“All these things are made to take away;
Where my heart resides they have laid to waste;
Now they fill the time with hollow trash;
I hear a ticking bomb, I’m glad you asked;
I’m alive.”
At first blush, it would seem that Dave Thomas, frontman and original member of Pere Ubu, has a rather dim view of humanity.
When discussing musicians, Thomas told me, “Musicians are scum.”
When talking about academics, Thomas seethes, “Anytime I talk about academic musicologists there’s an implied spit.”
And when describing audiences, he said, “They could be a bunch of damn zombies for all it matters.”
Thomas doesn’t even appear to particularly like himself. “I’m not special – my ideas aren’t good enough to exist on their own,’ he said.”
While Thomas may come across as a self-hating misanthrope, he is no nihilist. In fact, Thomas’ antipathy towards people is arguably rooted in his wanting the best out of himself and others. And for Thomas, there is purpose in discovering truly authentic and honest ideas that manifest in great songs.
“Every song is a unique sound construction, a unique slice of space and time. And you owe it to the integrity of space/time to allow it to live – to allow it to be its own entity,” Thomas explained. “You owe it to integrity, to the universe, to what is good in the world – to be true.”
From Thomas’ perspective, the key to being true to a song is not to be satisfied with it – to constantly question everything. “As far as brain soul killers, self-satisfaction has got to rank right up there…One should never be satisfied with where you’re at … Part of that is eliminating self-satisfaction … purging yourself … People like to say it’s not the arriving, it’s the journey. Well, that’s baloney,” Thomas said. “Pennsylvania is the space between where you are and where you want to be. Now, if the journey is so important, that means you never get out of Pennsylvania.
“And frankly, I want to get out of Pennsylvania.”
When one takes the approach of constant purging and questioning, what emerges, according to Thomas, is a commitment not to people, but to ideas. Specifically, Thomas feels that the ideas of songs are discovered as part of storytelling.
“When you write a song you are so desperate for some phrase or idea to start with. And then, hopefully, you have a methodology of pursuing it so that the story takes on a life of its own so it gets beyond your control. Being a storyteller means to a degree that you have to strive – though it’s a futile effort – you have to strive to find that observer status, that neutral status … and not try to make the story turn out in a certain way,” he explained. “Human beings like to have morals to the story. They like to have a story, and at the end of it, they like to have a little lesson that you take home. I’m not sure that real life is like that. You don’t control real life. There are many narratives working in cooperation or a narrative that is running contradictory or at an oblique angle – or seemingly irrelevant noise in the middle of the story.
“Confusion and contradiction is part of the routine that we’ve got to deal with here.”
For Thomas, human beings – whether musicians, audiences, critics, or even himself – risk having personal agendas and perspectives that interfere with the pursuit of the idea in storytelling. And as a result, humans are the ones that can either generate the ideas and commit to the ideas, or ruin the song by imposing their own personal agendas that take the song away from the integrity of the idea.
“Self-expression is evil…Personalities are irrelevant…the people in a band are irrelevant. Everybody’s replaceable. The problem with making music is the musicians. The guitarist wants to go in one direction, the bassist wants it to go in another direction,” Thomas explained. “And, eventually, what you have are little artifices, morals to the story versus allowing the thing to live and take on a life of its own, an existence of its own, to be a unique slice of space/time that you’re not in control of.
“What’s important are ideas – ideas that people represent and bring to a cooperative effort.”
Thomas admires other creative spirits who he feels value ideas over neat plot lines. He cites author Raymond Chandler as an influence. “It probably all comes from reading Raymond Chandler at too young an age. Because the one thing that never matters in a Raymond Chandler novel is the plotline,” he described. “You can’t figure it out. There is no plot line as far as you can see. And that seemed to be a pretty accurate way of writing about human life.”
And Thomas appreciated the work of Alfred Hitchcock and the band The Residents, who would often all dress up in eyeball helmets and top hats to conceal their identity. “Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘The problem with making movies is the actors. The actors ruin the movie.’ I admired the Residents – they started out right. It was just all behind a mask. You never saw who they were, and you didn’t know their names.
“It was really irrelevant.”
Consistent with his beliefs, Thomas feels he needs to strive in an ongoing way to control his own impulse to impose his own biases on Pere Ubu’s ideas. “Part of the effort that I’ve engaged in for years is to neutralize the intention of any one particular musician, including myself. There’s a dynamic there where you have to constantly question what you’re doing to a certain degree,” Thomas said. “You have to examine what you’re thinking and what you’re doing. Never trusting yourself – there’s an old Biblical saying – ‘The heart is treacherous, who can know it?’ So the heart is treacherous and you have to keep on your toes. And we used to have a motto, refine yourself in the furnace of the moment. You burn with fire clarifying the dross.’
“You’ve really got to remove yourself.”
Similarly, Thomas is cautious to challenge his audience with new and different ideas, and not let their influence affect the way he and Pere Ubu write music. Because for Thomas, it’s ultimately all about the integrity of the ideas.
“You don’t want to be a slave to your fans. This is why you need to purge them out … One winds up sounding arrogant and somehow detached from the reality of pop music when you talk this way, but I have things I want to accomplish. I want to go somewhere,” Thomas said.
“I want to get out of Pennsylvania.”
Photo credit: Kiersty Boon
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Psychology Today on January 4, 2018.
