On The Surface: Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing at 45
Reflections on the group’s precedent-setting second album
Most people who follow the marginalia of American history know that Cleveland’s chemical-logged Cuyahoga River caught fire – and not for the first time back in 1969.
Fewer stop to discuss the fact that wide swaths of the city’s largely Black East Side also went up in flames, and fewer still recall the moment when then-Mayor Ralph Perk set his own hair on fire.
That episode, which unfolded when Perk was using a blowtorch to cut a steel ribbon for the opening of a manufacturing plant, was peak Cleveland – a singular conflation of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, set against the crumbling infrastructure of a city in the last throes of its industrial age.
VIDEO: Cleveland mayor hair catches fire
That’s the landscape that birthed Pere Ubu, a band that never quite gets the accolades it deserves for pioneering so many things – in terms of sonics and in terms of trailblazing. Ubu’s members migrated from such foundational bands as Cinderella Backstreet (one of Peter Laughner’s earliest vehicles), Hy Mya and Rocket From The Tombs (who earned wild acclaim decades after their demise). And when thrown together, they pretty much single-handedly invented the indie/DIY universe with the 1975 release of the monumental first single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”/”Heart of Darkness” – a record that deserves the handle “double a-side” as much as any in rock ‘n’ roll history.
Hearing those songs at the age of 13 – long, brooding, redolent of doom, yet not bereft of humor – was revelatory. That sense of wonder never waned during the quintet’s run of self-released singles, from “Street Waves” (which could have passed muster on a classic “Hot Rod Hits” album from the mid-1960s to the throbbingly paranoiac “Heart of Darkness” (which wraps Conrad’s vision in a Can-colored blanket).
Thomas gets most of the notice for the nature of those recordings, but they truly are the product of a singular group of musicians – players who knew when to press the pedal to the floor and when to lean back and smell the asphalt. Drummer Scott Krauss, who off-handedly coined the phrase “avant-garage” when put on the spot to describe Ubu’s sound, says “David once said ‘Allen and I are the brains of the band, Scott and Tony [Maimone, who’s gone on to play with Bob Mould and They Might Be Giants] are the brawn. I always thought that was a strange way of putting it.”
It really is a little off-base. While Ravenstine’s other-worldly sounds are certainly the calling card on Dub Housing, Krauss, Maimone and guitarist Tom Herman conspire in the shadows to conjure plenty of potent elixirs – some dissonant, some fleetingly jazzy and some that do, in fact, borrow from the spacious Jamaican sounds referenced in the album’s title. Their arrangements, far more complex than they might seem at first listen, were given extra life by Ken Hamann, a suburban Cleveland engineer and studio owner who cast things in just the right amount of light or shadow, buffering some edges and sharpening others. Hamann’s skill in such matters had been honed through decades of dizzyingly diverse work – sessions that included both Grand Funk and Stockhausen (not to mention local power-pop heroes The Outsiders, whose “Time Won’t Let Me” bears his stamp).
Hamann might’ve been as important to the sound of Pere Ubu as George Martin was to The Beatles, which explains why they kept returning to him and his little refuge, which moved from downtown Cleveland to a cabin in the woods of exurban Painesville, Ohio. While he’s certainly a presence in the mix – along with his late son, Paul – who took the studio’s reins after a short apprenticeship, “production” is credited to all five band members, and Dub Housing, released 45 years ago this week, certainly sounds like a group effort.
The band throws down the gauntlet from the onset of the spectacularly hypnotic album with “Navvy,” a plea of sorts from Thomas, who grows increasingly agitated while yelping a plea for freedom – squalling about “arms and legs that flip flop” and a wish for somewhere to go. A voice in the background – is it mocking or encouraging? – confers, offering “boy, that sounds swell” as a rejoinder. All the while Krauss pummels his drums with unrelenting heaviness, and Ravenstine seems intent on tying the singer in knots with vine-like tendrils of fuzzy noise.
While not quite a U-turn, “On the Surface” pivots to Ubu’s more pop-like sensibilities. It’s a summer song of sorts, Thomas’s references to the beach and songs on the radio reflecting a youth spent poring over Beach Boys classics and a young adulthood spent pondering the mysteries of the churning waters – a mix that makes sense given the look of Cleveland’s rocky coastline. Tom Herman’s alternately ascending and descending basslines mimic those waves – Erie is the choppiest of the Great Lakes, after all – making it one of the most welcoming of the band’s songs.
