he was, after a few shows he was definitely in.

He answers as if reciting a script. Let's try to break the ice.

At one point during the cover of "Surfer Girl", on the box set you've just released, you go into a long monologue about Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground and a country song called Stand by earth's man. It seems like you want to rediscover the beauty of the simplest rock, almost a return to the roots...

No, absolutely not. The things I say in my records are fictions. I put them together and construct them, but that doesn't mean they're true; they come out that way because that's what's needed in certain situations, to get me where I want to go. The things I say when I'm making art, modern art, aren't necessarily accurate or true, only necessary. It's modern art itself that's true, a result made up of a series of fictions. For a long time I thought there was a song called "Stand by earth's man" and I had no idea of that particular context. The rest of the story I tell is simply invented, it certainly didn't take years to put together. This is what's called "making art, making poetry", it's invention, exactly like Shakespeare invented and created. If I had to explain why I put it into "Surfer Girl", it would take hours, it's poetry and must be accepted as such, and that's because I'm a musician rather than a writer. If I'd been a writer I would have written books, but instead I'm a musician, so I deal with visions, with poetry, with emotions. Everything is emotion and vision. If you take the individual parts and separate them, you end up trivializing them, it becomes hard to talk about, it becomes impossible. See, even I'm rambling around a simple question, it can't be explained...

One of the last Pere Ubu albums is titled "Pennsylvania". It's the name of a place, one of the many places you've dedicated song titles to, down to the 'no place' of Erewhon. Why?

Erewhon is an anagram of Nowhere. It's a 'utopian' album: erewhon, nowhere, a place that doesn't exist. I love places, especially the ones that don't exist, that's why I arrived at "Pennsylvania" after Erewhon. Everything has to do with geography, sound itself has to do with geography; in particular modern sounds, the sounds of the magnetic age, have to do with space, and space is understood by us in terms of geography. Behind all of rock'n'roll there's the notion of sound as geography. Today, though, people increasingly live in places that don't exist, in cities that don't exist. The places, the cultures of the world are all disappearing, they're all Erewhon. Today we live in a world where culture has been reduced to the choices you make inside a boutique, culture today is buying a pair of jeans, culture is reduced to a single worldwide boutique. And Italy is no longer Italy, America is no longer America, the people considered 'cultured', those who know how to use words well, are liars. The purpose of the written word is to lie to ordinary people, it's a weapon in the hands of social engineers.

The only thing that can't lie is geography, the land, your land never lies to you. For example, what connects me to Mark Twain isn't blood, isn't politics, isn't some cultural continuum. I mean, Mark Twain was simply an American like me, just from a different era than mine: what links us is the land we were born in. My generation is the last one that can call itself American. Kids under thirteen in America aren't American anymore, just as Italians under thirteen aren't Italian anymore, they're all inhabitants of some imaginary global village. In the global village you're nothing anymore, and look, that's not a criticism, it's an observation. So the only thing that connects you to the past is the land, where there are hills watching over you, where there are mountains looming, where the wind blows, where there are trees and fruit, where the grass grows. All these things are the only ones that never lie to you. That's why "Erewhon-Nowhere". And "Pennsylvania"?

Pennsylvania because... Oh, I don't know, I don't think many people could understand why I'll call it that. Let's say, though, that Pennsylvania is a very long state, anyone who wants to go to New York or the Atlantic coast has to pass through Pennsylvania, but nobody stops there. So the album has to do with things you have to go through to get somewhere, places you have to travel through to reach some other place. That's the concept behind the album. Pennsylvania is in a way another place that doesn't exist, another "nowhere". When we talk about Pennsylvania we know what it means, it just means "a long journey to get somewhere". It's something that should make you think of Orwell, there's an Orwellian key to get there. When you think of Orwell and things disappearing you start thinking "Oh, this is the concept behind 1984, the fact of controlling people, the fact that people can be controlled even in their own desires" and so on, you get it?... But we're too smart a band to explain everything, it would take twenty-five years to make everyone understand, so let's stop now.

Hmm... isn't there a bit of longing for the 'good old days' in what you're saying?

I never said "the good old days". We're all citizens of the television world, once upon a time all peoples were different from each other, so were Germans, Italians, Americans. We had very different ideas, cultures. What could be learned from one another was very exciting, it was like seeing things through glass, it was exciting to know how the same emotions and the same fears were interpreted from different points of view. As time goes by everything becomes homogenized, and it ends up that looking into each other's eyes becomes like looking in a mirror; when I look into you, more and more I see myself. It's not a matter of "the good old days", it's a matter of differences. What's happening today in this so "politically correct" world, where we all have to appear happy, equal and homogenized, is that differences are disappearing, while from differences you can always learn. Then these social engineers come along and say "Oh, what's happening?" and discover that there are no more different races! What I'd want from you is for you to be different from me - understand? - because I could learn much more from you if you were different, rather than looking at you and seeing a reflection of myself. It's not nostalgia, I'm not a nostalgic person. I'm just observing what's happening to us, what's happening to our children.

