Bent By Nature Ep. 11: Don’t Look Back (With David Thomas)

Deirdre O’Donoghue: Do you know this band that’s coming in here? I bet they do a …

Ruth Seymour: Who are they?

O’Donoghue: It’s Pere Ubu.

Seymour: Uh huh.

O’Donoghue: One of the most influential bands of the ‘80s in developing music. David Thomas is a genius. You’d love his writing. He’s quite something.

Seymour: You know, I wanna tell you something. These guys walk in and I say to myself, “These are rock musicians? They all look like intellectuals to me.” [Laughs]

O’Donoghue: That’s the nature of SNAP. That’s exactly what they are. That’s exactly what it’s about. - SNAP #1212, June 14, 1991

In May of 1989, Cleveland’s native sons, Pere Ubu, released Cloudland: a gorgeous, wide-screen, major-label pop album that instantly polarized the band’s avant-garde fanbase. That spring, band leader David Thomas was in LA, shooting videos for two of the album’s songs. Deirdre charmed him into bringing an advance tape onto SNAP, which they premiered live on air. Two years later, he came back with a scaled-down version of the band — which they called Petit Ubu — to perform songs from their then-new album Worlds in Collision.

David Thomas sat down for an interview with KCRW in August of 2021. He discussed the making of those albums and the band’s “life and times” around those SNAP appearances. This episode was prepared (but never completed) as part of the original run of Bent By Nature. In observance of David’s recent passing, we’re sharing it at last.

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O’Donoghue: What sort of reaction do you anticipate from longtime fans of Pere Ubu with this new album, Cloudland?

Thomas: Ha! Pere Ubu fans should be very used to the fact that whatever we're going to do is going to be the unexpected. You gotta just trust that wherever we're going is going to be interesting, and whatever they thought was going to be next, isn’t.

Cloudland was to be a journey across America. It was to be a metaphor for a journey through life. The West Coast is always … This is what Raymond Chandler was always going on about. “This is the end. Here you are. This is the great immovable Pacific object. This is where all people, all travelers, must inevitably end up, at Bay City, corrupt and venal,” and on and on and on. That was the basic metaphor of Cloudland. It's an evocative name, so it's better than Lafayette, GA, or Tuscaloosa, or something like that. My mother's family was from Georgia, so it connects on a lot of levels. Like everything with Pere Ubu, there's a lot of connections.

At the time, I was excited by the notion of working with a really high quality producer. Stephen Hague was a producer for much of that record, and he was extremely successful. I mean, he was practically Mr. Producer of the ‘80s. To me, it was a big experiment. Iit was like, “Alright, we're going to see what somebody else does with this.” I'm the only one who was there most of the time, and I would just go in and sit and watch Stephen work. Those were the days before computers got involved. He had two 24-track digital multi-track recorders, which must have cost a fortune each in those days. This is the most expensive studio in Europe at that point. And he would just sit there [for] hours on end, straightening out the drum tracks and patiently bouncing one beat of the foot drum from one tape to the next. I couldn't believe his patience and discipline.

O’Donoghue: I think it kind of echoes my sentiments here. David. I can't believe this, you've made a dance record. It’s great.

Thomas: Uh, yeah, yeah. That’s, uh, that’s actu – Yeah, yeah, it's … It’s … Yeah, it’s … Yeah, what can I tell you? In fact, though, the English [record] company is very much into club mixes of things, and so they've made some club mixes of “Love, Love, Love,” which was mixed by Daniel Miller from Mute Records, who's an old friend of ours. The thing that we’d wanted to do on this record is, we wanted to turn the thing over to other people to mix. ‘Cause this was another thing, there’s a radical approach we wanted to take, which was just basically: we wanted to stand ourselves on our head and shake ourselves up a bit. And one of the things we did was go to people we trusted and say, “Here, you do it.” 

O’Donoghue: This is going to be, this will be “Waiting for Mary,” which is the single that’s out in England, yes?

Thomas: Uh-huh. I think this is the extended version, but yes, this is the single.

O’Donoghue: What are we doing here? “Waiting for Mary (What Are We Doing Here?)” Anything we should know about this? 

Thomas: No, just…

O’Donoghue: Just listen to it? Just dive right in, feet first. Brand-new Pere Ubu on SNAP on KCRW.

