Long Live David F**king Thomas
Saluting the late Pere Ubu frontman, gone at 71
“My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.”
Those were the last words posted on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page announcing Thomas’s death April 23, at 71, after stating that he “has died after a long illness.”
The final solution, I guess you could say.
It’s fair to say that Thomas was not a healthy man. That probably could have been said at any point in the big man’s career, starting with Rocket from the Tombs in 1974 through Pere Ubu and many other collaborative efforts.
The band’s statement said that Thomas, who grew up in Cleveland but resided in England for years, “died in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest stepdaughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’”
You may be reading a lot about Thomas and his avant-garde music in the next few days. Not quite. That was not his choice of term. His was “avant-garage,” for maybe obvious reasons. There was art-rock, of course, but it was often ramshackle art-rock, not cleanly sculpted and polished. He was referencing the mix of high art and low.
“I don’t have a ‘pop’ career,” Thomas said about his rather jagged trajectory and cult success. “I don’t have to do things that pop bands do. Pop bands last five years. Well, I’ve had at least eight pop careers and eight times five is 40.”
This was in 2015.
“It’s like you’re standing there on the street waiting for the bus to come along and whichever bus it is, you get on it.”
VIDEO: Pere Ubu “Waiting for Mary”
Thomas explained Pere Ubu’s emergence to me this way in 1991: “We came along in a generation that was almost a lost generation, because this is a generation that had seen rock go through its adolescence and then pass into maturity, from 1965 to 1970. Here was this great land rush, like the Oklahoma land rush, where this wonderful land opened up and covered wagons were bouncing across it, discovering rivers and valleys and beautiful sights.
“And we were the generation that came after that, who were brought up with rock music not as a teen sort of thing or fashion, but as a mature art form, with the full expectation that now it was our turn, as we came to manhood, to take the torch and say, ‘Well done, esteemed forbears! We will build this brave new world that you’ve discovered.’ So, this was our expectation. We wanted to move boldly into the future and, naively, we expected that rock music wouldn’t turn back and fall back, reactionary-style. But, of course, it happened. The point is, though, in the end, we still believe that we’ve never changed. Once you see the true light, you can’t turn your back on it. That’s our strength and our weakness.”
That’s a succinct history of rock and Pere Ubu’s place in it. Not bad for an extemporaneous response to a question about perseverance.
The last time I saw Thomas live was in 2015. It was at a Boston club called the Brighton Music Hall. He was fronting the re-formed Rocket from the Tombs, a band he began in 1974. He was seated in a wheelchair at the front of the stage. Not, let’s face it, a good look. (When Thomas was in his prime, when he was mobile, was an engaging and unpredictable entertainer. He’d pace the stage, seemingly puzzled and perturbed; he’d wave his arms wildly, do jumping jacks.)
And then they blasted out this ferocious “Sonic Reducer.” You may recall that song from the Dead Boys first album, but it was co-written by Thomas and future Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome during his time in the band, 1974-75. Sure, Thomas couldn’t rocket around the stage like the late Stiv Bators, but that song lacked for nothing.
There was a new RftT album, Black Record, a cantankerous, fast and furious effort. There was some joy in the punk rock world, many of us never having seen Rocket from the Tombs and this being a chance, but Thomas didn’t want anyone to call what he was doing a retro-fitted, return-to-the-roots reunion.
“I haven’t gone back to anything,” Thomas insisted. “We’ve been here all along. There’s only so many things I can do at once so. The [Black Record] recordings started back in 2012. Then I have Pere Ubu to work on and Two Pale Boys to work on and everything just happens as quickly as it can.”
“Rocket is fast, Midwestern hard rock groove music,” added Thomas, who loathed the term “punk rock.” “I haven’t ‘outgrown’ it. I haven’t started putting together my album of Sinatra covers. And I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. I like doing this kind of music, hard, fast loud unremitting rock music. I don’t want to do it all my life. I suppose it would have been better if I had done it all my life. Then again, I wouldn’t still be doing it, probably. I don’t know. Rocket was the foundation for Pere Ubu. Actually, it was the foundation for the Pale Boys and the foundation for everything I do. I’m just not going to keep doing it over and over again.”
The goal when they went in to make Black Record, Thomas said, was pretty simple: “Make a hard rock record.” It is, in places, gleefully nihilistic. Asked if there were any themes he intended to explore, Thomas politely exploded.