He finally looks me in the eye. You can tell it really gets to him. The relationship is frank and the man not remotely accommodating: if I ask questions he doesn't like, he has no problem saying so. I could be the most important journalist in Italy - though for that matter he doesn't even know the name of my magazine - and he'd behave the same way. There's sarcasm in his words, almost bitterness. He doesn't love the modern world and doesn't hide it from you. And you are part of the modern world.

In the booklet accompanying the box set of your solo work, you write that the album "Winter comes home" doesn't exist.

That's right.

Are you sure?

Yes.

But I've got it…

You're living a life of illusions.

Is it an illusion?

It's an illusion. It's officially gone. It never existed.

But it's not such a bad album…

Nobody ever said it was bad, I simply said it never existed (he gets worked up, raises his voice). As I explained somewhere, I don't remember where, maybe on the website, everything that happens in the modern era, like the Ubu Project in the modern era, can't be understood simply through albums. As I explained, that album was conceived to have a very limited lifespan, an album that was simply about a theatrical experience. When we were doing that show we decided to record a performance because we wanted people to come and see us after hearing it. I haven't performed it again for at least ten years now, and there's no reason to keep a souvenir of that show. Today it could only exist so people could judge that theatrical event, but that's not what it was created for, and so I decided it can't and shouldn't exist anymore. If you decide to make modern art you shouldn't keep referring back to past experiences — at least that's my way of understanding modern art, which is created using everything at the same time. Never turn your back on me.

In your early singles with Pere Ubu, in '74-'75, you went by the name Crocus Behemoth…

I'd been going by that name since '71, when I was writing for a Cleveland magazine that covered music, theatre and other cultural events. I got to the point where I was writing almost all of it myself, since my job was to edit other people's pieces, and they were so badly written that I ended up rewriting them almost entirely. At a certain point they asked me to write about music in the first person, and even though I wasn't that interested in music I started doing it because it was better to write my own stuff than to fix other people's. So I started churning out a pile of articles, almost the whole paper. I got to the point where I had to hide the fact that the paper was being written almost entirely by one person, so I started writing under a bunch of pen names. That pseudonym came about because… I had a girlfriend who was in the Weathermen White Painters Jazz 5, we were living in a commune and we used fake names to dodge the government and the phone company. We'd open the dictionary and use the first names we found, that's how Crocus Behemoth came about.

But then you changed it…

Oh, sure, I didn't want to be Crocus Behemoth for the rest of my life and there was no longer any reason to be. I had no idea anyone outside Cleveland would ever know who I was, then it happened that after the first Pere Ubu single Crocus had become the best-known of all the names I used; I didn't want to be Crocus for the rest of my life, so I dropped it as soon as I realized what was going on.

Don't you think that in some ways the legacy of Pere Ubu today is carried on more by your solo records — for instance by the Two Pale Boys — than by Pere Ubu themselves?

No.

I don't mean in terms of the music produced, but in terms of experimentation…

And what about Ray Gun Suitcase?

Sure, Ray Gun Suitcase is a great album, but the ones between The Tenement Year and that one…

Fine, the Two Pale Boys tend to be more overtly experimental, but not in the sense of an "experiment". Once you've made experimental music, it seems like you have to keep making it forever. Words like these, "experimental", "avant-garde" — I think they're terms only journalists, "civilized" people and so-called "real musicians" use, because both of them need to fill up newspapers somehow. They're words you people use for your own purposes, they're words I don't think in, and to me they don't mean anything, I don't get the concept.

The Two Pale Boys, for example, have to do with… Let's say there are two ways of looking at them, your way and mine. You say “Oh, this group that does all this improvisation, that composes songs this way” and so on, and so you build your own personal vision of the Two Pale Boys that answers exactly to what you want it to be, with every other musician automatically becoming what you want them to become. For me the thing is very simple: I want a group I don't need to rehearse with. That's my concept of the Two Pale Boys: simply a group I don't have to rehearse with. But I can't say that, because “civilized” people like you – not you specifically, obviously, but the whole world – don't accept this idea, the idea that you don't rehearse before playing and recording, because it doesn't “sound” good when you have to write it down: “Good God, what's going on?”. Now, for instance, there's a kind of commercial transaction between us. I'm trying to sell records and you have something to write for your paper. We're making a commercial exchange, ok? So, I know I can't tell you the Two Pale Boys don't rehearse, and you have to write something suitable for your readers, from a specific angle, so they don't say “Oh, that doesn't sound right to me, it's improvised, I won't buy the CD”. To sell our records better I have to make them look good for “civilized” people and not make them feel too radical, I have to make them seem of some artistic interest to people, and so you and I are cooperating to get everyone to swallow this story. That's how the lie perpetuates itself, and we end up in an art world that makes no sense, full of standards and dogmas. And it all starts the moment I tell you I don't want to rehearse, you see?

