Let's start at the beginning: how did you come to join Ubu? I know it was right after Ubu got back together and recorded an album.

Well, not as right after as it might seem from the outside. My version of it… Well, I knew Pere Ubu's music a little bit, but not really a lot. When they were in their original hey day, I was off doing other things and couldn't be bothered, but it was historically afterwards that I heard some things and liked it.
Allen Ravenstine decided he didn't want to participate on either a regular basis or touring, or at all. I don't know exactly. I received a call from Ubu's manager, asking if I would be interested. About a year before I had met David Thomas and Chris Cuttler in passing at some art rock festival in Italy. I was there working with Snakefinger. Then, maybe a week after that was when Philip [Philip Charles Lithman, aka Snakefinger] died. After I regrouped from that… It's a little shocking to find your friend dead, and I thought maybe I didn't want to be in a band and tour around for a little while. So I took a year off to pursue other musical endeavors that let me stay at home.

Like what?

This was 1987, and I bought my first computer and was going to learn how to sequence and started composing for theaters around the bay area. I did a lot of shows at Berkeley Rep and ACT---that kind of thing. That was sort of an excuse to help force me into this technology.
And then I got this call from Ubu's manager. It was the end of 1988 and I was intrigued by it. Then I went across the street to a local video/magazine store, and Ubu was on the cover of Option magazine. And I looked at those guys and said to myself, "Oh, yeah, I could stand next to those guys and not be out of place." So I accepted an invitation to see what it was like. I went out to Cleveland and we just got in a rehearsal studio and started writing songs that were mostly to my recollection b-sides to Cloudland, which I don't think had come out yet.
It was an easy fit. I really liked everybody, and I have to say that they were… People think of them as being way out, but from where I had come from they seemed like such a groove'n'boogie rock band, and I really liked it. I felt like I was playing in the Rolling Stones.

Not quite the Vestal Virgins.

The Vestal Virgins did a lot of things, but we didn't really rock. I thoroughly liked it immediately.

I went back and listened to Worlds in Collision the other day, and I really noticed how much linear music you were playing in there. Hearing Apocalypse Now was part of what made me think about that, since on that album you're playing straight piano.

[ Apocalypse Now] came out when that Mtv unplugged thing was going on. We were on tour and we had an off night, and it was suggested that it'd be an Ubu show but not a normal Ubu show. And there wasn't time to go out and find some sort of a musique concret device lying around the city of Chicago that I could perhaps use to make psychological textures on. It seemed appropriate at the time.

You mentioned stepping into Allen Ravenstine's shoes, which is something I can't imagine doing. He'd set up something pretty unique in the world of music. How did you approach taking over his roll in the band?

I approached that by ignoring that. Once I met him… He's a very nice man. He actually plays on Worlds In Collision as well as me. I was so sorry that he was gone because there was room for both of us in such a good way, and it would have freed both of us up. I thought that, in certain ways, when I listened to Cloudland, that mix-wise he was being squeezed out somehow. And I felt like I could somehow help keep that from happening.
I was not brought in to replace Allen Ravenstine, but obviously there was that element. So I was trying, with David's urging, to find a place in this band, to add that psychological element that he did, but in my way. And because I am more of a linear musician than Allen Ravenstine, I was doing more of that---actually being more of a musical member. And looking back on it, I'm not sure if that's what they needed, but that's who I was. And also I remember thinking "Wow, these guys really kick", and instead of being the one who kind of psychologically had nothing to do with that I wanted to do all things.
Talk about a band being in the right place at the wrong time. It almost seemed right. In a commercial way, what was starting with that whole "college rock revolution," Pere Ubu was so out of step with that, and the idea of all of these big sounding FM rock records that they were beginning to make. Somehow in the middle of Worlds in Collision, I became really aware of this going on. Most of the time before that, it felt good to be separate and oblivious of what was going on, but all of a sudden something that was going started to feel kind of relevant. And then all of a sudden it felt old and out of date. It was off in left field, even in its way of trying to be pop-like. It was pop-like but out of step. Once the pressure was off and the budgets weren't so big, I think Ubu started doing things it should have been doing all along.

But I forgot what the question was.

Are you keeping up with the albums at all?

Yeah, I always get them and enjoy them. I think it's just circumstantial in a way, but I never… When I left there was no knock-down brawl, it was just that some other opportunities had come up and Ubu was asking for something at a time when I couldn't do it. There's this notion that with Ubu you sign on for another year, and I just felt like I couldn't sign on for another year. As things turned out, I was never consulted again about being involved. [laughs] I still look back on doing it and playing a lot of shows… I really liked the line-up I was playing with a lot, and I think the retrospective of old and new material I think went really well.

