The Big Lookback: Carola Dibbell on Pere Ubu

"Pere Ubu Lives in This Shit!" The Village Voice, May 7, 1979

On July 16 Two Dollar Radio did me the honor of reissuing my 2015 novel The Only Ones, and at the July 19 launch, I discussed my writing with Anna North, author of the simpatico Outlawed. The Only Ones is, among other things, a pandemic novel, but people who like it—well, people who don’t like it too—often talk about the voice of the narrator, a semi-literate teenager from the near future. So I’d had a while to think and talk about how I got there, though I always forget the part about Damon Runyon.   

In the late ‘90s, I’d started sending a novel I called Girl Talk out for submission by snail mail, as people did back then and I’d done many times before. So I knew what was likely coming. “Thanks so much for sending us your novel! Unfortunately, it is not for us at this time!” By then I was almost in my fifties. I wasn’t sure I could stand to go through this again. When I decided to start another project ASAP, it was pretty much for medicinal purposes. I needed a little hope.     

At that point in my so-called career, I’d published a couple of short stories in pretty toney places, but most of my work in print was rock criticism, mostly in the Riffs section of The Village Voice, starting in the early ‘70s, a time when I’d written almost no journalism and had more talent than confidence. But this was a form that not only welcomed amateurs but opened the door to a lot of wonderful strange stuff, which it turned out I could sometimes bring off. The Riffs crew tended to be quite supportive, and even Lester Bangs once admitted with a sheepish grin that he really liked my review of Pere Ubu’s wonderful strange Dub Housing. I can’t remember if he was a Pere Ubu fan to start with or had thought they were just for Ivy League bohemians. 

Journalism itself, even 75 dollar Riffs, offered two things that had been missing in my work: readers and deadlines. The Pere Ubu piece republished below was a deadline special. I was running way late with nothing to show for my struggles at the old upright Underwood but a bunch of blurbs in no sequential order. Because I lived with the Riffs editor, who was (and is) my husband, all Bob Christgau had to do was cross our apartment to hound me at my study door: “Just show me what you fucking have!” This was before computers enabled modular revisions, so I used a scissor to cut the non-sequential blurbs into paragraphs which I scotch-taped to a yellow legal pad to be moved around as needed. All I had to do was cross our apartment to Bob’s study to hand in my copy, taped to the yellow legal pad. He said, “This is great.” I don’t know if he even moved anything around, though I expect we did tuck in some transitional sentences. I got a lot of very nice feedback about “Pere Ubu Lives in This Shit!” (Not including from my mother, who winced at the title.) 

Around the time I started looking for a new project, I’d done a bunch of pieces for various new Riffs editors and a big essay on women in punk for a Rolling Stone collection, which had gotten some attention. So I thought, “Nobody wants my fucking fiction. Why don’t I make my fiction more like fucking rock criticism?”  I began to fool around with language that had the spirit if not the subject of the old rock crit stuff. 

I wrote two stories with some version of the funny language I often spoke in Riffs. [real piece of work] is pov an old hippie, whose furshlugginer boyfriend curses like a !@#$%^&*()_+ cartoon. Surviving Death is pov a dead person. These were both written in that perennially unpublishable form, the very very long short story. You can find them on my website. 

Because these stories had ended up fantastical to make plotting easier, since the plots didn’t have to be credible, I had the notion to take a jump into science fiction, retaining the funny voice. I came up with Inez Fardo partly because I knew the type from cyberpunk, but really because I wanted to try a character who was nothing like me. As I tried to imagine her voice, since Inez had probably finished second grade, I began to picture one of those old composition notebooks, full of stiff language and drawings where the sky is a blue line on the top of the notebook page: “Our News. Today is Monday March 31 2047. It is sunny.” Somewhere in that period I came upon a remark from Damon Runyon to this effect: to make a character sound like an uneducated person, use unnecessarily formal language, like his Guys and Dolls gangsters who do not use contractions. I don’t think this Runyan angle gave me the idea for what I ended up doing. But it strengthened my resolve. I found that having my character talk so awkwardly, so stiffly, gave the prose a lot of punch. Then I mixed it up with wrong grammar, puzzling tense changes, and I more or less knew where I was going.  