“It’s very clear if you sit there and think about the record, it’s just like any record I do,” he said. “There’s stuff that’s being said. It’s not namby-pamby, I’m-a-sensitive-person, Honey-this-is-what-I-feel. I don’t care what you feel and I don’t care what you think; people shouldn’t care what I feel and what I think. The songs are stories. That’s the point of it all.”
When Pere Ubu formed in 1975, Thomas took the music in a headier, more expansive direction. “We just took it in the direction that rock music was going in or should have gone in,” Thomas maintained. “It’s not meant to be some stupid adolescent, boring boy-girl, Brill Building/Wrecking Crew sort of construct. All of that is fine, but the plot of rock music is very easy to understand: It starts with the Elvis recording of ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ Then there’s the whole Brian Wilson/Velvet Underground axis — abstract sound and concrete sound and analog synthesizers coming into use. And the third generation of American rock music is what we were.”
For Pere Ubu, humor, irony, whimsy, wit and anger were part of their arsenal; so was jazz, three-chord rock, elliptical song construction, improvisation and jarring tempo changes.
When Pere Ubu first folded their tent in 1982, they did it, said Thomas, for “three pretty good reasons. We were fed up; we weren’t getting along with each other and we’d run out of ideas.” Thomas pursued a series of solo projects and collaborations, most of them more eccentric and lyric-oriented than Ubu’s work. In 1987, when Thomas was working on a solo record, several Ubu associates joined him. It dawned on everyone that Pere Ubu was, in fact, back. That record became The Tenement Year and as we spoke, they were finishing up work on another LP, Cloudland.
Group philosophy?
“We’re kinda stick-in-the-mud people,” said Thomas. “We still hold the same principles we held back then. The only thing that’s changed is us as people. Our beliefs about music are pretty much identical.” (There have been roughly 30 members of the years.)
Their 1987 comeback, The Tenement Year, was classic Ubu — demanding, terse, poetic, genre-jumping, rewarding. Cloudland, released in 1989, and Worlds in Collision are both critical successes, but they showcase a band less enamored of the disruptive jolts of yore and once more into crafting smart, melodic pop-rock.
It was a stylistic shift, admitted Thomas. “But that doesn’t make it light. After Cloudland, we thought we had some unfinished business — that we had gotten close to something very moving and could now zero in on it.”
VIDEO: Pere Ubu “Final Solution”
There are many stories popping up on social media. This one came from David Steele, bassist for the Boston band Orangutang: “I’ve always been a huge fan of Pere Ubu and their primordial rust belt dada avant-punk. In 1993 my band, Orangutang, opened up for them on a North American tour. Never got tired of seeing them live every night. Must have seen them 50 times — always amazing, and almost every show was unique or bespoke in some way. Got to know the mercurial, cranky, and deeply intelligent, David Thomas, in our tour downtime. I could write a book of David Thomas stories — his antics, quips, barbs, capricious demands.
“We were on the same record label and he despised record labels — the whole music business, most of the people in the industry, the marketing, the rituals, the norms. The label PR people wanted them to do a press gathering Q&A before every show. David would oblige by playing a short acoustic set with him on concertina and members of the band doing a stripped-down sea shanty version of some songs and then an interview/Q&A session. You know, the era of Unplugged. So good.
“The tour got to Club Babyhead in Providence, Rhode Island, and David was in a foul mood. He entered the club and loudly announced to the label publicity team that he was tired of these press things and the stupid questions and he is refusing to do it. They pleaded with him that there were a lot of press coming and they were expecting this pre-show VIP press gathering, but he would not back down.
Finally, he said, “This is what I will do. I will host a cookout. You need to get me a grill and a lot of hamburgers and hot dogs and a hat. I will cook the food and the press and guests will get in line for it. The only question will be by me — ‘Hamburger or Hot Dog?’ The guests will answer with either, ‘Hamburger’ or ‘Hot Dog.’ I will give them their choice and they will walk away.”
Thomas is dead, but there’s more to come. As per the Facebook website (British spellings), Thomas “and his band have been recording a new album. He knew it was to be his last. We will endeavour to continue with mixing and finalising the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official Bandcamp page. His autobiography was nearly completed and we will finish that for him. Pere Ubu’s Patreon will continue as a community, run by communex.”
