20 JULY 2002: “WHAT EXACTLY
HAPPENED IN CLEVELAND IN THE EARLY ’70S TO MAKE IT SUCH AN INSANELY CREATIVE
SPOT?”

From: http://www.projex.demon.co.uk/archives/keenan.html

David Thomas interviewed by David Keenan

Looking back on these
tapes now, how do you feel about them?

I’m not sure what you mean.
Am I nostalgic about them? No. Am I embarrassed or shy about them? No.
Do they reveal anything to me? No. I suppose one of the problems has always
been that this phase of our history has never been made public. We started
out dedicated to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. We remain dedicated
to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. This is the foundation but
like many foundations maybe it rests unnoticed. You have to remember the
Prime Directive: Never repeat yourself. At all costs, and beyond any reason
or logic, keep moving. So we made this music in 1974-5. It’s hard, groove
rock played with passion and unwavering dedication. Isn’t that what you’re
supposed to do? And once you’ve proved that you HAVE the Right Stuff you
move forward or you slip backwards. Only the dead remain secure.

What exactly happened
in Cleveland during the early-Seventies to make it such an insanely creative
spot? Most people think of these years as a bit of a black hole for outsider
rock ‘n’ roll – how come it was so different in Cleveland? Was the fact
that The Velvet Underground had pulled through there a couple of times
really that significant?

Alot of things came together
in one place and one time. I’m tired of going thru the story but I’ll give
it a shot one last time.

(1.) It was a unique generational
window. Charlotte Pressler described it best in her piece, “Those Were
Different Times.” I quote the first few paragraphs.

“This is a story about life
in Cleveland from 1968 to 1975, when a small group of people were evolving
styles of music that would, much later, come to be called “New Wave.” Misleadingly
so, because that term suggests the current situation, in which an already
evolved, recognized “New Wave” style exists for new bands to aim at. The
task of this group was different: to evolve the style itself, while at
the same time struggling to find in themselves the authority and confidence
to play it. And they had to do this in a total vacuum. The whole system
of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a star did not exist. There were
no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what these people were doing. If they
did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those
conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling.
One is dead.

“There are questions I would
like to know the answers to. Why, for example, are so many of the people
in this story drawn from the same background? Most of them were from middle
or upper-middle class families. Most were very intelligent. Many of them
could have been anything they chose to be. There was no reason why they
should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet
all of them turned their backs on this world, and that meant making a number
of very painful choices. First, there was the decision not to go to college
at a time when the draft was still in effect and the Vietnam War was still
going on; and several of these people were drafted. Most of these people
did not marry; those that did generally did not have children; few of them
worked jobs for very long; and the jobs they did hold were low-paying and
dull, a long ways from a “career.” Yet they were not drop-outs in the Sixties
sense; they felt, if anything, a certain affection for consumerist society,
and a total contempt for the so-called counterculture. The Sixties drop-outs
dropped in to a whole world of people just like themselves but these people
were on their own.

“You can ask, also, why they
all turned to rock ‘n’ roll. Most of these people were not natural musicians.
Peter perhaps was, and Albert Dennis, and Scott Krauss; but John Morton
and David Thomas and Allen Ravenstine and Jaime Klimek would probably have
done something else, if there had been anything else for them to do. One
can ask why there wasn’t; why rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be the only choice.

“I would like to know too
the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged
wire. It was a desperate, stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection;
the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert, but our desert was
the Flats. Remember that the people who did this music had an uncompromising
stance that gave them no way up and no way out. It was the inward-turning,
defiant stance of a beleaguered few who felt themselves to be outside music,
beneath media attention, and without hope of an audience. It seems that
the years from 1974 to 1978 in Cleveland were a flash point, a quick and
brilliant explosion, even epochal, but over with and done. No amount of
nostalgia can bring those years back; they were different times. Still,
I can’t imagine living any other way than the way I learned to live in
Cleveland during those years. We found it hard, in 1975, to imagine that
anyone would live to see the year 2000. It’s not that hard to imagine it
now. What’s become hard to imagine – but then why would we want to recapture
it? – is the timeless, frozen, quality of life as we lived it in 1975,
in the terminal landscape of Cleveland, with our drivenness, our rage,
and our dreams of breaking through.”

(2) Cleveland was, in the
early 70s, a nexus for all music. Record shops competed for the new and
cutting, for the complete and final word. Almost everyone I can think of
who was in a band was working in a record store. Not only the college radio
stations but even local commercial FM stations played radical music. So
the “scene” in Cleveland was compact, informed, tough and protected from
any threat of fame or acceptance.

(3) We were the Ghoulardi
kids.
It’s been suggested by any number of us that the Cleveland/Akron event
of the early 70s was attributable in large part to his influence. I was
ten in 1963 when he went on air and 13 when he left Cleveland in 1966.
After him I believe that I could only have perceived the nature of media
and the possibilities of the narrative voice in particular ways. Describing
how he devastated the authority of the media, and of the Great and the
Good, how he turned the world upside down, would take too long and would
be too hard to translate– a dumb slogan or two, some primitive blue screen
technique, and a couple firecrackers for 90 minutes on the TV every Friday
night, how unsafe could that be? You have no idea. He
was the Flibberty Jib Man.

(4) Don’t dismiss the power
of The Velvets. Yes, it was a big deal. It changed lives. Every band in
Cleveland in the early 70s could do Foggy Notion, for example– all that
unreleased stuff that would later appear on bootlegs– but learned from
cassettes. Doing Sweet Jane was such a rube thing to do it came to be a
litmus test for naffness– like doing Smoke On The Water or something.
Bands from AKRON would do Sweet Jane!

