When Ohio was Cutting Edge

Believe it or not, Ohio had a vibrant avant garde music scene in the mid 70s, with Devo being the best-known band of the Ohio scene. Seriously, in 1973-4, Ohio was more of a hotbed of rock-and/or-roll innovation than any other place on the globe. Another celebrated Ohio band was Cleveland's Pere Ubu, a band which had its origin in short-lived band Rocket from the Tombs, a band which also gave rise to The Dead Boys.

While I have long been a Pere Ubu fan, and I dig a couple of The Dead Boys' songs, I had never heard anything by Rocket from the Tombs (not to be confused with the band Rocket from the Crypt, which took its name from RftT). Recently, I found some Youtube videos of live recordings by Rocket from the Tombs (who broke up before releasing an album). The sound reminds me of a lo-fi Black Sabbath, playing avant-weird music and fronted by a warbling art-school student).

"Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" was an early single by Pere Ubu, a chilling, jagged-edged soundscape inspired by accounts of The Doolittle Raid, a one-way bombing mission meant to bolster American morale and jar the Japanese out of a sense of military supremacy:

Dark flak spiders bursting in the sky,
reaching twisted claws on every side.
No place to run.
No place to hide.
No turning back on a suicide ride.

The version by Pere Ubu is enough to elicit goosebumps:





The original by Rocket from the Crypt is sparer, and even less conventional than the Pere Ubu single:





"Sonic Reducer" by The Dead Boys is a fairly straightforward punk song, all adrenaline and attitude, and has passed into the punk "canon" (covered even by St. Joseph):




While the original by Rocket from the Tombs clocks in at about twice the length, it clearly foreshadows The Dead Boys' version, sounding like a "Stooges" outtake:





I suppose it was inevitable that Rocket from the Tombs would break up, what with two such disparate musical styles (exemplified by David Thomas and Cheetah Chrome) characterizing the band's output.

I'd been meaning to hunt down music by Rocket from the Tombs ever since reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, but the recordings were as rare as hens' teeth. I'd make a snide comment about how the internet makes everything easy to find, but I'm too happy to have found these recordings to play at being a hipster d-bag.

An Ongoing Solution

Back in the mid-'70s, the avant garde of rock music was Ohio, and one of the most interesting Ohio bands of the era was Pere Ubu, a sonically challenging band which formed out of the breakup of legendary proto-punk band Rocket from the Tombs. Early on, the band facetiously described their musical style as avant-garage. One of Pere Ubu's most celebrated early singles was ode to teenage alienation Final Solution, a song which the band refrained from playing live for years because of the association of the title phrase with Nazism.


The song's first incarnation was a spare, edgy version performed by Rocket from the Tombs:





The original Pere Ubu single version had a richer sound, a slow tempo number which still achieves a nice burn:





Recently, a reconstituted Rocket from the Tombs has toured, performing a version of the song which, to my ears, has a plaintiveness substituting for the angst of the original version:





Covers of the song have popped up from time-to-time, with Peter Murphy, frontman of Bauhaus releasing a version as his debut solo single:





Yesterday, I found a smoldering cover of the song by Living Colour, which inspired this post:





For a song originally recorded by a bunch of young Midwestern weirdos, it sure has legs.

Brooklyn Bound, for Birdies

Tonight, I'm heading down to the beautiful Bell House in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn for this month's Secret Science Club lecture to hear Dr Rafael Maia of Columbia University speak about birds. Speaking of birds, Thunder has a nice post with pictures of a leucistic sparrow at his blog.

Longtime readers will know that I am partial to birds myself. I am also partial to Pere Ubu and the amazing concert film Urgh! A Music War. Put Urgh, Pere Ubu, and birdies together and you get this:





Pere Ubu's music ranged from the minatory to the Dada-esque, with this song being firmly in the latter camp. Me, with a crocodilians post and a birdies post back-to-back, I'm firmly in the Archosaur camp.

Nostalgia Begets Nostalgia

It's no secret to longtime readers that I am a fan of the proto-punk/avante-outré band Pere Ubu. Today, I had a hankering to hear the song Non-Alignment Pact, which is a bizarre deconstruction of typical oldie songs about infatution. After blasting the original, I remembered that Julian Cope, former lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes, performed a credible cover of the song about ten years after the release of the original.

Because the Intert00bz is a garden of forking links, I found a video of a concert that Mr Cope played at NYC's The Ritz, a music venue which I frequented back in its 54th St heyday... the venue was right by the Afghan Kebab House, so there was a good, inexpensive restaurant at which to fuel up before hitting the club. At any rate, I figured I'd watch the entire concert, and Mr Cope did not disappoint:





Julian Cope is pretty much the antithesis of Pere Ubu's David Thomas, a rail-thin, handsome rockstar with a deep, vibrant voice, compared to Mr Thomas' burly, somewhat disheveled warbler. Mr Cope did have a pretty good handle on the non-conventional in popular music, something he probably picked up by listening to David Thomas... he couldn't have helped being a conventional pretty-boy.

Reminded by Memorial Day

This past Memorial Day, at a ceremony at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, a wreath was laid by 102 year old veteran Richard Cole, the last surviving member of the Doolittle Raid, a daring April 1942 long-range bombing run over the main Japanese island of Honshu. The mission was a one-way flight over Japan due to the difficulty of landing the B-25 Mitchell bombers on the aircraft carriers from which they took off.

Me being me, I immediately thought of the haunting Pere Ubu song 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, inspired by the book and movie of the same name. The song, a particular favorite of mine, gives me goosebumps. Here is a 2013 live rendition:





If you can't distinguish the lyrics, the album version is more intelligible.

Thankfully, we of the US are friends and allies of the Japanese people, to the extent that an attack on Tokyo is one of our greatest fears when it comes to international policy.