With all the light-saber rattling and threatened nuclear aggression being espoused by the infantalists in charge of the U.S. and North Korea, it might be tempting to interpret the latest Pere Ubu album as a political statement. 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is the band’s quasi-concept album about a military man who spends two decades staring at the control panel that could unleash Armageddon and wonders about his life choices at his career’s end. But Ubu co-founder and sole consistent member David Thomas points out that a) the album was conceived and recorded before last November’s election results and b) that’s not how the legendary Cleveland band rolls.
“Oh God — this has nothing to do with the election,” Thomas says. “Pere Ubu doesn’t deal with politics. I’m sure individuals have their own points of view, but the band doesn’t. Whether you live in America or Germany or England or Uzbekistan, you’re dealing with the same sort of antagonistic, offensive system dedicated to screwing up the lives of people who just want to get on with things — build a happy family situation, build a business, build a house out back. Ordinary stuff.”
In fact, Montana Missile Silo could more appropriately be seen as a metaphor for the music industry’s sad state, as well as an observation of the human reaction to babysitting the machinery of destruction.
“I wanted to create something that had sort of a claustrophobic feel to it,” Thomas says. “Here’s a guy who spent 20 years staring at the button to end the world, and he emerges on his last day and looks around at the state of the world and he thinks, ‘I spent 20 years toe-to-toe with Uncle Joe for this?’ In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the state of modern music, where everything is stultifyingly ordinary and it’s all safe and contrived and tells you little lessons. If you spent 40 years fighting ordinariness and the good fight on the musical front, you’re just overwhelmed thinking, ‘I spent 40 years doing this for that?’ ”
Certainly no one could accuse Pere Ubu of banality. Since the band’s auspicious and mind-blowingly original debut, 1978’s The Modern Dance, its name has become synonymous with an uncompromising dedication to blending art and music in consistently unique combinations. From the pinwheeling oddballery of its early work to the off-kilter accessibility of its middle period to its later hybridization of both eras, Pere Ubu stands shoulder to shoulder with Rock originals like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa (who Thomas references with the lyrical repetition of “brown shoes don’t make it” on Montana Missile Silo’s lead track, “Monkey Bizness”; listen above).
“Pere Ubu is a continuum. Each album is not a destination, it’s simply a moment in time,” Thomas says. “A tour is that moment in time, and oftentimes the band is ahead of that moment. We were doing shows in which we were deconstructing (Montana Missile Silo), which is sort of a bizarre time scale, but you have to remember, the album was recorded a year ago. And a band in the studio and a band onstage are two different things. You make an album to be studied and contemplated and considered over time. The live show is a visceral moment that’s there and gone. As far as Pere Ubu goes, we beat you over the head for an hour and every so often throw in something that’s not beating you over the head, in terms of power and brutality and whatever it is.”
Montana Missile Silo stands as a great synthesis of Pere Ubu’s conceptual oddity and skewed melodic sensibility, all threaded together by Thomas’ careening vocal style. From the almost-but-clearly-not-mainstream soundtrack to the hat-tip to fellow Clevelanders James Gang on “Funk #49” (not a cover of the classic song, but an original that shares the title), Pere Ubu’s new album shows the band can appeal to at least a portion of the masses without compromising its artistic vision.
“I wanted something that had a real — for want of a better (description) —‘blue-collar Rock’ element to it,” Thomas says “That’s where that came from. The James Gang had been on my mind a lot for various reasons. We shared a studio for a long time, and every so often I’d say hello to Joe and Jimmy Fox. To me, there’s a connection. Jim Fox, the drummer of the James Gang, he sees it, but not many other people have, nor should they be expected to.”
Even as Pere Ubu approaches Rock redemption on its own terms, there are still some wild sonic mood swings on Montana Missile Silo. That will always be a component of the group’s creative DNA.
“Somebody in England pointed out in one of the 1978 reviews of The Modern Dance that there were 10 songs on the album, and 10 different bands could make entire careers out of taking one of those songs and following it album after album and Pere Ubu just throws out this stuff and moves on,” Thomas says. “That’s always been our way of doing things. If we’d stopped at any point and done whatever song again and again, which is sadly the methodology for lots of bands, we undoubtedly would have been more commercially acceptable. That’s just not how we do things.”
While Pere Ubu takes great pains to present the totality of its vision on current set lists — a third of the new album, a third of its recent work and a third of its legacy catalog — Thomas resolutely affirms that there will be no celebration next year for the 40th anniversary of The Modern Dance.
“The problem with the anniversary of The Modern Dance is it just keeps coming around. There was a 10th, a 20th, a 30th,” he says. “I find this fascination that human beings have with numbers that end in zero a bit irritating. Why is the 40th more significant than the 38th or the 43rd? It makes no sense and is indicative of something that needs to be rewritten in mathematics. I think there’s something deep about it on a conspiratorial and esoteric level that probably doesn’t bear too much looking into for fear of upending some rock that, underneath it, is something really unseemly. But I put up with it.
“Yeah, it’s the 40th. No, we’ve got no plans, to make a short answer long.”
Pere Ubu plays Woodward Theater on Tuesday, Nov. 21. Tickets/more info: woodwardtheater.com.