Some time back, I talked with the late great saxophonist Ralph Carney about playing with him in two of his “other” bands, David Thomas & the Pedestrians and David Thomas & the Wooden Birds. Carney compared Thomas to Oliver Hardy and Ralph Kramden, noting both his girth and acerbic temperament.
“To me,” Carney said, “David is the Neil Young of the alternative set,” “He’s got the longevity. He takes chances. David likes to rile people up, including myself, on stage. It’s not personal; sometimes he gets super frustrated, but it’s well worth it. To work with him, when he’s on, it’s great. Nobody like him at all.”
Peter Prescott, drummer for Mission of Burma, multi-instrumentalist in minibeast, posted “I was lucky enough to have David Thomas and Pere Ubu’s music interwoven into my musical life since my early 20s. These were the most important moments — not long after I joined gonzo Boston weirdo wonders, the Molls, on drums. We opened for Ubu and the Suicide Commandos on the tour promoting the [Pere Ubu] Modern Dance record and the show literally changed what music could be for me.”
Burma didn’t do a lot of covers, but Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness” was one. It’s on their live album, The Horrible Truth About Burma.
“Ten or so years ago,” Prescott wrote, “my current outfit, minibeast, was privileged to open for Ubu for a week. It was a pretty great version of the band. David was not in great physical health at the time and sometimes cranky as fuck, but his performances were always utterly compelling and singular. There is nobody remotely like him in the history of recorded music.”
The Bush Tetras singer Cynthia Sley wrote: “When I was 20, I lived in Cleveland and was going to art school. My friends Barb Klar, Laura Kennedy and I would religiously go to Pirate’s Cove every Thursday. They would have residencies there. Devo had a big influence on me, yes, but it was Pere Ubu who just blew me away! We danced like our lives depended on it in the front by the stage. Dave even dubbed us the ‘Nerve Gas Dancers,’ I guess due to our crazy dance moves. It’s burned into my brain experiencing that band. David would come out in a long trench coat and no pants like a giant. He’d slam down a sledgehammer onto an anvil. Pierced my heart. I loved loved loved David. He solidified my desire to make some trouble in the world through making music. Throughout the years we would meet and he remembered the dancing.”
I wondered at some point about the sort of frustration that must set in when you do exemplary work for years and you’ve yet to attract a commensurate audience. I mean, Thomas’s and Ubu’s fans were super fans. but they were, by and large, an older, or a crowd that aged alongside him. Pere Ubu never really enticed a sizable portion of the younger “alternative music” crowd. Which was a shame as Pere Ubu’s music had many of the same elements as did, say, the best of Talking Heads — melodic weight, quirkiness, probing lyrics, funk, Island rhythms, playfulness, poetry, a love of absurdity.
“The most positive thing about us,” Thomas told me, “is I think we still have our vigor, musically, we still deliver the goods as far as rock ‘n’ roll is concerned, and we haven’t wimped out, converted to Lite Rock-105.”
“We were given a magnificent vehicle with a powerful engine and set out on the highway,” said Thomas about his work with Rocket and Pere Ubu. “After a while you come to a road sign that says ‘Satisfied City, Exit 1 Mile’ and there’s nothing wrong with Satisfied City and you can exit there and have a full productive life and be happy and that’s wonderful. But some of us see the sign and then we see the sign going over the hill and we say, ‘Ah, let’s see what’s over that hill.’”
VIDEO: Pere Ubu “Oh Catherine”
Pere Ubu’s last performance was February 11, 2022, a one-off group titled Pere Ubu’s Canterbury Tales, at The University of Kent’s Gulbenkain Theater in Canterbury.
Among the many artists Thomas worked with one was the estimable English singer-guitarist Richard Thompson. He played on Thomas’s first solo album in 1981, The Sound of Sand and Other Songs of the Pedestrian, and David Thomas and the Pedestrians’ Variations of a Dream in 1983.
Upon learning of Thomas’s death, Thompson emailed me: “David was an artist with a unique musical and poetic vision. He absolutely ploughed his own furrow. His influence on later generations of performers has been profound.”
Singer Linda Thompson, Richard’s ex, posted: “I am so sad that David Thomas has died. He was a wonderful man and one of my favourite singers. Many years ago I did a tour with Pere Ubu. I loved it. David was one of the first people to ever make me feel loved and respected as a performer. I thanked him so often for that. “
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