I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman’s X, THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu, performing a live score. It sounded too good to be true but how would it work? Would the audio be turned off so that the movie would essentially be treated as a silent film with a new score? Would the band perform a spontaneous live remix of Les Baxter’s score while riding the volume levels? Would the film’s dialogue be heard at all in this presentation? All of my questions were answered on Tuesday, March 25th at Atlanta’s Plaza Theare when I attended the PERE UBU X show.

For those of you not familiar with Pere Ubu, they were pioneers in the underground music movement of the early eighties and have remained resolutely independent in the commercial music world by their own choice. Their early music was a dissonant and dense sounding collision of garage rock and industrial music that was distinguished by lead singer David Thomas’s commanding stage presence, whether he was howling in some strange language or riffing playfully absurd lyrics. The Trouser Press Record Guide wrote “Pere Ubu is to Devo what Arnold Schoenberg was to Irving Berlin.” I was introduced to them by a friend who gave me a tape of their Enigma-Mercury recording “The Tenement Year” in 1988 but it wasn’t until I saw them later that year or the next on the short-lived but incredibly eclectic “Night Music” program on NBC (hosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland, formerly of Squeeze) that I really became a fan. On that program they performed selections from their “Cloudland” album which was the closest they ever came to making a melodic pop album…well, sort of. It was like Dada art in musical form and irresistible but I digress. You don’t have to know ANYTHING about Pere Ubu to enjoy their improvisational approach to X. They are not performing as the band Pere Ubu in this infrequent traveling event but as a mini-orchestra, supplying a live, organic soundtrack to a remarkably eccentric drive-in movie from the sixties. 

X (also known as X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes) was made during Corman’s most creative period in the early sixties when he was experimenting with literary adaptations (Edgar Allan Poe) or tackling controversial material (racism in The Intruder with William Shatner as a white supremacist). X has a fascinating premise – a doctor studying human eyesight develops a formula that increases the capacity of the human eye to see beyond its normal limits and uses himself as the guinea pig. What Corman lacked in budget and special effects, he made up for with his idiosyncratic direction and the casting of Ray Milland as the obsessive, ill-fated Dr. Xavier and Don Rickles as a sideshow hawker who briefly exploits Xavier’s newly acquired powers of being able to see through anything. At the time, many critics praised this low-budget effort, seeing a grim morality tale given a sense of tragic grandeur by Milland’s world weary performance. The obviously fake, threadbare sets induce a sense of claustrophrobia which seems intentional as Dr. Xavier becomes a wanted man. And what once drew snickers and jeers – Xavier looking through human skin to see the internal organs beneath which are clearly medical illustrations from books – now looks like a tongue-in-cheek homage to underground filmmakers on the order of Mike and George Kuchar. Seen today, however, Corman’s movie might seem curiously inert and s-l-o-w to post-MTV audiences. But seeing X with Pere Ubu’s transformative aural enhancement breathes new life and excitement into it. 

 According to band leader David Thomas, no two performances of X are the same. In an interview with Bob Townsend for Atlanta Access, band leader David Thomas stated, “We construct a musical score, usually different for each performance, that overlays a perspective to each scene. Sometimes we replace the film’s soundtrack, sometimes we supplement it. To one degree or another, there is an improvisation process involved that means that we will deviate from our own score. It’s not a safe process, but audiences above all else need to feel that a live event is teetering on the brink of the apocalypse, and that only their trust in capable men who stand in the moment and can deliver the goods separates them from madness.”  

For the performance of  X I attended, the Les Baxter score was often audible and “remixed” on the fly by the band. Without warning the music could transision from a theramin-like sci-fi score to a primitive tribal sound with a rhythmic underlayer that added tension and suspense. Then the spell would be suddenly broken by a Three Stooges sound effect reference – Curly doing a high pitched “wubbababababababaaaaaa.” Not only was the dialogue an integral part of this presentation but the band would occasionally ad lib additional lines as if they were a character’s innermost thoughts – “What did he see? What did he see?” Or they would function as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action through electronic graffiti and odd sonic effects. At one point during a scene in a hospital corridor, you could hear them mimicking voices on the intercom, “Calling Dr. Howard! Dr. Fine? Dr. Howard?” Yes, there are numerous Three Stooges references throughout and there are plenty of unexpected and hilarious audio gags in addition to the restless, kinetic music accompaniment.  Pere Ubu’s X may be a work in progress but the possibilities it introduces for creating new “soundtracks” for existing sound films is quite exciting, even if they don’t take full advantage of it themselves at times.  

Most of the time Pere Ubu’s audio re-imagining works wonderfully and makes the film strange and fascinating in ways it never was before: the minimalistic opening credits sequence – an eyeball floating in a beaker in a bare bones laboratory – now seems like some mysterious experimental film from Eastern Europe. The party sequence where Dr. Xavier suddenly realizes he can see through everyone’s clothes, resulting in disorienting shots of bare legs twisting wildly, becomes an erotically charged funkadelic dance groove. A scene where Milland accidentally pushes a doctor colleague (Harold J. Stone) through a glass window to his death suddenly erupts in a frantic adrenaline rush of syncopation. Especially memorable is the climax, where Milland, with his shiny, metallic eyes,  is being pursued by a helicopter and loses control of his car during the chase. This sequence is given a new urgency with Pere Ubu’s chaotic, propulsive score; it has a nerve-jangling intensity.  

If you have the opportunity to see Pere Ubu’s X – and are already fond of the Corman film – I highly recommend it. When David Thomas introduced it, he read a prepared script from his music stand in the slightly bored, singsong manner of an academic professor which, if you listened closely, actually explained his attraction to the film. In the previously mentioned Atlanta Access review, he was more specific about why he chose X for a rescore: “The amateurish enthusiasm and naive intention, as well as lack of  budget, of the B-movie encourages a kind of communal abstraction that approaches folk culture, and the frequent lack of a coherent agenda leaves lots of wiggle room for whatever personalized context or agenda an audience or band chooses to overlay. I learned this lesson from Ghoulardi.”   

Pere Ubu has also toured with the 3-D film It Came From Outer Space, employing the same approach as they used on X. How I would love to see that presentation! Unfortunately, there is no official tour date for the band’s current X project. Probably the best way to check on possible upcoming playdates is to check the official Pere Ubu web site – http://www.ubuprojex.net/ 

For those of you would like to refresh their memory of X, check out the original trailer on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg6L3VGrKRk&feature=related

or those crazy opening credits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81zkcZEkK2Y&feature=related 

One last thing to note is the movie’s abbreviated ending – the final gruesome shot lasts barely a second. In fact, an urban legend has developed over the years regarding the ending of the film. It was said that Ray Milland shouted out a last line of dialogue after blinding himself that was cut from the film but Pere Ubu’s David Thomas is happy to yell it out in live performance. That final line reveals a worse fate than we imagined for the hapless Dr. Xavier but is the penalty for scientists who play God.