Pere Ubu

I wouldn’t presume. He was a writer and I separate the work of art from the author. He wrote certain kinds of stories that had certain kinds of truth in them.

I can’t tell you how I got to Jim Thompson specifically as opposed to Raymond Chandler. I probably felt guilty about mining Raymond Chandler so many times that I looked around for another victim. I’d just been reading James Cain a lot and rereading it, and clearly one thing flowed from the other because I haven’t read Jim Thompson in maybe 20 years or at least 15 and it just occurred to me. I wanted more of a 50’s angle than Cain, which was definitely 40’s.

No, the way I work is that I come up with what you might call a back story and from that back story I choose a particular psychological moment that interests me. This is the same for any Pere Ubu record. The songs on the album are all about trying to describe one particular moment from the back story. You’re not meant to assemble a cohesive narrative from it because that’s not really what I do and it’s not really of much interest to me.

I don’t write it down. There’s no point to that because then you get into a writer mode and you’re sitting there wasting your time as if it’s valid as a piece of writing. Right now I’m beginning to assemble the story that I’m interested in pursuing for the next album. So it’s in my head and I make notes along the way with details of something that I want to weave into the story.

I don’t think that deviously. One of the reasons that I decided to go with the title was that it occurred to me and I was somewhat skeptical of using it because I knew people pay more attention to the title than anything else. But one of the things that ended up convincing me is that I really dislike the mythology of music where the singer is some tortured soul pouring the depths of his being out in lyrics and songs. That’s just baloney. This stuff is fiction you make it up. You have an objective and you have some, as I pointed out, some psychological moment that you want to communicate. You make up a story to achieve that or you make up a story about yourself but this whole idea that this is all tortured soul confessions is extremely irritating to me. I thought, “Ok, I’ll go with it because the question will come up and I can make my point about tortured souls confessions.”

Yeah something like that.

That’s the thing I can’t keep track of.

[Smog Veil owner] Frank Mauceri is a good guy. He’s very dedicated and very enthusiastic. Also they’re Clevelanders and I like to stick with Clevelanders.

We recorded almost everything we’ve done at a place called Suma which used to be Cleveland Recording in Cleveland. But I do the vocals at home just because it’s easier to do them when you feel like it as opposed to being clocked into some studio and you’re sitting there and don’t really want to do it. But I record almost anywhere. I recorded one of the vocals in the room at the Red Roof Inn and recorded another one out on the back porch of the place I am now. The good thing about modern digital technology is that I can do anything anywhere, when I feel like it.

It depends. It really is very weird, I hate to use the phrase young people, but in some cities there are only young people. In certain cities for some bizarre reason there’s nobody under the age of 35 or something. I don’t understand any of it but most of the time it’s a pretty broad mix.

I have since about 1995. In the late 80’s and early 90’s we did three albums with producers. Before that we self produced it or the engineer had a lot to do with it. Oftentimes it is very confusing and frustrating.

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons that I took on the production. If there’s going to be mistakes in production, which there always are, I’d rather they be my mistakes than anybody else’s. Also the sound has always been very important to the meaning. I wanted to be a bit more involved in it because I’m involved in the meaning of the songs.

He’s a member of my group called David Thomas and the two pale boys which is an improvisational group with Andy Diagram on trumpet and Keith on guitar.

Yeah, over the course of time I began to realize that he, like most English progressive musicians, has an urge to rock but is afraid to express himself that way. So over the years I’ve weaned him into being a very good rocker. I didn’t do anything other than to say, “You know you can do this. You are a good rock player.” He’d go, “No, I don’t do rock music.” There were a few years of that before Tom [Herman] retired and I said, “You’re the man now. You’re the guy, so let’s do it.”

We didn’t plan, we just did it. That it was one of the first questions we were ever asked back in 1976 or something like that. They said, “How long are you going to be together? When are you going to break up?” I was like, “Why are you asking us when or how long we’re going to be? We’ll break up tomorrow or we’ll be here in 40 years.” That’s still the answer. I don’t think we’ll all live that long but it wouldn’t have surprised me if we had broken up the next day either. We don’t have a pop career curve. We’re really much more of a folk band. Rock music is American folk music and you can’t understand rock music unless you know that and apply those parameters to it. So folk musicians just endlessly do what they do because it’s part of their understanding of their life and their culture. Also part of it is that we progress; we don’t do the same thing endlessly. We create new problems to solve. We evolve and all of that is interesting to us. If we were just doing modern dance endlessly I don’t know that we’d still be together.

Yeah we did an underscore to X out at UCLA. It’s something we’ve done a number of times. We did a tour in England three years ago with a 3-D version of It Came From Outer Space. We did about a week and a half of concert halls and art centers.

The original idea of It Came From Outer Space was the idea of a film producer in London. He did that first tour with us and then X was always a film that I liked. It has a cool story and I wanted to do a tip of the hat to Roger Corman.

Yes we sit there and score out what key we’re going to be in and what kind of a rhythm and what kind of a feel. Sometimes we have ideas that we take from our own songs and say, “Well in this scene we’re going to play kind of this riff but we’re going to slow it down.” So we plot out where we’re going to go with it and what’s going to happen along the way and then it is improvised from that point onward.

I wouldn’t even know how to because you’d have to start dealing with film companies and lawyers and an incredible amount of mind numbing hassles which isn’t worth it to us. It is not going to make the film company any money. Universal Records is not going to care about a few thousand sales of a Pere Ubu record. So I wouldn’t even attempt it. Maybe someday we’ll do it as a bootleg below Universal’s horizon.

We have about four or five gigs at the end of the month. We just finished about three to four weeks in Europe and did this UCLA thing in San Francisco. We’ve got some other things we’re doing. We’re going to take a break at the end of November and start up in Europe again in March or something like that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck