Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance is a great album few have heard. When it
was first released, on Mercury’s punk imprint, Blank records, it sold about 10,000 units. Van
Halen’s debut album, released the same month as The Modern Dance, sold 10 million copies.1
No one who worked on the album expected any other outcome. This wasn’t
music made to capture the marketplace. It wasn’t produced by Ted Templeman in a state‐of‐the‐art
Los Angeles studio. It was recorded in a studio in Cleveland, by musicians who had been
reassembled from the remains of bands that had played Cleveland for years. Of course, that doesn’t mean the
people who recorded the album didn’t know what they were doing. The band was clearly immersed in all
kinds of rock and roll, throwing bits of surf guitar, a little Velvets, along with the Stooges and
Zappaesque experimentalism into the blender. Ken Hamann, who ran Suma Studio, and had built it with his own
hands, had produced the James Gang, Grand Funk Railroad, even Wild Cherry. But Pere Ubu’s long
relationship with Hamann (and later his son Paul) wasn’t a result of commercial calculation. It
was chance. Pere Ubu had taken an earlier project – their self‐produced single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo – to
Hamann’s Suma Studios to cut a master tape that could be used to produce 45s. New to the process of
recording and making records, Pere Ubu found their way to a studio, and returned to it when it came
time to make an LP. In Cleveland, a city on the slide, where options were few, you grabbed on to
musicians and opportunities as chance permitted, and you did what you did without too much calculation,
guided by your gut.
Like Patti Smith’s Horses, another album that heralded the arrival of
punk, The Modern Dance was a product of its cultural influences. But for Smith, culture meant art –
the poetry, visual art, and music that surrounded and sustained her. For Pere Ubu, what I mean by culture
is something very different. Culture is history, the accumulation of all we do, or perhaps, our
understanding of history and its consequences. We don’t make history, as much as we respond to it, are
shaped by it, adapt to it. Cleveland by the 1970s was a city that had been discarded, tossed aside
by the forward march of commerce and capitalism. Two hundred thousand manufacturing jobs were
lost, the city was crumbling, and hopelessness and a sense of isolation were the
inevitable consequences.
Pere Ubu, and the bands that made up the scene they were part of,
performed a soundtrack for the fall down the dark abyss. The thing that made Pere Ubu different, perhaps,
was the sense they brought with them that Cleveland, this dark place, populated by glassy‐eyed
losers, was an abandoned amusement park. Carnival music, just audible over the clanking of old
machinery, still played at the edge of our senses. A lot has been written about the grit and grim
pessimism of the downtown art scene that produced New York’s punk rock explosion. But Cleveland was
an altogether darker place. Patti Smith might have followed her muse down the rabbit hole, but Pere
Ubu was following its neighbors down the drain. Although the media celebrated the
heroin‐fueled darkness of punk‐era New York, in truth, New York remained a place full of opportunity. In an
interview with Playboy magazine in 1978, coincidentally right in the middle of the punk rock moment, Dylan
observed this about creating non‐mainstream art in New York:
“Mass communication killed it. It turned into one big carnival side
show…. The atmosphere changed from one of creativity and isolation to one where the attention would
be turned more to the show. People were reading about themselves and believing it.”2
And what was true of folk musicians in 1962 was true of punk rockers in
1975. In New York, the media was always watching, and reporting, and bands began to believe what
they read about themselves, and shape‐shifted to fit the media accounts. In Cleveland, isolation
allowed a type of creative freedom. Bands could absorb what they heard, but practiced their own art in
private, without mainstream media reporting on it. This was true, at least, for years, when the essential
DNA of Pere Ubu’s sound was mapped out.
Maybe it was the sense that everything was coming to an end, that
someone would be by soon to turn the lights off, and shut down the few machines that still spit out
widgets. Pere Ubu’s story seems strangely compressed, turning out their post‐punk debut at about the
time everyone else was just getting started with punk. Pere Ubu was born from the ashes of Rocket
From the Tombs, maybe the world’s first punk band, if you don’t consider Iggy and the Stooges
punk, or think of the New York Dolls as glam. Rocket From the Tombs debuted in 1974, the same year the
Ramones first took the stage. In 1975, a full year before the Ramones recorded their first album, Rocket
From the Tombs recorded some crudely engineered rehearsals, which weren’t released at the time, but
included 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, which would be Pere Ubu’s first single, released just months after
Rocket From the Tombs splintered (Gene O'Connor aka Cheetah Chrome would go on to start the Dead Boys)3.