I understand, and I agree with you. But for me, writing 'experimental' or 'improvised' is a way of letting the reader understand what's inside an album. If I had to write about Sting … I don't want to and I won't, but if I had to, I'd say he makes pop music, whereas talking about you I have to use certain other words…

Sure, sure, I get exactly what you mean. If I wrote for a paper I'd do exactly what you do, but that's not my business. If I asked questions the way you're asking them, I'd already know what kind of answers to expect. I've done it too, as I told you, and when I interviewed people like Jim "Dandy" of Black Oak Arkansas or Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, I knew what they'd answer before they even opened their mouths, and I didn't care about the answers at all. In the end I told myself: “I have to do this too”, so if you prefer I'll tell you “I'm a musician, I'm smart, I'm self-made, I can do it better than anyone”, ok? So let's drop this whole thing, it makes me sound arrogant and I don't like it. I'm not interested in talking about this, it doesn't excite me, it doesn't move me. Because music, in the end, is just a language of the heart, a matter of visions, of poetry, and never a matter of words, which always wound. I can't describe things that can't be described, that's your problem. I'm not paid for that.

Neither am I, for that matter.

You're probably paid in other currencies besides money…

Well look, my kind of journalism isn't so different from your kind of music. I know exactly what you mean when you talk about art and poetry, otherwise I wouldn't be here with you.

Ok, good answer, but it's a dangerous attitude for your world…

Finally we're all laughing heartily, but it's quite a fight to keep up with him. I hope he understands which side we're on, us too. He opens his eyes again and stares at me while laughing heartily. The ice seems to have finally broken.

In the early Eighties you were at Rough Trade with Pop Group , Red Crayola … What do you remember about those years?

Well, honestly I don't remember anything about those years. I remember going to Rough Trade and… What I remember is going there to check the gig listings and the day-to-day stuff… I remember once walking into the offices and there was that guy from the Fall, what's his name?… Yeah, Mark Smith… He was sitting there and I didn't recognize him, he got pissed off and didn't speak to me for ages just because I should have recognized him… That's all I remember about Rough Trade.

Could you say there were musicians you drew inspiration from when you were starting out?

Honestly I don't remember, I liked a lot of different things. The problem with modern times in relation to history, and rock history in particular, is that… For example, in the early Seventies, as at the end of the Sixties, something truly great was happening, different and exciting situations. For us, someone like Marc Bolan in '70-'71 was an avant-garde musician, he was considered as great as Can, Soft Machine, MC5, Gary Glitter, and the whole underground. All these people were on the same level, they were great… well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but… there weren't all the divisions people talk about now. The problem with rock music is that it isn't taken seriously as an art form. This also has to do with the punk movement, with the very nature of the punk movement, which was a kind of counter-revolution. The punk movement was created to subvert the revolution, to knock rock music down. Punk, the Sex Pistols and that sort of thing were invented by Sony, by Warner Brothers and similar companies.

You see, it all has to do with a bunch of things like the “nature of rock”, which is an American idiom… If what happened back then to rock music within American culture had happened on some remote island, say to a tribe in Borneo, everyone would have thrown up their hands in horror. So you guys turned our culture upside down. If this had been done to some remote tribe, everyone would have said: “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Damn! You did it to us! But we're Americans, well-off… So everyone can say this is fine. Everyone thinks America rules the world with its culture, without the slightest doubt… but McDonald's isn't America!!! McDonald's has nothing to do with America, it has as much to do with America as it does with the whole world we live in, with the emerging global culture we're all citizens of, you understand? So what happened to rock music in those years is the same thing… A violence.

Everyone looks at the Seventies as a boring era, but that story was written by people who know nothing about the Seventies. There were very exciting things happening during those years; today everyone imagines them as the age of disco music, but that's just the mythology that's been embroidered onto it. Every following decade recreates a mythology about the recent past, and that's logical, even fair I'd say, given that the rest of the world, all of you, see rock music simply as a fashion to consume and perpetuate. Because you don't have it in your blood, it's not yours, it's not your culture, it's not in your DNA, it's not here, you understand? So you only experience it as fashion, building your absurd theories on top of it, and fashion means change, bands coming and going, replacing the ones before them. Everyone is guilty of looking at rock music this way, as something that doesn't belong in the same context as Victor Hugo, Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway. That's a real problem, we should think about it. Your interpretation of things is very different from my interpretation of things, just as my interpretation is completely different from anyone else's. And so my interpretation is the right one and everyone else's is wrong…

We laugh heartily again. He's said a lot, and always said it right, and it's hard to make him understand how much I agree with what he thinks. I ask him if he'd like to sign a ghost album with a ghost signature. He looks at me, finally surprised. I hand him “Winter comes home”. He laughs and scribbles something. He puts a hand on my shoulder. He's understood, maybe.

(From issue 2 of “Blow Up“)

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