All who’ve dipped their toes in even the shallow end of early punk lore know the famous trajectory of the early scene in Cleveland By God Ohio: first, there was the proto-punk band Rocket From the Tombs. They were weird and combative and completely out of step with normality, and it couldn’t last, so they split. That fissure produced that amazing yin and yang of Ur-punk—the bratty, gutterbound Dead Boys, who burned bright and flamed out fast; and the forbiddingly arty, brainy, and belligerent Pere Ubu, who still exist to weird out the normals today (they’re on tour right now, in fact).

But that’s only half of the story. Of the first lineup of Pere Ubu, only singer David Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner were Rocket refugees, and Laughner, sadly, didn’t even live to play on Ubu’s debut album. Guitarist Tom Herman and drummer Scott Krauss came Ubu’s way from a now utterly obscure weirdo outfit called the Robert Bensick Band. Bensick was a veteran of a handful of bands that included various future Ubus and members of the under-documented Laughner band Cinderella Backstreet, and in the mid-‘70s he assembled from those sources a band of like-minded rock ’n’ roll misfits to record what he intended as a magnum opus, the never-released French Pictures in London.
 

Robert Bensick—photo: Daniel Mainzer
 

Scott Krauss—photo: Cynthia Black
 

Tom Herman—photo: courtesy of UbuProjex
 
It’s a strange album—“punk rock” as such wasn’t really on anyone’s mind, as it was just in the process of being invented then, so the most visible templates for how to go out-of-bounds in non-prog art rock were the likes of Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground (the latter of whom had played shows at a bar in Cleveland called La Cave, at which all the important future freaks were in attendance), so it doesn’t sound so much out there as so much… off. It’s a familiar sounding album, and yet perfectly apt musical comparisons are difficult to conjure. There are bits of Scott Walker in there, the biographical street poetry of Lou Reed certainly plays a prominent role, and krautrock, prog, bar rock, and lounge music are all in the mix. Per Bensick:

There are a lot of emotions in French Pictures in London. It’s real stories about real people. And some of it was struggling, some of it was fighting, some of it was desperately looking for love. French Pictures in London is real. It’s not trying to entertain people. It was one guy really trying to document real human beings and their lives inside a musical product inside a contemporary, populist art form.

The album was considered for release by A&M, who at the time were sniffing around Cleveland due to Eric Carmen’s free agency in the wake of the Raspberries’ breakup, but that was never to happen, and the album was held by the studio when that deal fell through, but the artist couldn’t afford to pay for the sessions he’d presumed were being covered by major-label money. Krauss and Herman would soon be making history in Pere Ubu, so a different lineup of the Robert Bensick Band would record a second album, Songs from the Plaza, which also went unreleased. Bensick ultimately got a teaching job, and continued to make music—in fact, he repurposed the title French Pictures in London for a 1981 song and video—but with his true masterwork down the memory hole and his role in the crucial ’70s CLE scene pretty much entirely unrecognized, he dropped out of public performance by the mid-‘80s.

Here’s your Hollywood ending: in 2012, a reel of French Pictures in London that had been passed around among a few mover-and-shaker types turned up, in pristine condition. As part of its “Platters du Cuyahoga” series of historic Cleveland weirdomusic, the Florida-based boutique label Smog Veil Records is at long last releasing it. The main personnel are Bensick, Herman and Krauss, with bassist Albert Dennis and other assorted CLE-famous contributors. Smog Veil has been so generous as to allow us to premiere two of the songs for you today, so please enjoy the bookends of the LP’s side 2, the Velvetsy “After the Ball,” and the completely unhinged freakout “Doll.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Pere Ubu announces North American tour dates
‘Irene:’ New Pere Ubu video is eerie and gorgeous