There was actually a lot of stiffness in CBGB era punk, e.g. David Byrne’s posture, the Ramones’ discipline, and various guitarists and bass players who posed frozen, plus stiff little lyrics like, “Did you feel low?/Not at all/Huh?” or repetitive plunks like Pere Ubu’s “I walked in! I walked out!” One of the things that made me feel at home in CBGB’s was that you could be stiff. You just shouldn’t pretend to be relaxed, like a hippie. So I could be myself, a fuck-you English major.  

I put a lot of punk and old school hip hop nods into The Only Ones, like the title,  and also little jokes like a landing strip in the Catskills called Erdelyi’s Field (Tommy Ramone’s real name), or Inez Fardo’s cleaning clients Mrs. (M.I.A.’s Maya) Arular, and Mrs. (Chuck D’s mother) Ridenhour.  I just threw them in for fun. And the scenes where a mystified Inez Fardo hears genius rube veterinarians discuss elaborate theories of alternative reproduction were inspired by my early months with Bob’s rock critic cronies discussing albums and tracks so over my head they might have been in a foreign language. 

But what I really got from that pioneering rock critic world in Riffs and Creem was what happened if you took something seriously that you weren’t supposed to. A lot flowed from that. You could write like you weren’t supposed to, and that wasn’t just about being slangy, or vulgar, or amateur. You could be personal, be wrong, be arty, tell lies—forbidden stuff, like thinking something was important that wasn’t supposed to be important. 

All these years later, some things haven’t changed. I still have trouble with deadlines and sequential logic, though last-minute sequence changes are really helped by the modular options of Ctrl X and V. So I still haven’t decided whether to put this thought at the beginning or the end. But we’ll find out, won’t we?

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I suppose it’s cannibalistic of me, but when I think an artist or group has a great heart, I expect to have it served up at performances. Which is to say, I was somewhat disappointed by the two shows at Hurrah last week of my favorite band, Pere Ubu. The first night I was practically vomiting with excitement, so I came back the next for perspective and heard a virtually identical set. (I did feel the second show took off more.) This is relative criticism. Ubu can rock out and tune in simultaneously, singer David Thomas is a very funny man, and both these shows were wonderful. But I’ve been told that Ubu live can be better than wonderful, and I believe it. So, as Debbie Harry said when Nick Tosches asked what kind of birth control she used, let’s just stick to the music.

At the Bottom Line a while back, a random conversation turned, as conversations will, to Pere Ubu. Once we had revealed our true feelings, the stranger next to me could afford to cavil about the new album, Dub Housing. “Too juicy,” he complained, preferring The Modern Dance. I had to disagree. Like a drummer I know who raved, “Much more accessible while still remaining really repulsive!” I felt Dub Housing was this Cleveland band’s greatest work. Nothing they have ever recorded—including the three singles rereleased, more or less, as the import-only EP Datapanik in the Year Zero—has lacked intensity, consciousness, originality, and visionary edge. But the openness of this album—the convincing imitation of randomness in the use of randomlike sounds tucked into deep but tactfully casual structures—the increasingly organic (even mammalian) evocations of Allen Ravenstine's synthesizer—the increasing good nature of David Thomas's sad-clown vocals—the cheerful pace—the exuberance of bon mots like “I have desire!” and “Boy that sounds swell!”—all took Dub Housing over some kind of line for me.

Pere Ubu describes its organization as “anarchistic” and its product as “industrial music.” But they’ve also pointed out: “We’re not so much concerned with the actual industry. That’s one thing. The form of the art and the art of the form and how they both apply to human flesh is more our concern.” A recurring theme in Ubu imagery is the vision of urban industrial environment as a kind of natural form, often water. A recurring aural element is the confusion of organic and inorganic matter—a synthesizer screech somewhere between a train’s whistle and a horse’s neigh, Thomas vibratoing like a car shimmy , horn/vocal trompe-l’oreilles. One of Ravenstine’s great sounds, “bffp,” is something between motorcycle acceleration and a Bronx cheer. Pere Ubu poses the musical question: How do we live in this shit? It answers: With imagination! And rhythm!

