It was a night to slip on your leather jacket and spike your hair, just for old time`s sake. The fathers and sons of punk rock were coming to town.
For those who remembered the bizarre days of 1977, when studded dog collars and safety-pin earrings were all the rage, that recent September night won`t soon be forgotten. First, there was Iggy Pop and the Ramones at the Aragon, then a late show at Cabaret Metro with John Cale and Pere Ubu.
Even for those who couldn`t care less about 1977, who thought punk was a tasteless joke, the night of concert-hopping still paid unexpected dividends. Not everyone stays a punk all his life, after all.
”If I was 35 and married, which I am, and writing songs about dating-there`d be something wrong here,” said David Thomas, lead singer of Pere Ubu, before taking the stage at Metro.
Iggy Pop is married, too, and at 41, he`s old enough to have fathered nearly every one of the 5,000 devotees who packed his Aragon show. When he was 21, the former James Osterberg of Ypsilanti, Mich., had no idea what ”punk rock” was, but he knew that he didn`t belong in the flower-power Age of Aquarius. He sang ”I wanna be your dog” and proclaimed that 1969 was
”another year with nothing to do.” It was enough to make any man scream, and scream he did.
Iggy formed a band called the Stooges, and began acting the part of a traumatized Shep: He mutilated his body with cut glass and simulated unnatural acts with microphones. At one concert, he rubbed his chest with peanut butter and leaped into the crowd. Talk about holding your audience.
At about the same time, John Cale was cofounding the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in New York City. Cale had presaged his future when, as a young piano prodigy, he concluded a recital by smashing his piano to bits. He found a soul mate in Reed, who sang harrowing tales of addiction and sadomasochism
(”Heroin” and ”Venus in Furs”). When Reed went in a more ”mellow”
direction, Cale quit and sought out-you guessed it-Iggy. He went on to produce the Stooges` debut album.
Neither Iggy nor Cale met with much commercial success, but their influence was enormous. As avant-garde musician Brian Eno said of the Velvet Underground, only about 100 people bought their records, but every one of them went on to form a band.
One of those bands was the Ramones. The four leather-jacketed misfits from Forest Hills, N.Y., took up where the Stooges left off. The Ramones were a Saturday-morning cartoon, both celebrating and satirizing stupidity. They sang of bored suburban teens getting their kicks by sniffing glue, of feuding or comically indifferent parents and of schools that were more like insane asylums. They only knew three chords-albeit three great chords. And they played as if they were double parked (their first shows lasted barely 20 minutes).
On July 4, 1976, they traveled to a concert in London as virtual unknowns, and left the next day as heroes. Future members of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Generation X and the Damned saw the show, and punk became a media event literally overnight.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Pere Ubu was giving Cleveland a good name. They weren`t exactly punk, but they weren`t exactly like anybody else. The band formed circa 1975 to record two songs: ”Heart of Darkness” and ”30 Seconds Over Tokyo.” Restless youths embraced ”Heart of Darkness” as an anthem: ”I don`t see anything that I want,” David Thomas sang, with evident disgust. The follow-up, ”Final Solution,” was an even blunter affirmation of pubescent angst, with Thomas bellowing that he`s ”a victim of natural selection.”
The trendy punks and new wavers loved Ubu`s surreal lyrics and its strange brew of funk, jazz and garage rock. The band broke up in 1982 and then reformed last year, and its recent music, as documented on ”The Tenement Years” album, is as adventurous as ever.
Adventure was all that was missing when the Ramones took the Aragon stage to the pre-recorded strains of ”The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Everyone knew what to expect, and they got it in megadecibels. Within an hour, the Ramones had blitzkrieged through 28 songs, with their guitar amplifier knobs set on ”Ear Bleed.”
By the time they encored with ”Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” an indictment of President Reagan`s 1986 visit to a cemetery that included the graves of Nazis, the Ramones had numbed, if not deafened, their appreciative audience. ”These people aren`t dancing, they`re twitching,” said one onlooker.