Let's talk a bit about Worlds In Collision.

I think for me it's more of a sonic thing than anything else, since the songs are what's really going on but for me, when I heard it… It was just in this era of… This is one of the few times you'll ever hear me say this as a negative, but it's a digitally recorded multi-track record, and when I listen to it I just hate the aesthetic of the sound. It doesn't sound real to me.
It was also a very compromised project by the end, in that it was taken away from Gil to some extent in the mixing, and a lot of it was redone by Stephen Hague---who did half of Cloudland. All I'm saying is that there were a lot of other people involved that thought "this is how it should be, this is how this should happen", and they had nothing to do with the brain trust of the band. Which is mostly David. The more people fucked with it, the more it lost its path.

Talking about David Thomas, he seems to be the central point of Ubu at this point in history. Since he doesn't play music, what does he do to communicate with the band?

I don't think he cares much about music and notes and all that. The band that I stepped into when I came out there were these really nice, non-verbally communicating, skilled musicians. People would have an idea for a riff and would start playing it. And it would just come around to sounding like good music.
And then David would show up and sit over in the corner looking totally miserable and agitated, holding his head in his hands. He'd listen to it, and say things like, "A-A-B; A-B-B-A," which he would think should be the structure for a song, or else he would say, "This needs a bridge." Or sometimes he would say, "I just can't relate to this at all." But mostly not---mostly he would just hear it and… There was never anything like, "yeah, I'm enjoying this," he would just go into some kind of heavy concentration, and say what he wanted out of it. On that level it was fairly… I shouldn't say effortless, but it seemed to be fun for everybody until… until it reached certain levels. Things were always just a little out of step. When I look back on that, I wish we could do it right now. I think it would be really good… I think I'd know exactly what to do.
Anyway, then he'd put lyrics to it. I don't know if he already had lyrics worked out or if they all just fit into this ongoing thing…

And as far as writing music goes, how did the band work together on writing things out? Did anybody walk in with the songs fully formed in their heads? Or was it more organic?

Nobody would really say, "Do this." Mostly, from when I was around Jim Jones was doing the bulk of coming in with riffs originally, occasionally Tony. And he would play what he had and people would come up with what they wanted against it. It worked pretty good. I wanted to get involved, and as I got my footing and felt more like I belonged there, I would tend to go home and write a whole thing. And I wasn't adamant about how it was played, it was just… I think that that was much more difficult for them and not as fun. People were happy to do it, but it didn't evolve.
There was definitely a time there, which I feel good about, and which mostly had to do with Tony, Scott, Jimmy and me in a rehearsal room, just writing and jamming. And I always said I wanted to do something like that again. Not to the exclusion of David, but it's something I think we'd all enjoy.

I find that split interesting, between David and the band. And now it seems like he's taken on a director's roll---that's what Tom Herman called it. And he's producing, too, which has changed the way a lot of songs sound. I think Pennsylvania is a great guitar record if you turn it up loud enough and can filter out the vocals.

It's always easy to second-guess when you're not doing. So many things that are happening now… It's just the changing of the times I guess, but sounds I'll hear now were going on there, but David was very resistant to anything at the time that sounded very guitar-oriented. He really liked guitars soft and not distorted, and didn't think that that energy was appropriate.

And Leaving Ubu? What happened? I assume that you went on from Ubu to playing with Frank Black, but I'm not sure of the chronology.

Yeah, it was Pixies then Frank Black. It all had to do with working with Gil Norton, before that while playing with Ubu we supported the Pixies on some shows in London. I met Charles, didn't know who he was, and saw his band. That was like one of those things, it was a bit of an eye opener. It had nothing to do with anything I'd ever listened to or thought I cared about---I mean, on the the surface. But something about it was strongly affecting, woke up something in me that had been gone for a long time, a certain simplicity and intelligence. It was still cerebral, but in a totally different way. And after that we just talked a couple of times and he ended up asking me if I wanted to work with him on making a solo record. At the suggestion of Gil Norton I believe.
And in the meantime I got invited to play on a Pixies record. They were just going to start working on what turned out to be their last record, and I considered that to be an interesting opportunity and got involved with it. Then I got the opportunity to tour with that. And I was still feeling like a member of Ubu. So I tried to be sort of the glue that put together what became a Pixies and Pere Ubu tour, with me playing with both bands.

