"But what I really got from that pioneering rock critic world in Riffs and Creem was what happened if you took something seriously that you weren’t supposed to. A lot flowed from that. You could write like you weren’t supposed to, and that wasn’t just about being slangy, or vulgar, or amateur. You could be personal, be wrong, be arty, tell lies—forbidden stuff, like thinking something was important that wasn’t supposed to be important."
Pere Ubu Lives in This Shit!" The Village Voice, May 7, 1979
Dibbell, Xgau's better half, wrote the piece hyperlinked above. She also shares some fun, interesting reflections about the story, those heady rock critic times (see quote above), and her 2015 novel, The Only Ones. I liked the latter a lot and would recommend it: A post-apocalyptic story about motherhood with a gritty punk rock feel. And by the way, one of the lines she quotes from Dub Housing, "Boy that sounds swell," combined with a song, "Wellsville," by a garage band from Lawrence, Kansas, The Embarrassment, both of which were on heavy rotation on my record player at the time, were how I came up with the name "Swellsville," the commercial-free fanzine (all moonlighting coffee/weed binging projects) I put out sporadically in the 1980s.