That single, and the singles that followed (Final Solution and Street Waves) were punk, by almost
any definition you might choose. Final Solution, the second single, also a remnant from the Rocket From
the Tombs period, in particular still felt a part of the punk era, missing Allen Ravenstine’s
characteristically queer electronics.
But once you dropped the needle on The Modern Dance you knew you were
in another era. The album starts with a distracting buzz, feedback and electronics, and even
after Tom Herman’s guitar riff jumps in, momentarily reassuring you that this is, after all, rock and roll,
the electronic howl just won’t go entirely away. That first song, Non‐alignment Pact, has more in common
with Suicide and This Heat and The Pop Group than with the Ramones. Pere Ubu was No Wave before there
was No Wave. Post‐punk before there was post‐punk. The album was released just a month after
the Sex Pistols last concert in San Francisco, before Public Image Limited and Joy Division mapped out
the blueprint for post‐punk.
Yet there it was. The ominous darkness, the blending of genres, the
elevation of synthesizers to the center of the music, everything that we, perhaps too carelessly,
associate with the post‐punk aesthetic. So how did that happen?
My view is that
Pere Ubu benefited from something that Cleveland, and its rusting neighbor Akron, offered that New York, Los Angeles and London
couldn’t: the promise of failure. The near certainty that anything you did, any music you recorded, would
be heard by almost no one, and certainly no one with any influence or interest to market it to the
wider world. Although Mercury, bizarrely, signed Pere Ubu as the first artist on their punk rock
subsidiary – never getting the memo that the band had moved on – and Stiff would show up later to release a
compilation of Akron bands, no one in Cleveland in the mid‐seventies could have had any illusion that
record label titans were listening, and planning a strategy for global domination using Pere Ubu, Mirrors, the
Electric Eels, and Devo as the talent. This was music made for its own sake, inspired by the setting,
but without even the expectation that fellow Clevelanders would listen. Clevelanders were listening to
FM juggernaut WMMS, blasting Van Halen while they got high in their Camaros, driving into a weekend
of drinking, trying to forget their dead end jobs.
Pere Ubu wasn’t doing it for the money or the fame. As
Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time:
“Say The Modern Dance proves a durable catalogue item, selling not 25,000,
but 50,000. That would mean about $20,000 in royalties for a five‐man band. Say that in
addition they could net what the Numbers Band (a hard working local Cleveland band) gets in live
performance ‐ $35,000 a year. That's a lot of ifs for an annual income of $11,000 per man.”4
That was a best case scenario. Not very rosy. Not why Van Halen got
into the business, for example.
If they weren’t playing for wealth, or album sales, or fame, or girls,
they were playing just to play, because they wanted to get what was in their heads out on the vinyl. And that
purity is more punk than anything else. The deliberate rawness of many punks, their carefully positioned
anger, their nihilistic politics, their sneers, were all a guise, self‐conscious and purposeful. Pere Ubu
had none of that. They were authentic precisely because they weren’t rehearsing for their moment in
the spotlight, they weren’t assembling a press kit, full of outrageous stunts. If you just consider
the title, Non‐alignment Pact sounds like a statement of independence, a “fuck you” to the man, a
punk DIY anthem. But the song is about a girl. Like so many songs before it (and since), it is a boy’s
confession of the hopelessness of his desire, an admission that the girl he wants is unobtainable. It isn’t
punk because it adopts a studied opposition to mass culture. It doesn’t rage against the machine. It’s
punk because the band that made it is completely indifferent to mass success. And that indifference, I am
arguing, is at least partly explained by where the music came from, a city where no one believed anything
good could happen to them.
In sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, I find
a compelling description of what happens when cities die.5 Persistent joblessness, caused by the
relocation of industry and the resulting collapse of retail businesses and services that serviced the
manufacturers and the employees who depended on the manufacturers for their paychecks, resulted in a
cascade of social and organizational collapse. Families that can – those with breadwinners with better
educations and more marketable and adaptable skills – flee the city, relocating
to suburbs to work in new industrial parks or, in the case of Cleveland, move to the sun belt to take jobs in Atlanta and Houston. As
families leave, stability providing local institutions shut their doors, as churches and lodges
and social clubs lose membership.
The result is a form of social isolation. The unemployed in the city’s
inner‐city neighborhoods lose their connection with one another – a function churches and clubs once
provided – and, perhaps more centrally to our story, the residents of the city, immersed in its
decline, lose touch with any other possible narratives. This story – one of poverty and hopelessness, of
irreversible decline – becomes the seemingly inescapable truth of their lives.
