Pere Ubu
If I had to choose any three minutes of my life to live over and over forever, this snippet would definitely be in the running. I’ve forgotten the faces of people I thought I was in love with then, but I remember the song that was playing: “Roadrunner,” by the Modern Lovers. What that moment, and that song, were telling me was not only that my greenhorny teenage sense of wonder was nothing to be ashamed of, but that it would serve me well for all my life. I was so in love with the modern world, modern moonlight, modern rock ‘n’ roll, that it hurt. I wanted to eat it.
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Nothing on St Arkansas has the effortlessness of the effectively mechanical; like most Pere Ubu over the decades it is carefully designed to sound rickety and lurching and missing a muffler. This music struggles and strains and sometimes sounds painful to make. It’s like driving across the Great Plains, where you can spend all day getting from nowhere to nowhere. “Phone Home Jonah,” another song about escape, feels urgent–like scanning the scrubby desert for gas-station lights while the needle creeps closer and closer to the E. St Arkansas uses sound to achieve the level of descriptive detail we’re more used to getting from novels. We like our literary rockers marked clearly as such–and too often the music sounds like the afterthought it is. But the stories Thomas’s evocative poetry hints at are fleshed out by the fidgety music, come alive only in his squawky, unsettling delivery. Kick that synth and maybe it’ll settle into a comforting drone; maybe those guitars will stop leaking oil before everything grinds to a halt.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Jones.
