Crawling out of Cleveland in the spring of 1976, this record was a swift kick in the balls for the five people outside the Buckeye State who heard it, me being one of them.
The song is a deconstruction of Eddie Cochran’s rockabilly classic, "Summertime Blues," but Pere Ubu doesn’t use Eddie’s version as their starting point, preferring Blue Cheer’s bikers-on-acid psychotic fuzz freakout cover version as the source of their sonic palette. The only band louder than God, Blue Cheer had taken a lighthearted lament on the frustrations of being young in the 1950’s and transformed the "summertime blues" into one long drug-crazed amphetamine shriek, a dumb primal bludgeoning howl of frustration. And it’s that howl that Ubu taps into.
Opening with an ominous midtempo bass throb covered in layers of guitar distortion and synthesizer squeals, lead singer Crocus Behemoth grimly intones:
"The girls won’t touch me cause I’ve got a misdirection
Living at night isn’t helping my complexion"
OK, lyrically, we’re still in Teen Angst Town, but where Cochran’s luckless narrator at least had a chick he could call for a date, this loser is completely out of luck, and most likely because he has the clap. ("The signs all say it’s a social infection") And where the Fifties kid could toss off his frustrations with a shrug of his shoulders and write the whole thing off to "There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues" with that tone of teenage resignation, that, "hey, what can you do, after all, I’m only a kid!" feeling, Pere Ubu grinds down like a drill press on THEIR take on what exactly needs to be done and chant "We DON’T need a CURE, we need a final solution!" with bitter anger on the chorus. And yes, the crypto-fascist undertones hiding under that "final solution" are intentional (what would you expect from a band that held an "Extermination Night" dance?) but Ubu wasn’t some sort of proto-skinhead Skrewdriver from the Midwest, their call for a "final solution" was the cry of teen angst run down in the decaying rust belt of America, and unlike the British punks who were looking around England the same year, seeing no future, and hating what they saw, Ubu reveled in it.
The second verse opens with the lines "Buy me a ticket to a sonic reduction/Guitars gonna sound like a nuclear destruction" and then BANG! Out of nowhere, all the instruments come to a dead stop, and the only sound you hear is a chilling whoosh of synthesizer "wind" blowing across a destroyed landscape, two seconds of silence that contain every 70’s post-apocalypse empty future Road Warrior flick you’ve ever seen. Most people in the 1970’s played synthesizers as if they were a crazy organ that could make fart noises; Ubu used a synthesizers to create grim sonic landscapes and walls of textured noises that burble and crackle like a live wire skittering across a wet concrete floor.
Maybe this all started with some poor teenage dope in the 1950’s who refused to work late, had his daddy’s car privileges yanked, and gets no help from his jackoff congressman because he can’t vote (look out kid, Vietnam is right around the corner) but by the time corporate assholes in suits had taken over rock and roll in the mid 1970s, the call for a final solution resonated with a generation of underground freaks lost out in the teenage wasteland of the 1970s, or WOULD HAVE, if radio had played this record. As I said, five people must have heard it, but they told their friends.
The song ends with the words "solution" being howled over and over, and the entire song becomes an existentialist rant, no longer merely a teenage lament.
Most of the rest of Pere Ubu’s recorded output is Beefheartian dada skronk avant-garage r & b freakbeat. The band was massively unpopular, no one heard them, and most of those who did, hated them. They now claim to be the longest operating unsuccessful band in history. Their music polarizes people. I played their 1978 LP "Dub Housing" for Secra, and she told me "Never, ever, EVER play that record again if you want this relationship to last." Not being one to take "NEVER" for answer, I played "Final Solution" the next day, with the end result being that THIS ONE SONG is allowed to be played here at Maison DRaftervoi.
Final Solution
The girls won’t touch me cause I got a misdirection
An living at night isn’t’ helping my complexion
The signs all say it’s a social infection
And a little bit of fun’s never been an insurrection
My mom threw me out till I get some pants that fit
She just won’t approve of my strange kind of wit
I get so excited I always gotta lose it
Then they send me off and make me take the cure
But I don’t need a cure
D-don’t need a cure
D-don’t need a cure
I need a final solution
Buy me a ticket to a sonic reduction
Guitars gonna sound like a nuclear destruction
It’s seems I’m the victim of natural selection
Meet me on the other side--no direction!
Cause I don’t need a cure
D-don’t need a cure
D-don’t need a cure
I need a final solution
Юåf±êrvØ¡: Go buy this record