In the liner notes to their second single, the fabulous Final Solution,
Pere Ubu’s first bassist, Tim Wright, who left before the second album, Dub Housing, to join up with no
wavers DNA in New York, wrote:
As the droning in her ears performed its pre‐ordained function as
introductory soundtrack, she instinctively knew the future of the mirage forming itself in a blank
field. For a second she sensed leaving something behind. Refocussing, she found herself facing a dimly lit
shed vibrating with the pulse of internal generators. At the door stood a large man flecked by shards of
white light that escaped the shed to annihilation in the overhanging hemisphere of an industrial arc
lamp. She followed him inside through a deafening squall of unnamed noises combining their extremities in a
miasma of smoke and gases peopled with queer shapes. Humans(?) shuffling about; machines waving
their arms. She couldn't tell which was which. Spaces between machines were narrow, each moving part
barely missing another. Distracted by a waver in her peripheral vision, she raised her eyes to
see giant aluminoid cables where the ceiling should have been, stretching off to infinity, from whence
they transmitted Life to the machines. The man shouted incomprehensible explanations, then
genuflected to the colossal steel‐spiked stamping machines with cast‐iron flywheels and iron balls that lashed
the air with each stamping while immense cogwheels squeaked and groaned, shining black with oil. Her
eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she could see men swaying, hypnotized by the revolution of
the cogwheels. As always, her gaze returned to where the ceiling should have been, the vast silent
cables shielded her from the formless Void.
This, as precisely as anything, captures what Pere Ubu did, and the
location where they did it. Cleveland was a vast industrial space, filled with factories and their machines,
crowding out the few workers left behind, echoing still with clangs and vibrations. And above, the
machinery’s cables, feeding “Life” into the entire operation, obscured the limitless sky, where, if permitted,
Clevelanders could have given flight to their hopes, releasing them like balloons into the blue. They
could look to the horizon, to destinations beyond the noise and smoke and darkness. But hemmed in by
the machinery and the system that feeds it, they couldn’t hope, couldn’t imagine a future. In
the song, even though it isn’t about post‐industrial despair, the band too is trapped. Unable to
imagine an escape from Cleveland, Pere Ubu shouts incomprehensibly, and pays homage to the “colossal
steel‐spiked stamping machines” that litter the industrial landscape, filling their music with
unidentifiable groans and clangs and beeps.
That the band did escape, in some measure, especially David Thomas, who
takes flight to New York and London, and goes on to play with Richard Thompson and Peter Hammill and
Lindsay Cooper and Chris Cutler, is beside the point. That, like stumbling into
Suma Studios, was a result of chance, not calculation. As Thomas sings in The Modern Dance:
Watch real close.
Look real fast.
He's in touch. He'll never last.
Cuz our poor boy.
He believes in chance.
He'll never get the modern dance.
Chance is a fickle force. In a city watching all it had built and
accumulated crumble, because of bad fortune and forces beyond easy comprehension, chance was an assassin,
snatching away your accomplishments, killing hope. But against all likelihood, the band did
learn to dance, surviving in an indifferent music industry. Now, almost 35 years later, like the Fall
and the Mekons, the band rolls on, accumulating a body of work incomprehensible to many. On recent
releases, in fact much of what followed after Mayo Thompson joined the band for their fourth album,
The Art of Walking, Pere Ubu has offered sometimes difficult, sometimes appealing art rock, no
longer directly referencing the bleak post‐industrial reality of Cleveland. One can recontextualize Rocket
from the Tombs and Pere Ubu in the conversation about the origins of punk (and post‐punk), as a group
who, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, with the possible exception of the Fall, allows us to
follow an arc that travels from punk, to post‐punk, to avant/art rock, through a brief flirtation with
commercial relevance, before finally making a return to what feels right, a comfortable late‐period that seems to be composed of everything that went before. Yet, even all these years later, after all that unfolded, The Modern Dance still retains its ability to startle, fascinate, and distract us from our march toward
bleak obsolescence. It is an artifact, in a way. A crucial reminder that Pere Ubu took a chance, in a town
where fate and circumstances had conspired to bring poverty and dislocation to hundreds of thousands of
people, and as a result, we have this remarkable music, and all the music that followed.
Notes
1 This was, after all, the era of the mega‐album. Between 1976 and
1978, Frampton Comes Alive! sold 6 million albums, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours
brought in 13 million buyers, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack topped
them both by selling 15 million copies (of a two record LP).
2 Ron Rosenbaum, “The Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan,” Playboy (March
1978).
3 The recordings were released, in 2002 by Smog Veil, under the title
The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs.
4 Robert Christagau, "A Real New Wave Rolls Out of Ohio,” Village
Voice (April 17, 1978).
5 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
