The making of URGH ! A MUSIC WAR

Oingo Boingo : Ain't This The Life

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On the weekend of August 16 British filmmakers, working with IRS Records and FBI Booking Agency,  showed up at various Los Angeles venues to shoot performances that would appear in a 1981 concert movie called Urgh! A Music War. 

It all began on a Friday night at Santa Monica Civc Center with sets from Chelsea ("I'm On Fire") and the Dead Kennedys ("Bleed For Me"). X followed with a version of "Beyond and Black", followed by The Cramps playing "Tear It Up" with their new guitarist Julien Hechtlinger, aka Julien Grindsnatch. 

  The next night featured Stiv Bators, who didn't make the cut. Wall of Voodoo followed with "Back In Flesh". The Members("Offshore Banking Business")  were next and then came Pere Ubu with "Birdies". David Thomas looked like a junior banking executive.

Magazine followed with a version of "Model Worker". Said a reviewer from Sounds "Howard Devoto was looking like an over-intelligent lift-operator from another world dropped into a disco".

On Sunday night the filmmakers moved to the Whiskey A-Go-Go to film The Surf Punks performing "My Beach", followed by The Go-Go's with "We Got The Beat". 

The Alley Cats took the stage that night to play  "Nothing Means Nothing Anymore" and a band called Oingo Boingo with "Ain't This the Life".

In San Francisco they would catch Devo on stage. 

The following weekend the crew would be in New York City catching performances by The Fleshtones, Joan Jett and, most memorably,  Klaus Nomi performing "Total Eclipse". The movie would be released in 1981 along with a soundtrack by A+M Records which may why The Police, shot in September along with the likes of XTC and Echo and the Bunnymen, get three songs on the soundtrack. 

Both Talking Heads and The B-52's both turned down offers to appear in the movie.  

The Darkened Sky

Pere Ubu : Ubu Dance Party

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"Mr Thomas's voice is that of a man muttering in a crowd. You think he's talking to himself until you realize he's talking to you."
-Greil Marcus

In November of 1978, Pere Ubu released their second album, Dub Housing on English Chrysalis which meant it was only available as an import even in the band's hometown of Cleveland. Singer David Thomas and most fans of the band consider this to be Pere Ubu's masterpiece. Where the debut, The Modern Dance, rocked, Dub Housing weaves in experimental synthy swoops, guitar lines and Thomas's high pitched absurdistt lyrics. The words most used to describe the album is "challenging". Critic Dave Marsh called it "Anti rock for anti-rockers. Boo".

Robert Christgau was one of the first critics to hail the album, grading Dub Housing with an A and writing:

Because I trust the way Ubu's visionary humor and crackpot commitment rocks out and/or hooks in for the sheer pleasure of it, I'm willing to go with their excursions into musique concrete, and on this record they get me somewhere. The death of Peter Laughner may well have deprived America of its greatest punk band, but the subsequent ascendancy of synth wizard Allen Ravenstine has defined a survival-prone community capable of bridging the '60s and the '80s without acting as if the '70s never happened. Imitating randomness by tucking randomlike sounds into deep but tactfully casual structures, joyfully confusing organic and inorganic sounds, they teach us how to live in the industrial shift--imaginatively!

From Ken Tucker writing for Rolling Stone:

Self-parodic, intense, austere and ribald, Pere Ubu presents itself as the cutting edge of nothing at all, making rock + roll out of art for art's sake.

From Trouser Press

The spectacular Dub Housing accentuates the more amorphous qualities of the band's sound, drawing heavily on synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine's utterly original soundscaping ability. Songs like "Codex," "Caligari's Mirror" and the ominous title track conjure up images straight out of art-house psychological horror films like Carnival of Souls. Simply one of the most important post-punk recordings

Pere Ubu in Sweden, 2011.

Thomas would tell Melody Maker 

"Ubu was a grotesque synthesis  of all that was ugly in human flesh. Why the band is called Pere Ubu has to do with a number of things I can't easily explain, but on the simplest level it has to do with the thing that I am in a lot of ways: a grotesque character, and the band has a grotesque character. What we are is not pretty."

Sign it!

Pere Ubu : Nonalignment Pact

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One week in and we've already got our first classic rock album of 1978! Released in January of 1978, Pere Ubu's debut album, The Modern Dance, is one part avant garde art experiment, one part psychic breakdown, one part garage-style rock 'n'roll...often leaping between these three shades several times within the same song.

The album begins with an ear bleeding synthesized siren. That, my friends, is how you do it.

Most of the members of Pere Ubu had roots in the Cleveland proto-punk band Rocket From the Tombs.  The smarter members went to Pere Ubu. The others founded The Dead Boys.  

Of this classic example of a "grower" Robert Christgau wrote:

Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas's shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while. So even though there's too much Radio Ethiopia and not enough Redondo Beach, I'll be listening through the failed stuff--the highs are worth it, and the failed stuff ain't bad. A-

Ken Tucker wrote the review for Rolling Stone :

Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance is harsh and willfully ugly, yet always mindful of certain rock and  roll imperatives: a solid beat, snappy lyrics and engaging themes. Ubu tends to break these imperatives apart: if the lyrics are funny, the melody will be excruciatingly abstract; if the melody is catchy, the lyrics will be intentionally dull or indecipherable. But David Thomas' smooth, adenoidal vocals and Tom Herman's staccato guitar playing provide the musical glue to hold everything together.

 The band's name, derived from a character in turn-of-the-century avant-gardist Alfred Jarry's famous plays, has some significance. As in the work of Jarry and other Dadaists, there is, beneath Pere Ubu's shouted cynicism, a painfully hopeful romanticism, a feeling that if you wallow in ugliness with a sufficiently noble and artistic intent, the ugliness will become attractive. It did for Jarry, and it does for Pere Ubu, especially on the title song—a swirling, complex collage—and on the sardonic but hearty "Humor Me."

But the best thing I've read is by someone named Leland on the Rate Your Music website :

The Modern Dance is a black-and-white comic featuring a grotesque, undersketched, permanently underemployed fat manic depressive walking cracked sidewalks in a torn trenchcoat under chronic Cleveland cloud cover, mumbling conspiracy theories gleaned while watching a distorted-tubed tv on the blink during long afternoons lying around in a bathroom-in-the-hall efficiency.

40 Year Itch : Don't Need a Cure

Pere Ubu : Final Solution

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Everything I’ve done has been a failure.

-David Thomas

   On March 18, 1976,  Pere Ubu released the single "Final Solution" b/w "Cloud 149". No Nazi reference intended, this disquieting, monstrous epic is actually an anthem for the alienated teenager living inside each and every one of us. We're all outsiders. And if we can't get a girl to touch us, at least we have rock'n'roll. As for the sound of Pere Ubu, singer David Thomas once told The Guardian "I used to say that the bass player is actually the band’s guitarist, the guitarist is the bassist, the synthesiser is the vocal and I’m the horn section. "

40 Year Itch : Dark Flak Spiders

Pere Ubu : 30 Seconds Over Tokyo

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  There were a few other bands exploring the avant-garde ( Henry Cow comes to mind), but no other American single released in 1975 suggested such big and noisy changes were on the horizon. The riff may make you think of Sabbath, but Ozzy never wrote such poetic, disturbed lyrics. And then the whole tune implodes for minutes of noise. Had the punks followed Pere Ubu's lead instead of the Ramones, what would we have been hearing in 1977?