Rocket From The Tombs
almost seem now like some kind of early testing ground for the new punk
rock/avant rock. Their impact seems to be more in the way that they infected
other groups – Pere Ubu, Dead Boys etc – was there something so intense
and charged about that grouping that meant it would always be an unstable
entity? Does the fact that its legacy is so fractured bother you?

RFTT was always doomed. Everything
from Cleveland was doomed. RFTT 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.

Looking back at the
lyrical pre-occupations and the casualties that resulted, that whole scene
seems an intensely nihilistic/apocalyptic one – would you agree with this
perception? What was it that fuelled such nihilism? Or was it just an as-serous-as-your-life
approach to art?

I don’t know what drove it.
Of course we were serious. What kind of question is that? It was a compact
and isolated group of people. The rivalries were intense. The disdain for
anything anodyne was immediate and severe. It was a hothouse environment.
Lots of the people lived on the urban frontier. Allen, Peter and all the
crew at the Plaza were real urban pioneers. It could get weird. And we
were young. We had turned our backs on the hippies and we
had rejected the safe course thru college. (Until just recently
no Ubu member had ever graduated from college– or even lasted more than
a year! And we were smart kids and EVERYBODY went to college in those days.)
So we were drawn to art and in the early 70s rock music was the only valid
art form. Rock music was the cutting edge. If you were good you went into
rock. If you were 2nd string, if you were not quite good enough, then maybe
you wrote or painted or made films. Who cares?

How do Pere Ubu and
Rocket relate? Are the Ubu seeds to be found in Rocket or would you say
Ubu’s project was distinctly different?

I don’t know. They relate
because Peter and I went on to form Pere Ubu and so for us it was a continuum.
For Scott Krauss, for example, or Allen Ravenstine, or Tom Herman, it was
not.

Were you consciously
trying to bring the techniques of the avant-garde to rock music? Was it
as theoretical as that or was it more to do with taking rock ‘n’ roll at
its word and freaking with it?

Rock is the avant garde.
There was no question of taking one to the other. This is a racial problem.
Because you are a foreigner you don’t understand the nature of rock music
as a cultural voice, as the American folk experience, so you are always
looking to interpret it in alien terms. This was the problem with punk.
Punk
was an imperialistic grab at someone else’s culture fueled by chicken-hawkers,
multi-national corporations and a guy who wanted to sell clothes. It provided
a dumbed-down template aimed at the lowest-common denominator that sold
the Big Lie that art was something ANYBODY could do. Well it wasn’t. It
isn’t. It never will be. (I always had this problem at Rough
Trade in any Desert Island Disk debate– no one believed, that given one
record to take, I wouldn’t hesitate a nanosecond to choose John Cougar
Mellenkamp’s out-takes to any Smiths record. John Cougar was playing the
music of his culture with an authentic voice, that Smiths guy, hard as
he tried, as great as he was, as much as I liked what he did, could never
disguise the stone cold fact that he was a foreigner and once removed from
the True Moment.)

The liners to the new
CD make the point that if this grouping had released an LP it would be
seen in the same historical light as Horses, The Velvet Underground &

Nico, Kick Out The Jams and The Stooges 1st – what do you think? Do you
have any regrets about the fact that this group never made it to the LP
stage and were never fully documented? Are there any other RFTT jewels
hidden in the vaults?

Yes, I suppose it would have
been a great record. So? There are many great records. There are many that
haven’t been made. I am always proud to be counted among the Brotherhood
of the Unknown.

How do you feel about
The Dead Boys’ version of “Sonic Reducer”? What was the idea of the sonic
reducer?

I’m not keen on it– the
vocals are overcooked– but maybe also it’s because it’s the source of
the one piece of bitterness I have in my career. When Gene asked if they
could use some of the material I told him he could have it all, take all
the credit, but NOT Sonic Reducer. They could use Sonic Reducer but they
couldn’t pile on the writer credits. But they did. Gene and I remain friends
but he knows how I feel and we avoid the conversation. I think I explained
sonic reduction as well as it can be done in the liner notes.

What do you think of
the subsequent near-deification of Peter Laughner in the rock and fan press?
What are your memories of him now? How important was his input/role in
Rocket? What do you think he would have done had he lived? You ever read
Lester Bangs’s tribute to him? What did you think of that?

I have nothing to say to
outsiders about Peter. Do what you want. Believe what you want. Use him
for any agenda you have in mind. Leave me out of it.

Do you see a direct
line of descent from RFTT through to your current stuff?

Yes.

Do you ever get sad
and nostalgic for those “different times”? Could rock music ever be so
free and full of possibilities again?

I am not nostalgic. Rock
music remains the only music that is free and full of possibilities. All
the endless variants of dance / ambiance are a deadend. Jazz suffers on
without the human voice and rose as far as it could under that restriction
many years ago. World Music is MOR background music for TV shows about
women’s problems. No, I am not nostalgic. I still walk the narrow road.
Say, how’s things in YOUR town?

Do you think of Crocus
Behemoth as being a different person? How do you feel about that particular
incarnation?

No. And there was no “incarnation.”
It was simply an alias to disguise the fact that I was writing inordinate
amounts of the magazine. I happened to use it for certain kinds of writing
that became “popular” among the readers so I kept it as a commercial or
ego consideration. Also because it’s an artifact of the year I spent in
a White Panther commune it had fond personal memories for me but that’s
about it.