You could say that Ubu’s secret is the combination of arty ideas with great riffs and hooks, but even if that were simple, it wouldn’t begin to suggest the astonishing proliferation and felicity of pattern in the music. When I counterposed Dub Housing to Roxy Music—which also lays dancey rhythms in pleasantly dissonant relation to arty vocals—Ubu seemed to have three solid riffs for every Roxy one. (It sounded more akin to the febrile Ornette Coleman I tried next.) Sometimes Ubu songs seem to be built of riffs alone. The bridge from riff to riff is another riff. Even a crowd sound can operate as a kind of bridge, with a distinct shape, including murmur, scattered titter, and sweeping applause. The sound of breaking glass will turn out to be the hook (just ask my cats). Often the words embody such clean rhythms they can stand in as riffs in their own right, with a spoken, not sung, vocal dynamic: “I breathed in (squeek); I breathed out!/I breathed in (squeek); I breathed out!/I went out. I came back!!” Like a hot potato, focus is tossed from lead vocal to synthesizer, to sound effect, to something else. In the previous case, “(Pa) Ubu Dance Party,” the appeal of the riffy lyric, like that of the honky-tonkish keyboard riff and car-related noises, is subsumed by a great backup chorus that goes “Didada dah dah! Dida dab dah! Dida dah dah, nah-nah nah!”

It’s a complexly evocative music, too; “We try to transmit a whole series of images,” Thomas says. In the preternaturally lovely “Codex,” the lyrical shape of the semi-spoken plaint, “I think about you all the time,” flutters up top over back-up groans (like souls of the damned) both sung and synthesized, which plod or slide down scales illustrating the next band in the lyrical design: “Step after step, block after block.” This song begins and ends with a simple guitar solo consisting of four notes, which are finally tipped on their side. Then out trudges a final two-note motif, which fades like footsteps.

Grooves run deep through this music (lots of funkoid and reggaeish rhythms), but the movement of the whole is also turned by the delicate off-timing of individual flourishes—not only Ravenstine’s brays, squeals, and backfires, or Thomas’s little hums, but also Tony Maimone’s spare, sometimes Latinish piano, his and guitarist Tom Herman’s casual vocal entries and exits, Scott Krauss’s random drumrolls and cymbal crashes. The ensemble is what matters, though. All of these musicians are accomplished, but flourishes and bridges are as close as they usually get to solo work. More characteristically they share chores. The punkish pulse and jazzy feel of Krauss’s relatively light drum touch—spare with the bass, free with the cymbals—leaves space for Maimone’s robust basslines to muck about in; Herman’s guitar can drive the beat with big diagonals or simply set up a kind of drone, a zithery, twangy dissonance that’s part of the overall melodic flavor, like Thomas's purposeful off-keys. Even the “lead” vocals often function as just one more part in a contrapuntal or polyphonic construct.

Talking with one of many writers who have designs on the Pere Ubu subject (and who all seem mildly relieved to be beaten to it this time around), I recently learned that Thomas once called himself “Doctor Science.” The writer would have wanted to explore the social-realist aspect of the work, he told me. “Take it,” I said. The primrose path I had mapped out followed another former Thomas name, “Crocus Behemoth”—the beauty in the (industrial/fat) beast. I was particularly moved by the band’s rare conjunction of compassion with visionary modernism. I wanted to talk about fat, and David Thomas’s aghast, benign, serious fat boy’s voice, blubbering. I figured to bring in Harvey Pekar, the Cleveland cartoonist whose real-life-style American Splendor comics touch some of the same bases as Ubu—and maybe William Carlos Williams, poet laureate of Paterson. Fat chance. The form is so damn rich I got stuck in it!