We were surrounded by Pere Ubu fans. Dave Bates, the head of Fontana, was a fanatical Pere Ubu fan. He was scared to death to mess with us. He did not want to be the Richard Branson to Captain Beefheart with Pere Ubu. He did not want to screw us up. I had a certain amount of fighting to do in the band about it, because there were some people in the band who were snooty about the whole thing. I've always thought about it: If they were Michelangelo and taking money from the Medicis, I would rather take money from Phonogram than the Medicis. The men in suits are men, and they're in the record business. And they love the record business, just a different side of it. I've never had a problem with them. If you don't sell any records, they get rid of you, y’know? What the hell do you want? I've played the game, I don't expect special rules.

O’Donoghue: It's not often that I have an opportunity to audition records actually on the air, and I think you're one of the handful of people in the world whom I would trust this way, but this new album … Well, you can't make a mistake. I mean, how can you go wrong putting a David Thomas or a Pere Ubu record on the turntable? There's no doubt about it. Are you basically happy with what's come out of it?

Thomas: Sure! We like it. We like this record, you bet. We’re happy.

O’Donoghue: Well, it's making me smile incredibly. I can't wait to, uh …

Thomas: Well, you know, you haven't heard me play the accordion yet. 

O’Donoghue: Well, let's hear you play the accordion. Why not?

Thomas: Okay, well … 

O’Donoghue: The new, disciplined, David Thomas!

Thomas: Yeah, yeah, this is … [Laughs]

All the accordion songs I've ever written are special songs to me. Because if it's got an accordion on it, I wrote it. And the accordion has always brought out a certain in-depth view of my character. It answers some need in my being that's expressed only through pushing air. You know, everything about me is pushing air. I'm always pushing air.

O’Donoghue: …and it's SNAP #1212, here on KCRW, Santa Monica. I'm Deirdre O'Donoghue. We’re a week away from the summer solstice, and I have for us tonight what I'm absolutely certain is going to be pretty swell. Pere Ubu have a new album out called Worlds in Collision. David Thomas has been here before. Welcome back to KCRW. David.

Thomas: Thank you.

O’Donoghue: You've brought along a couple of your mates this time.

Thomas: Mm-hmm. We got here Eric Drew Feldman. He's on the piano, but he has no microphone to speak with, so he will tiddle his keys.

Feldman: Hi.

Thomas: Oh, okay, he's gonna say hi. And we have Jim Jones over on the guitar. 

Jones: Hello.

O’Donoghue: Hi guys. Thanks for coming along tonight and performing live on SNAP. Have at it, it's all yours. 

Thomas: Uh-oh. Okay … We thought we were going to start off with a safe song, but then we decided we're going to start off with a song that I can't remember all the words to, but we're going to do it right away anyway and see if I can get through it. This song is called “We Have the Technology.”

[Music plays, to minor discord]

Thomas: …this is very bad, Eric, because you were playing the introduction to “Worlds in Collision,” and we really want “We Have the Technology.” This is hideously embarrassing.

O’Donoghue: David, do you know about the electromagnetic storm that we're passing through?

Thomas:  I think there was a flaw in the time-space warp continuum, I think. We're gonna do a time splice. Okay, time splice. Everybody's imaginations now, go.

When I put Pere Ubu together, I was determined that it would be a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner, or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in, if they had been brought up in the rock’n’roll era. So I was determined that this is what Pere Ubu was going to be. And I knew it would take me a long time. But the stories of the albums are very complex. We were always working a long way ahead. So before Cloudland had come out, we had decided on [the] Worlds in Collision situation. And my idea for Worlds in Collision was that I was going to get Van Dyke Parks to produce it. I've always loved Van Dyke Parks. He's probably been the most important person in the business to me. So I was in LA doing videos, and I was supposed to call Van Dyke Parks, and somebody had given me his number, and I couldn't get the nerve to do it. So, on the final day I was there, I finally got the nerve to call him from my hotel, and he picked up the phone and I just hung up. I couldn't talk to him.

Worlds in Collision, I suppose thematically, is very much [based on author Immanuel] Velikovsky. All the songs that come to mind are about the clash of different realities, or the clash of worlds. I don't know how to explain it other than that. Velikovsky wrote about the literal clash of planets, but this is obviously more figurative.

I also enjoyed working very much with [producer] Gil Norton for Worlds in Collision. Now, Gil and I had a lot of fights. We had a lot of trouble doing vocals, because this is at the point at which I was beginning to understand that I don't hear the way other people hear. Because I would go into the vocal booth and I'd start singing, and he'd say, “Oh no, we need to go back and correct that. You're off key there.” And I'd say, “...all right,” so I went back and corrected it. We'd progress through the song, and then he’d stop, there'd be this long silence, and he said, “The thing we just corrected is now wrong.” Hours went by like this. 