That's got to be draining.

I was having a great time. Also, as I've learned over the years, being a support isn't that much fun, even though you think it's going to be a good idea. Ubu headlining was much more fun than opening for the Pixies because the Pixies crowd didn't care very much about Pere Ubu.

Which is pretty ironic.

Well, my impression was that Charles was pretty open to the idea and he did, but most of his comrades weren't. As it turned out, Ubu got it by default because the two or three other people they asked couldn't do it.
But it was during that experience of doing both that I started to feel a lot of different opportunities open up to work with a lot of different people, which is difficult when you're in a band because you're obligated. And I was starting to feel…

You were swinging.

Yeah. I was ready after all of this time… I'd always related being in music to being in bands, where you're IN them. And I decided that I wanted to have a lot of things---I didn't want to not be in Ubu, and I didn't want to just be in Ubu. So that was the reason I had to force myself out of it. And the thing that did it---which really had nothing to with anything being particularly bad---was the Pixies opening for U2 on their big tour. And that was right in conflict with Ubu making their next record. So that was when I said "I can't do this." Other than that I was thinking I could do both but…

I gotta ask about going on that U2 tour.

I don't know what…. I mean, you don't really have to ask anything specific… It was not a very musical experience, that's all I can say. Looking back on it now, the Pixies… There was always this idea that they were going to be the next REALLY big thing, and I don't think that ever actually transpired. And again it was like "this is going to be a great opportunity to put them through to a much bigger audience." And really, looking back on it they were over---they were just done. From my perspective, I liked each of the people involved individually, but there was just no joy or communication left at all. Everybody was doing it separately---the band just sort of met on stage for 45 minutes every two days, and the rest of the time various members had their own transportation from gig to gig. There was no sitting on the bus to discuss anything. So it's no surprise that at the end of that tour Charles announced that he wanted to take a year off to do a solo project, and that was it. They never got back together.

Completely changing the subject, which were you playing first---bass or keyboards?

Kind of both all the time. Like a lot of kids I played guitar when I was really young, and there was a piano around. I know I had a bass at some point when I was 10 or 11, but bass became more of an everyday thing when I was working with Captain Beefheart. And I basically started in his band as a keyboard player, covering bass parts on mini-moogs and things like that. I wanted to play bass, and so I started bringing a bass there and saying, "Hey, I could do it like this." And that worked out, so it was another thing to do.
I had to learn a lot of things after that, but playing there I got really good at playing bass in a way that you're not supposed to play bass. I always really liked it, and still do. It's much more visceral to me. Being on stage and performing, bass was just more fun, more immediate.
Bass has worked out for me lately, but even… Working with P.J. Harvey on the last project I got to do both. And I like just being able to do both simultaneously. I also like working with arrangements that are a little more unconventional like that, where there's not a bass in every song.

I heard that on one of the Frank Black albums you were using a computer to map out and structure songs. Is that something you're still doing?

It was something I was doing then, I'm really not doing it much these days. At the time it was a good way to work. It was a way for us to get away from where he had been at the time. And I wasn't sure who the musicians were going to be on the album, so it let us work around that. He was writing all the songs, and I would sit there and try to template them out on the computer---so when we'd say, "when we get to this part the drums will do something like this, Then when we get to this part this will happen."

To me that seems like a lot of work.

It was a HUGE amount of work! But looking back on it now, it was also me wanting to do something different with him, and I wanted to have control of where it was going to go. At the time I was nervous about not knowing the musicians, just kind of him and me going in and rehearsing it in a room. We did one record like that, and then the next one was nothing like that. It was a lot of work, and I don't regret it. I wanted something that… I didn't want to make something that on a certain level was ordinary---I wanted it to be colossally great or to colossally suck. I don't think I'm very subtle.
That was kind of the peak of that; a lot of that started in a bad way on Worlds In Collision, and I think that's part of why it left such a bad taste. And it had nothing to do with my idea---I will say that until the end. But Gil really liked that I had this particular skill to template out songs, so as soon as we started that ended up being the case. That's where I first really did it, was with me being the new guy on the block. We'd rehearse a song and learn it, and then I'd mimic the parts and put that down as a click track. Then people would play to the nuance of the sequence. Which is totally fucked up. But there was a thinking at the time that that was something good to do.

What was it like touring with Ubu? It sounds like when you were with Ubu there was enough money to spend some time rehearsing before you went out on tour…

Yeah, as much as we needed, a week and a half or two. These days it seems like whenever I work with somebody it's more like 5 days.

