Pere Ubu - Pennsylvania (1998)

"Pere Ubu is a rock band. We are the mainstream. We are the norm. We require no labels. Labels are only useful for music that's deviated from the mainstream: backwaters & deadends require labels. If you fail to recognize that Pere Ubu and bands of its kind are the mainstream then 'everything you know is wrong.' Study the history and meaning of rock music. When you arrive at 1975 it's quite clear that the manifest destiny of it as an art form is defined by Pere Ubu and other groups with similar ambitions, everything else falls away along an arc of deviation from the vector of the ideal. Plato will tell you that only the ideal is real. Depends I suppose on whether you rate Plato. So what do you say to journalists? Pere Ubu is an irrelevancy. We don't sell enough records to make any difference. We stubbornly continue along a path which has increasingly fewer points of contact with the rest of the industry and the rest of media-driven society. We can make records that make people cry and we can make them remember what it was that they thought was so special about rock music in the first place. That and a buck gets you a cup of coffee in some states.

So what can I say?

Pere Ubu is a rock band. We are the custodians of the avant-garage. We had the misfortune to have a dream and vision at an early age that was too powerful to shake in older life. If you're young enough and if the vision is strong enough, you will never lose it-- like the people who became communists in the '30s. They had no alternative but to continue. With us, it's a similar thing. We saw what rock music should be and could be and nothing less than that would ever do for us."
David Thomas [from "Usual self-defeating press-release"]

David Thomas: vocals
Tom Herman: guitar, bass, tack piano, snare
Jim Jones: guitar, bass, organ
Robert Wheeler: EML & digital synthesizers, theremin, organ
Michele Temple: bass, guitar, organ, piano
Steve Mehlman: drums, percussion

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