Paul Hamann, who had been the only producer I'd ever had, said, “You know, you're never out of key, ever. You're singing to resonances and frequencies that are not musical, that are coming from the synthesizer, or they're coming from echoes, but you're always in key. It's just that most people think that being in key has to do with the melody. You're not always with the melody, but you're right in there.” So there was this entire thing. 

Then I went off and produced four B-sides while Gil was doing something else. I bring them back and Gil says, “Why don't you sing like that for me?” I just silently said, “‘Cause you don't let me.” The last day of the session, he comes to me and says, “You know, I never should have told you what to do, because I don't understand what you do,” which was astonishingly honest. But I really liked Gil, and I didn't resent any of the fights, you know? It was just like, “Well, this is just working together.” I don't take any of this stuff personally.

Somebody asked me about how many people have been in Pere Ubu, and I said, “It doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter who's in Pere Ubu. As long as I'm in charge and the rules are followed, it's Pere Ubu.” Now, the caveat there is that I've always attracted extremely talented people. And it was a real joy working with Jimmy [guitarist Jim Jones]. Number one, it was a joy watching him in the studio doing vocal parts or something. Because at a certain point, we'd say, “Okay, Jimmy, you got any ideas for the vocals, backing vocals?” And he would say, “Yeah, I need four tracks.” And he would just go in and lay 12 parts across those four tracks. And I still have a lot of tapes of just, you know, I take away the rest of the song, and I just leave his vocal tracks. They're backing vocals. They're not up front, but if you put them up front, they're amazing. 

And he had a similar musical grasp of things. He had this certain mentality. We called it Jimmy World. There's this one infamous time we were playing the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and Jimmy got off into Jimmy World. All of a sudden, the rest of us noticed he was playing the wrong song, and he was playing it absolutely synced in with the rest of the band, but we were playing a totally different song. And this went on for two or three songs. Finally, I went over. I said, “Jimmy, this is Song B, what's going on?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, okay…” But Jimmy was one of a kind, boy. You'll never see his like again. Miss him dearly.

Thomas: We actually haven't discussed what we're gonna do here. I know this looks really shoddy and unprofessional that we haven't really worked out a set list here, but that's okay. Who cares? There is a song…

O’Donoghue: No, it’s SNAP. That’s the way you're supposed to do it here.

Thomas: Let's do “Final Solution.” But Eric, I guess you're gonna have to lay out, unless you can just vamp along or something. You know the routine. And Jimmy?

Jim Jones: Mm?

Thomas: Let's do it. 

Jones: Let's do it.

Radio has always been huge in my life. I grew up listening to the radio. You know, I was a radio … far more than television, I was the radio generation. And I remember very specifically getting my first seven-transistor radio. It was about this big, and I didn't know what a transistor was, but this one had seven of them. And I would put it under my pillow and listen to … I think it was Alan Douglas and a bunch of other people that were on the radio late at night talking about UFOs or Bigfoot or whatever, or just anything, you know, just crap. But I think there is something about the voice coming through the blackness. There's that song I wrote about it called “Ghosts” – “And the radio plays all night for the fear of silence, for the fear of silence of one's own thoughts.” I suppose that's the dark side of it. The other side is this notion that I've always been infatuated with, of these invisible radio waves blasting through every … coming through the walls right now, pumping out whatever, in this confusion of 20 different radio stations at this point here in Brighton, and it's all just going constantly.

Thomas: Can I have one more rant?

O’Donoghue: Be my guest. You can have two more. 

Thomas: Okay, thank you. No, just one more. Radio … I mean, the point about … I mean, music should always be like radio where there's a drama on. When you listen to a drama on the radio, and by chosen bits of sound, a skeleton is provided, which the imagination of the listener fleshes out. And you have to see the way the light strikes Philip Marlowe's face as he talks to the babe in the corner. And you gotta see the way the dust traveled, the moats float across the beam of light in your mind on the radio. But television, unfortunately – and this is, unfortunately, the way most narrative musical forms are these days, and have been allowed to become these days – is a totally a passive experience. And you just sit there and consume, and all is provided for you. And so, let's hold on to radio here. Thank you, and good night. 

O’Donoghue: Amen. Reverend Thomas speaks. Thank you very much. David, for coming and doing this: for playing, for bringing this new album … 

Thomas: It’s always a pleasure to come to KCRW.

O’Donoghue: You are always welcome here.