Do you think that helped shows out of the gate? I've always thought of Ubu as a great live band, and a couple of other people have mentioned that it took the band a week or so to really get on top of things.

I have to say, looking back, that playing with Ubu were some of the best live shows I've done, enjoyment-wise. There were definitely some lows, which would have to do with certain people not being into it that night. Whether Ubu, to me, was good on a night, had to do with whether or not David Thomas was good on a night. And he was more often than not really interesting to me, and I'd think "Oh yeah, I'd like to sit and watch this." Sometimes it was successful and sometimes it wasn't, but ultimately that was what it was about. Ultimately when it all came together, we made a really great support for what he was doing. Ultimately, whether it was Ubu or the Wooden Birds, it was all about… Well, it's not ALL about that, since at the time I was in the band it was a collective of music, and David had a little less control in that, but ultimately he's the one who's going to sell it or not. And everybody else was musicians, and musicians are okay, but there are a lot more of them than there are David Thomases.

It seems like your version of the band had a lot more time to rehearse. Did songs evolve much on the road or were they pretty much set when they hit the stage?

Yeah, they evolved. The ones that I found really fun were the older songs that I wasn't as familiar with, and which I could sort of interpret in my own way. And I was heavily encouraged to do so. I though a lot of them became really fun songs to do live, that I think that the other members of the band had given up on a long time ago. Probably ones that were overplayed. "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" or "Street Waves". We were doing something that was to me totally valid, and had nothing to do with how they originally did it. At first when we did it it was really tentative, but then they went for it and it was really solid. Scott and Tony, right there, doing it…

Some gearhead questions: As I remember, when I saw you out here on that tour, you were playing something like maybe an Emu Emulator or something with a floppy drive on it, which you were having troubles with. They'd get set to do a song and you wouldn't know which disk to use, and there was some confusion.

A lot of times they'd just pull things out that we'd never done before. I remember that, it was always a little too on the spot, which I take a lot more calmly now. It was a long time ago, things have evolved. I felt more literal about certain things at the time, and had a harder time being spontaneous. Especially with that equipment.
But yeah, it was some kind of Emu sampler, and a lot of that was my resistance to going with the expectation. I wanted to do something different. Now I own EMLs and surge modulators…

You have more than one EML?!?

Well, I have one, but I also have a little patch thing that I was actually using at the time to make samples. At the time I didn't want to have to go up there and deal with it not working, I wanted to be consistent.

So was the Emu what you were using in the studio?

No, in the studio I was sampling things mostly from the surge that I'd used. For the recording I did with them, even though he wasn't in the band and I was trying to do things not like that, Allen was always around.

So he was still living in Cleveland?

Yeah, he was still around, and he never became persona non grata. Psychologically, at that stage in my life, I didn't want to have to join a band and live up to somebody else. Now it's far enough away that if it happened again I'd do it differently, but it was a way to go then. But it was unpopular then and it's unpopular now, to be digital.

As far as amps and stuff go… I know next to nothing about how to get sound out of keyboards…

Well, it's probably to plug it into a guitar-type amp and mic it.

So is that what you were using on the road?

No, I had some sort of clean keyboard amp that had seemed like a good idea at the time. There were a lot of things that were being tried out for the first time, and I don't do them anymore. I don't regret it, but…
Then for a long time after Ubu I didn't even use amps. Now I've gone back to using amps, which I always did before. I've been doing this for more years than I'd care to remember, and when you get to the professional level, you meet these professional sound guys who know more about it than you do and you take their suggestions and go with it for a while. Then after a while you can say "no, that's not how I want to be." And there was a lot going on then. I wasn't used to the luxuries of monitors and consistent soundmen.

The little perks.

Yeah. I always learned to make due. Even through Captain Beefheart or Snakefinger I had My Amps. I had several amps. But then things start to change, people's backs get worse and it's harder to take as much stuff around and it started all getting smaller…

And suddenly that Fender Tube amp is starting to look really heavy…

Especially when you have 2 or 3 things like that that you gotta carry around. I was always like that. In Beefheart I always had a huge bass amp, like an SVD, and another big amp for the keyboard. It was before small mixers, so I just needed different amps for different things.

[… from here, conversation drifts. And we both had other places to go. Walking away from the café, a guy sitting on some steps who had been nearby where we were talking says, "She used me up like an ashtray heart" --- a curious approximation of a Captain Beefheart lyric. Time to go.]