Pere Ubu Singer David Thomas Dies at 71

David Thomas making a donation at the Rock Hall with former Rock Hall curator and local musician Meredith Rutledge-Borger. Credit: Scene Archives

Yesterday, Cleveland lost one of its most creative artistic voices. Pere Ubu singer David Thomas, a former Scene writer (initially under the pen name Crocus Behemoth) and a fantastic musician who performed as a solo act and with bands such as Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu, died at age 71 at his home in England.

In the 1970s, the terrific Cleveland-based proto-punk Rocket from the Tombs would serve as a launching pad for the artier (but still punk outfit) Pere Ubu, which Thomas and RFT guitarist Peter Laughner founded. In typical art-punk fashion, the group’s name referenced Ubu Roi, an avant-garde play by French writer Alfred Jarry.

A reworking of a RFT song “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” the band’s first single, announced its talent with a roar as Thomas’s whispering vocals possess a real intensity.

“Final Solution,” the band’s second single, prefigured punk, alternative rock and Goth. “It’s a harrowing testament to the music Pere Ubu made that now, 25 years later, the sonic doom of a song such as ‘Final Solution’ still resonates so clearly,” wrote Scene contributor Kurt Hernon in advance of one of the band’s early 2000s appearances in Cleveland. “In the midst of a blindly contented era, its lyrics ‘don’t need a drug/need a final solution’ still scream out a punctual message for the dot-com masses.”

A tribute to David Thomas on Stereogum nicely captures the group’s significance and provides an accurate overview of its career.

The group’s early concerts at small clubs in the Flats in the mid- to late-’70s gained the group a cult following in Cleveland. That following would grow as the band toured the States and Europe.

“We certainly knew we were special, and there was a sense of being unique and of being at a point in art history,” Thomas told me in a 1999 interview for Scene. “The thing you have to keep in mind is that [punk rock] hadn’t been invented yet, so there was no model of expectations. We didn’t think anyone would hear anything we ever did. That’s why we decided to put out one of our records in 1975. We thought that maybe someone would find one of our records one day. We thought this burst of whatever it was was over. We were going to make a couple of records and see how it went.”

Ubu made more than a couple of records. The terrific 1996 boxset Datapanik in the Year Zero captures the band’s output up to that point, and the group continued to tour and record even after Thomas relocated to England. Throughout his life, he continued to reissue out-of-print Pere Ubu albums through his Hearthen Records.

And he would leave his mark as more than just the frontman of one of art-punk’s best bands. He worked in theater and delivered lectures. He staged an improvisational opera called Mirror Man (he once said it was “about the twilight region between darkness and light” and admitted that percetiopn was “a feeling that was prominent” when he lived in Cleveland). It premiered in 1998 in London as part of a four-day festival dubbed David Thomas: Disastodrome!

Thomas and Ubu regularly performed in Cleveland even after Thomas was living overseas. In 2016, he stopped at the Rock Hall to donate a couple of items to the Rock Hall’s Northeast Ohio exhibit.

“It looks so tidy,” Thomas said as he looked over the Cleveland Rocks exhibit where several Rocket/Ubu items are on display. “It should really just be a pile of shit.”

As he handed a shirt over to curator Meredith Rutledge-Borger, he admitted he couldn’t quite remember why he had it in the first place.

“I don’t actually remember this shirt other than it showed up on my farm in Pennsylvania where I discovered it about five years ago. It’s far too small to fit me, so it wasn’t mine. It had to have been from about ’73 or ’74, probably ’73. That’s when I was doing the [Croc o Bush] column. I had pretty free reign [at the paper]. I would write up some convoluted joke or absurdist mind play.”

Thomas also donated a lawn mower roller bar that was used at the band’s very first gig at Pirate’s Cove in 1976.

“It’s one of the main percussion things from that day,” he said of the rusted roller bar that resembles a small pipe. “It’s our kind of maraca. It’s got a bolt that’s loose in there. It’s not smooth. It’s Pere Ubu maraca where it’s angular and somewhat random and rather loud. That’s why we liked it and used it on [albums such as] Dub Housing and The Modern Dance. I stopped using it after a few years later some teenager came up to me and said that Einstürzende Neubauten played pieces of metal as if I stole it all from them.”

An underground act that had a broad influence on bands such as the Pixies and R.E.M., Pere Ubu never attained what you might call commercial success. But that was always okay with Thomas.

“We’re not better recognized anywhere. We’re legends here; we’re legends there,” he aptly put it in that 1999 interview when I asked him about Ubu’s legacy.

In the wake of his death, Thomas’s “legend” as a writer and musician will undoubtedly live on.

His family, in a statement, said recordings had been made for a new album.

“David Thomas and his band have been recording a new album. He knew it was to be his last,” it read. “We will endeavor to continue with mixing and finalizing 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.”

And as for a sendoff: “We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can – ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock n roll band in the world.’ Long live Pere Ubu.’”