Sonic Reducer

Culturally insecure and brimming with aggression, the late-’70s recordings of the Cleveland rock bands Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys and Rocket From the Tombs mark the moment when American rock ’n’ roll turned in on itself. Pere Ubu songs like 1975’s “Final Solution” were simultaneously a gloss on the Midwestern rock of The Stooges and The MC5 and an aggrieved commentary on the irrelevance of such music in an era of corporate rock, while Rocket From the Tombs recordings from the same year, such as “Ain’t It Fun,” demolished rock ’n’ roll clichés about dying young and the redemptive power of the music in ways that eluded the band’s original audience. Pere Ubu and RFTT both utilized the frenzied vocals of David Thomas, but Ubu’s music was highly influential on the punk movement and 1980s post-punks, while the significance of RFTT and other, lesser-known Cleveland bands had gone largely unrecognized until the release of 1996’s Pere Ubu boxed set, Datapanik in the Year Zero. The box included an entire disc of performances by Ubu- and RFTT-related groups such as Neptune’s Car, Foreign Bodies and The Electric Eels. Next month sees the release of Why I Hate Women, Pere Ubu’s first record in four years. Meanwhile, the reconstituted Rocket From the Tombs, of which Ubu’s David Thomas is a member, continue to play shows that include The Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome and Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, who joined the band in early 2003 to play a Los Angeles show that marked the group’s first performance since 1975. (Since 2003, the new edition of RFTT has toured sporadically; their current tour, which includes the Nashville date, has taken them to Pittsburgh, Brooklyn and Hoboken, N.J., as well as to Cleveland.) Chrome came to Nashville a decade ago to work on demos and never left. “I was still living in New York at the time, and decided I would hang out for a couple more weeks and, you know, not go back to New York,” he says. “I’ve still got my return ticket someplace.” Although he still plays the occasional Dead Boys show, Chrome says RFTT is his main gig these days. The band got together this April in Cleveland, and spent a weekend rehearsing the songs for the current tour. Before they re-formed in 2003, RFTT’s last performance had been in 1975, at Cleveland’s Viking Saloon. That show included both Peter Laughner, who wrote the classic Cleveland-rocks anthems “Life Stinks” and “Amphetamine,” and Stiv Bators, who would go on to form the Dead Boys with Chrome. Both Laughner and Bators have since died. The current lineup of RFTT does justice to Laughner’s songs, as well as to the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer.” The addition of Richard Lloyd revitalized RFTT. “Television played with the original Rocket From the Tombs in Cleveland,” Chrome recalls. “It was their first gig outside New York. So me and Richard stayed friends over the years, and when it came time to do Rocket, Richard Lloyd popped into my head. He’s the only guy. Nobody else would be able to do it.” On the Lloyd-produced 2004 Rocket Redux, RFTT, which currently comprises Thomas, Chrome, Lloyd, bassist Craig Bell and Ubu drummer Steve Mehlman, come across as the apotheosis of Midwestern rock, with the group’s original populist impulses tempered by professionalism. Lloyd’s brilliant guitar adds heat and color to “Down in Flames,” and on the version of Pere Ubu’s “Final Solution,” the song’s lineage from Eddie Cochran’s anthem of teen angst, “Summertime Blues,” is made explicit. Chrome says RFTT continue to work on new material, despite the geographic hurdles. (“We get together at sound check, basically,” he says.) And, for Thomas, the contrast between the styles of Ubu and Rocket keeps both experiences interesting. “They’re very different bands,” he says. “If they were similar bands, I wouldn’t do it. Rocket is a pretty hard-groove, straight rock band, brutal music played by intelligent people. The combination of Richard and Cheetah on guitars is just something to behold….We’ve got about five songs we’re working out, and we’re getting together in Nashville the day before the show to write some more. If the process continues, then clearly, an album’s in the cards.” Thomas describes Pere Ubu as “much more of a band devoted to warping time and space and perception.” And he’s adamant, and funny, when he attempts to make what he considers essential stylistic distinctions. “We weren’t punk-rock; we were there before punk,” he says. “We’ve maintained this for so many years, it’s pointless now, but we’re mainstream rock. We’re the mainstream. It’s not my fault that all these experimental artists like Madonna and U2 and Britney Spears came along to move music out to a left-field, weird, experimental point of view.” This is spoken like a committed ironist, except that Thomas isn’t being ironic. Ubu’s Why I Hate Women comes with a disclaimer that reads, “This is an irony-free recording,” which Thomas takes pains to explain. “It has to do with the title,” he says. “When the title came I was not really happy about it…. I wasn’t in the mood to give anybody any easy outs or pat answers. But, of course, the trap is that people will think the irony-free statement is itself ironic. We can only go so far.” Why I Hate Women functions as a series of what Thomas calls “psychological moments.” As he says, “The albums have what I call backstories. I’m not inhabiting any character; the record becomes like a pointillist canvas. Pointillist painters assembled the image in points of color, and on an album, we do the same.” Why I Hate is a funny record, as when Thomas sings, “All the women that hang around, they are prayin’ they are free / All the women that hang around are lookin’ for a Bukowski.” On “Texas Overture,” he lopes into a litany of all-American pleasures: “Butcher paper one knife no fork white bread / Vegetarians Exit Now Please / Texas is the land of the free.” If Thomas no longer feels much connection to Cleveland (“I don’t look back at all,” he says. “And Cleveland long, long, long ago became something of a ghost town to all of us”), he maintains what sounds like an irony-free affection for American culture. “I would’ve loved Nashville in the redneck years, and I mean ‘redneck’ in the most positive sense,” he says. “I’ve been down there a couple times before, for a Rocket show, and maybe a Pere Ubu show,” Thomas continues. (The band played Nashville in September 2002.) “The best thing I ever did there was, I went to two or three really funky honky-tonk kind of places, cruddy linoleum, somewhere downtown. And I love David Allen Coe. If it’s dark, obsessive country, that’s what I want. I’m not keen on all this happy-clappy stuff.”