Under the Needle
Local avant-garde rockers, Pere Ubu: new live album
By Steve DelNero
PERE UBU: 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo (Rough Trade US 10)
What Cleveland rock band, together for six years now, headlines concerts in Europe, yet cannot fill the Agora, or have their records played on WMMS or M-105?
What Cleveland rock band does most of its recording in Painesville, yet finds it easier to release records in England than in America?
What same Cleveland rock band is doing as much for its city in terms of rock music as the Cleveland Orchestra is doing for classical music?
PERE UBU--whose new live album, 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo, has just been released!
The local Pere Ubu fanatics have been eagerly awaiting this album for months. It's not off the presses, and for less than six dollars, you can own an over fiftyminute long excursion into the early history of Cleveland's, if not America's, most important avantgarde rock band.
If you are not familiar with Ubu, this album is an excellent place to start.
Pere Ubu evolved in 1976 from the band Rocket From the Tombs, some of whose members formed Cleveland's best-known punk band, the Dead Boys.
Some of the other members formed Pere Ubu, named for the protagonist of a trilogy of plays by the absurd/Dadaist author Alfred Jarry. (This was no accident, as vocalist David Thomas resembles the fat, uncouth, and ridiculous Ubu in many ways).
If Northeastern Ohio is noted for its industrialist, dehumaniz-
ing music thanks to Devo, Pere Ubu is just as much to blame. Both bands question man's ability to cope with technology.
Although Devo and Pere Ubu have taken different approaches to this theme, Pere Ubu (especially early Ubu) is more avant-garde.
Akron-based Devo seems to have entered the Top 40 market for good, while Ubu's music-becoming more and more uncompromising and challenging--gets ignored by both Top 40 and the progressive commercial stations in America.
Ubu's music is very difficult to describe, and probably harder to imitate. Critics have compared Ubu to everyone from the German rock bands Faust and Can to Americans, Captain Beefheart and the Residents.
These comparisons are only valid in that all of these artists are exploring previously unknown musical territory.
The new Ubu album contains material from the earliest singles and from their first album, The Modern Dance (1977), a longdeleted but recently re-issued masterpiece.
Ubu's current label, Rough Trade, has decided to release a series of (at least) three live albums in (hopefully) chronological order. So what we have here is not Ubu in its present state, but recordings from the archives.
Since eight of the album's twelve songs were recorded in Cleveland, maybe that was you at the Mistake, the Pirate's Cove, or the Real World Disasto 2 show at the eerie WHK Auditorium!
All of the songs feature vocalist David Thomas, whose flat, whining voice signals boredom, hope-
lessness, and bitterness. The band, especially Allen Ravenstine on synthesizer and sincedeparted Tom Herman on lead guitar, plays to complement this cold, depressed landscape of seemingly spontaneous thoughts. Quite a few of the songs reach the manic intensity of the Sex Pistols at their best.
eccentricity of the soloists will The driving beat and sheer want to make you both listen actively and dance all over your living room!
If you have ever seen Pere Ubu, you know that their live shows can make you a lifelong fan even if you don't like their albums. This album proves it--there are no long, esoteric, electronic songs, only a unique rock 'n' roll madness.
If the film Eraserhead nad häŭ a rock soundtrack, Pere Ubu music would have been appropriate. The album's best cuts, "My Dark Ages," "Street Waves," "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," and "Heart of Darkness," show the true Ubu "Spirit of '78"; they are neither punk nor new wave, since Ubu was around before the terms were invented. Instead, they are a dance band. (In fact, I can't wait until Volume II of the series to hear "Ubu Dance Party!") You can hear the almosttraditional nihilist themes, but there is always that subtle plea for help, one based on both love and logic, that appears in few new wave bands.
Ubu is not an electronic disco band. You dance to Ubu like you dance to the Velvet Underground or Iggy Pop Paradox Music Mailorder has called Pere Ubu "America's most daring band." Care to take a dare?
JUNE 1981-HIGH GEAR Page 15
"The Gang's All Here" is mainly made up of Busby Berkeley's paroxysmic production numbers, which amuse me a good deal. There is one routine with giant papier-mache bananas which deserves to survive in every case-book of blatant film surreptition for the next century.
James Agee, The Nation, Dec. 18, 1943
It makes the screen glow.
Nothing less than Busby Berkeley's "Lola Montes," the ultimate expression of a very graceful talent at work.
I joined whole-heartedly in the applause for the bananas number, the phallic outrageousness of which is even more startling today.
--Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice
Busby Berkeley's own special brand of kaleidoscopic fantasy, turned into psychedelic surrealism by the electric reds and greens of 20th Century-Fox's Technicolor.
Those who consider Berkeley a master consider this his masterpiece. It is his maddest film.
-Pauline Kasl, The New Yorker
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