“Welcoming” is the last word one would use to describe the title track that follows. The ominous track, in which Thomas darts in and out of the sonic spotlight, conjures up images straight out of art-house psychological horror films like Carnival of Souls Yes, it’s ostensibly actually about a haunted house of sorts – one in which “a thousand voices talk and that talk echoes around and around/The windows reverberate/The walls have ears/A thousand saxophone voices talk.” But the tale itself isn’t nearly as fearsome as the disorienting hall-of-mirrors erected by the rest of the band, a construction that’s virtually impossible to escape with wits intact.
In describing what Ubu was going when creating the songs that went into Dub Housing, Ravenstine told Perfect Sound Forever, “I liked the idea of ambient noise as being part of something. It’s like when we’d rehearse. In all those places, we didn’t have air conditioning. So we’d be down there on a July night and all the windows would be open and Harley Davidsons (would be) going by and police sirens. Most of time we were in fairly rough neighborhoods ’cause there wasn’t anything but rough neighborhoods downtown. And all that stuff just fit. I just thought ‘yeah, that makes sense.’ So the fact that we were making all music in the city… it just seemed like the city should be part of it.”
There’s no way to listen to these songs without hearing Cleveland – or more specifically the crumbling outskirts of downtown, where Ubu maintained their rehearsal space and where Ravenstine got a grant to rehab a foreboding-looking apartment block called The Plaza. The building, which appears on the cover of Dub Housing, was home to a good part of the city’s incestuous music scene and formed relationships that still linger (among the survivors, that is – RIP Peter Laughner).
The spirit of that building, that neighborhood, that time is best captured in the creations – songs is far too jovial a word – that make up Dub Housing’s two centerpieces. “Caligari’s Mirror,” despite its length – over eight minutes – and its complexity, is the more approachable. Alternating between lurching sea chantey and a sonic reduction that replicates the chaos of breakdowns in the quintet’s earliest shows, the track churns purposefully without lapsing into mania. “After Modern Dance we had used up most of the stuff we knew. Dub Housing in my mind was just a little darker and spookier,” Ravenstine told Perfect Sound Forever, There was an element of eeriness to it that I liked. The Modern Dance thing was kind of black and white, rock and roll. Dub Housing was just a little more spooky… It had more color, in my mind so I liked it.”
Krauss attributes some of the sonic shift to the incessant touring the group undertook after the release of The Modern Dance – roadwork some of the members were loath to undertake. The drummer, who was happy to do so, tells us “We got to see something outside Cleveland, and that was a big deal in a lot of ways. Yes, the monetary thing changed our minds, the political thing changed our minds, but what really [mattered] was that we saw the history of the world. We saw Warsaw…we saw the Ardennes Forest.”
Those experiences coalesced in “Thriller!,” the most riveting piece on Dub Housing, if not in the band’s massive catalog. An instrumental, it recalls images straight out of art-house psychological horror films like Carnival of Souls, unrelievedly perplexing and utterly devoid of release in the midst of all its tension. Krauss recalls the band employing odd constructions to piece together the track, like Herman taking on auxiliary percussion duties by playing pans filled with water: The intent, he says, was “total sensory overload.” They succeeded, on all counts.
The mood would lighten palpably on New Picnic Time, which followed. Thomas’s writing grew more linear – and seemingly more explorative of the Jehovah’s Witness faith of his youth – and the curtains of noise parted. That didn’t sit well with Tom Herman, who left in 1979, with Krauss abdicating a couple of years later, before the release of the airy Song of the Bailing Man. He was replaced by Anton Fier – who’d taken his seat once before – and later returned for another stint. But by 1982, the original Ubu was, for all intents and purposes, in the history books. They’ve since returned, re-invigorated, but with a decidedly different zeitgeist – which is a positive, all in all: It would be inconceivable to have a force like this be reduced to stagnancy.
Many years ago, during the band’s brief stint with the short-lived Imago Records, David Thomas likened Ubu to the mythological Flying Dutchman, “condemned to sail the sea forever.” And while the band sails on to this day, there’s little in its arc to indicate damnation, and with discoveries like Dub Housing along the way, the journey has proven remarkably fruitful.
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The flip side of 30 Seconds Over Tokyo was Heart of Darkness not Final Solution sorry to say.
Final Solution / Cloud 149 was the second Pere Ubu single on their own label Hearthan – HR102
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