'Every week a new version of the future, every other week a new soundtrack of the times.' Paul Rambali, The Modern Dance review NME 1978
That's what the world seemed like in 1978. I've never been to Cleveland, Ohio. I probably never will. I don't really feel the need. I've no idea what it must be like now. I imagine it's improved over the last couple of decades. But I know exactly what it was like in the 1970's. Because I own and am very familiar with Cleveland band Pere Ubu's first album The Modern Dance. It describes the urban, industrial landscape of a depressed, decayed, filthy city better than any album I know. It's also one of the best avant garde rock records ever made.
'We told the truth as we knew it but we didn't sing about love.' Allen Ravenstine
In terms of alternative lives from the one I've been chosen to live if ever offered them I'd plump from one of three. The first would be in the Roman Empire of I Claudius as I was always sold on that programme, book and period of time. I still live within it partly in some portion of my head. I'd be Claudius's little documented but more able bodied twin. I'd be spared the ridicule and embarrassment that he had to go through poor lad, I'd live a good life and have two or three wives but in return I'd probably face exile and certainly never get to be emperor.
Failing that I'd live in Thirties Britain as an adult, because I was always taken by the knife-edge decade of choice those years were. I'd have opted for the left and made an appearance at Cable Street. I'd have gone to war and suffered a sudden but worthwhile end in a cause worth dying for.
Given that neither of those were viable choices and I imagine that neither of them are given the limited scope of time travel at this point and time I'd go for my third, most feasible option.
Place me in New York in late 1974. I'd take my chances and take the subway in late Autumn down to the Lower East Side on the Bowery to see Television playing in CBGBs on a Sunday night. There'd be plenty of space at the bar. I'd pay entry, buy a beer and watch the bands, rub shoulders with Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, Hilly Kristal, Patti Smith, Douglas Colvin, Danny Fields, Debbie Harry and all of the other bums, sleazeballs, artists and dreamers finding their way across Manhattan to the space and time where their futures would be made.
Cleveland
American Punk and New Wave produced a fistful of remarkable, indelible, artistically oriented records in the mid to late Seventies. I'd suggest, Patti Smith's Horses, Television's Marquee Moon, Suicide's Suicide, Talking Heads '77 and Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance as the best of these.
Pere Ubu's debut stands apart from the other four simply on the basis that it emerged from Cleveland and not New York. It chronicles a different America. The band were true outsiders. Misfits.
'There's something about cities that were once prosperous- the residues of wealth and pride make a rich loam in which bohemia can flourish. There's the material legacy of former prosperity: handsomely endowed colleges, art schools, museums, grand houses grown shabby and cheap to rent; derelict warehouses and empty factories, classily repurposed as rehearsal or performance spaces.'
Cleveland is a city built on heavy industry; automobiles, manufacturing, iron ore and coal. A product of the American industrial revolution, by 1920 it was the country's fifth largest city. It's now the forty fifth. Such a drawn out decline produces block upon block of unused, dilapidated space as everybody who can moves out to the suburbs. It was in these depressed spaces in Cleveland that Pere Ubu came to be born and thrived in the Nineteen Seventies.
"Rocket from the Tombs was always doomed. Everything from Cleveland was doomed. Rocket from the Tombs is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Pere Ubu is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. That is the power of Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire. Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that no one but your brothers will ever know it. That's the deal we agreed to." David Thomas
Pere Ubu was born from the ashes of a group that spawned two bands and perhaps best illustrated the schism that broke out in both the American and also arguably the British Punk scene between Art and Rock and Roll
TBC
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