Then it was Iggy`s turn. Poured into impossibly tight-fitting pants, his torso a writhing web of veins, sinew and muscle, Iggy gave not just a concert, but an aerobics class. Imagine whirling like a top for 10 seconds, then finishing with a karate kick at the ceiling. Repeat this move, and then mix in a whole series of ”dance” steps that would make James Brown`s skin crawl
(the body-bag lurch, the pogo stick, the knee-breaker drop). Then repeat each of them at two-minute intervals for about two hours, and you get the idea.
Occasionally, Iggy would pause, his chest heaving, his scowl defiant, soaking up applause. ”I want some power and freedom in my life,” he announced. ”I haven`t had enough of either one.”
From the very outset, he was working the lip of the stage, seemingly frustrated by the 8-foot moat that separated him from the audience. In delicious irony, an exuberant fan splashed a full cup of beer in Iggy`s eyes as he sang his classic ”Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.” Ig was unfazed. If anything, the unscheduled shower inspired him. Two songs later, with his security guards hyperventilating, he was climbing down from the stage, across the moat and into the audience (sorry, no peanut butter this time). A sea of grasping, clawing hands bore him aloft as he moaned lustfully for his ”Tuff Baby.”
After two hours, Iggy, bathed in sweat, headed off into the night, just as John Cale, bathed in black, took the stage at Metro. In a subdued, but powerful, solo set, Cale played mostly mordant ballads, spiced by a jazzy deconstruction of ”Heartbreak Hotel.” Elvis spun in his grave.
Backstage, David Thomas spun his wheels. He was doing his best to explain to an interviewer that Pere Ubu`s music was anything but punk.
”We had nothing to do with punk, nothing to do with rebellion. Punk was conservative, reactionary-the worst thing that happened to music in America,” Thomas said, sounding like the hapless father who was observed accompanying his daughter to the Aragon show.
”We`re not punky people, we`re not into revolution. We`re into marriage, we`re into relationships, we`re into tradition, we`re into maturity.”
But what about ”Final Solution,” David?
”That was a tongue-in-cheek song; it was vaguely satirical, self-mocking,” Thomas explained. ”It made fun of an attitude that you slip into when you were younger.”
And as if to emphasize the point, Thomas added this caveat before performing the song at Metro: ”A lot of bands who copied this next song made the mistake of pronouncing all the words so people could understand them. We don`t make that mistake.”
Thomas is a large, courtly man who dominates the stage with his mime-like gestures. While the band plays, he paces, examines a make-believe watch and tosses his hands in the air as though in the throes of indecision. And indecision, the very uncertainty of life, is what Pere Ubu`s songs, and Thomas` lyrics, are all about.
”I try to reflect reality as accurately as possible,” Thomas said. ”I mean the human experience isn`t as clear as (he breaks into song) `Oh, darling, I can`t live without you.`
”You think, you react quickly, you form conflicting images. One of the terrible things about being human is the ability to see both sides of an issue, and to become immobolized because of it.”
That isn`t the kind of attitude one normally associates with a rock `n`
roll cult figure. Exactly what`s going on here?
”I`m not a pop musician,” Thomas said. ”We make a living from playing music, but we can do other things. Our success, or lack of it, is
irrelevant.”
The music that Pere Ubu played at Metro had all that and more. Some would even say it had weirdness. But from the classic ”Nonalignment Pact” to the recent ”Something`s Gotta Give” (”Nation`s rise and fall/Dentist appointments forgotten by great and small”), Thomas and his band of merry men charmed an audience of hundreds with wit, and entranced them with snake-like rhythms.
At 2 a.m., it was over. The crowd drifted into the night, sated. Iggy and the Ramones and John Cale were probably already on the road somewhere, and David Thomas and Pere Ubu were probably doing something mature, like going to bed.
