Cleveland rocks!

Pere Ubu began gigging around Cleveland in 1975. Drew Carey, from whose show’s opening credits the above line is taken (for those of you who avoid television like the proverbial plague), would have been an apparently-troubled 17 years old—fatherless, directionless, and living in depressed, post-industrial, mid-seventies Cleveland; in other words, the perfect primordial bog in which a jagged, pissed-off odd-punk stinkweed might grow and flourish. Apparently he’s a long-time trumpeter and a pretty decent accordion player. So the mind wanders, doesn’t it kiddies? Imagine if you will The Ubu, big-timers—by that point, only-timers—in the ClePunk scene, play yet another Thursday night show at the Pirate’s Cove, for about 30 or 40 off-the-clock dock-workers. First opener: a scrappy bunch of punker teens—one on guitar, one on bass, one on drums, and one stocky fella in jeans and a t-shirt on trumpet, blasting marching-band riffology in between having to pick his glasses up off the floor. They fell off when he just rocked too hard. They were unmusical, and they were riveting, and they were called the Huddy Bollies. The direct connection between Drew Carey and Pere Ubu ends in my mind—perhaps he’s a fan, who knows?—but, oh the possibilities!

And now we backtrack, to 1896. No, make that 1893. French author Alfred Jarry—raconteur, cruel absurdist, dwarf—pens an essay called “Guignol,” in which he introduces his notion of pataphysics. Teasing out the meanings of rules by aligning with their exceptions; finding absolute truth in its contradiction; seeking everything in nothing. And so on, more or less. OK, now it’s 1896. Jarry premieres his five-act magnum opus at Theatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. In it, a man—Pere Ubu—is nothing, is a slave, is King of Poland, is a slave, and is nothing. Jarry invents profanity (”Merdre!“), and Ubu’s army just kills and kills again, to the drumbeat of monotone line readings and scene-setting placards. Then, in 1975, Cleveland loses its guiding underground rock light when Rocket From the Tombs unceremoniously calls it quits. They were hard, wild, and unpredictable. Their gargantuan lead singer David Thomas (nee Crocus Behemoth, who bore a not-inconsiderable resemblance to a young Orson Wells with a bad haircut) and normal-sized guitarist Peter Laughner were joined by Tom Herman and Tim Wright on bass and guitar (they’d switch off, they’d come and go), Allen Ravenstine on an obscure analog synthesizer (him too), and Scott Krauss (gone for good around the early ’90s). They thought Pere Ubu was a good name—references an obscure proto-Dada work, veritably trips off the tongue—and began their headfirst march into geek-crit obscurity.

OK, that isn’t exactly fair; however, it is true that their first four-and-a-half albums—the EP Datapanik In the Year Zero, The Modern Dance, Dub Housing, New Picnic Time, and The Art of Walking—were made, with apparent glee and at the height of their powers, when they practically couldn’t buy an audience, between 1976 and 1981. This was a post-Captain Beefheart world, the very pinnacle of the Reign of Zappa, but these guys were too weird, too angular, and too absurd for even those crowds. Their first ever recorded song, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” from the Datapanik E.P., might evoke an image of WWII bombers overhead (what, just me?), but its lyrics would be pure Middle-Earth if they made any sense; something about “a little dragon lost in time,” and “waves in an underground sea,” moaned through he largest sinuses this side of the Mississippi. Laughner pounds in with a few sharp chords, working them around until hitting a several-minute solo that, magically, is the same played forward as it is backward (no, not really, but it might as well be). For all practical purposes, they’re something of a jam band, massaging a single hook into a twisted image of itself, then unravelling it back. But unlike the empty proficiency of most “improvised rock” (sorry, everyone), Ubu at their best pull hooks out of nowhere, to the point where they can take them for granted. Take Dub Housing’s serpentine “Caligari’s Mirror”; slowed to a crawl for much of its length, and smeared with all manner of noise and logy as hell, with a pair of few-note riffs entwining, until it comes bursting out of its seams suddenly with a kitchen-sink chorus of yelps, Stax-style bass, and bar-band piano. Or “Say Goodbye” from 1988’s The Tenement Year, with Thomas’s high-pitched whine tied to a basically-trad rock line, and the terrifying compressed guitar solo in the middle, ending it all by breaking apart into squeaks and wails, and swirling down the drain. Somehow, they’re still a going concern, if only recording every few years or so, but as 1998’s Pennsylvania attested, at they’re best they’re every bit as vital now as they were in their supposed glory days; “Drive” pushes forever forward under the power of Steve Mehlman’s pounding drums and Tom Herman’s powerhouse punk-style riffing, only slowing down long enough for an ample coda, but rocking—as straighforward as they’ve ever gotten, and as close as, I would think, they’d ever be willing to get—in a manner befitting the shortest, cruelest absurdists.

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