You Say You Want a Revolution? : Well, You Know, Pere Ubu Still Believes in a Brave New World, Though Its Rock Has Evolved

"Our particular generation was doomed, because we believed the day of the teen idol in rock music was over, that it would never return to teen nonsense," Thomas, who will front Pere Ubu on Saturday night at Bogart's in Long Beach, said in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio.

"We believed it was our mission to build a brave new world, and that rock music was the poetry that could express all of human experience. We seriously believed we could change the face of music--we and our comrades, like (Tom) Verlaine and (David) Byrne. The New Wave generation of which we were part, we turned to our forebears"--Thomas mentions Brian Wilson, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan and "100 guys known and 1,000 guys unknown" as Pere Ubu's honored '60s precursors--"and said, 'Well done, hand us the torch and we'll build the brave new world.' We didn't think in terms of career. We were purists, true believers."

In case you haven't seen any MTV lately, careerism reigns, and teen idolatry did not topple. But if Pere Ubu failed as a revolutionary cell, at least it has succeeded in making interesting, influential music over a long arc of time without standing pat. Today the band is still around, providing an alternative for those who want more out of rock than glamorous schlock (you really can't blame a guy for feeling doomed if his life's work over 16 years has reached fewer ears than debut albums by the likes of Trixter and Slaughter).

But better doomed than dumb.

"We still believe," said Thomas, who will turn 38 on Friday. "We're doomed by that belief that music should be something moving, and that its only object is to be a personally moving experience and a socially and communally moving experience."

In its early days, Pere Ubu's vision of the brave new world tended to be noisy and dark as the band fleshed out its basic garage-rock song craft with assaultive blasts of synthesizer sound. Thomas, whose bulky, animated stage presence always draws comparisons to Ralph Kramden, developed a high, theatrical yowl that was something like Byrne's early Talking Heads style--although it wasn't always clear what words Thomas was yowling amid the din.

Pere Ubu had an initial run from 1975 to 1982. Thomas was the lone constant, but synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine, drummer Scott Krauss and bassist Tony Maimone were along for most of the ride in an otherwise oft-changing lineup.

"We did a number of headstrong things" in the early days for the sake of artistic independence, Thomas said. "If we were looking to be commercial, we never should have done 'Art of Walking,' " one of the band's most abstract albums. "But we weren't looking to make commercial decisions. 'Art of Walking' was a very necessary album to make."

After Pere Ubu broke up, Thomas moved to London--not to be part of the city's rock scene, but because his wife is British--and launched a solo career. By 1986, Maimone and Ravenstine were back with him as members of a band called the Wooden Birds. When Krauss joined in, too, they figured there were enough former Ubu peers around to justify a resurrection of the old name. Pere Ubu returned as a recording band in 1988 with "The Tenement Year." In case anyone thought time had eroded its penchant for noisy ways and placing uncommon demands on listeners, the album began with a squalling, static-filled din. The object seemed to be to explore how dissonant and quirky they could be while still working in a recognizable, basic garage-rock tradition.

Lately, though, Pere Ubu has toned down the noise and emerged with clean, accessible pop songs.

"One of the fundamentals of Pere Ubu is that sound has a visual component, a sound that engages the imagination of the listener and produces a landscape" Thomas said by way of explaining where the noisy side came from, and where it has gone. On 1989's "Cloudland" and the new "Worlds in Collision," he said, "we wanted to stress the voice of Ubu, the poetic vision. We decided to back down the visuals in deference to the emotional language we use. On 'Tenement Year,' the visual language is pumped up--lots of ideas, lots of noise, lots of kitchen sinks." The two latest albums, he said, "are more to do with directness and focus."