I want to ride the baggage car of your old mystery train: David Thomas, 1953–2025

It would be wrong to say that David Thomas taught me it was OK to be weird, because David Thomas was normal. Pere Ubu, the band of rock beat and pop hooks and ragged reggae industrial throb and distorted slashing urban noise that sustained Thomas’ barbaric yawp, a vocal tone that made David Byrne sound like Michael Bolton — they were normal. Thomas said so: “Pere Ubu is mainstream rock. Justin Timberlake is weird experimental music. Robbie Williams is avant-garde. Britney Spears is constantly coming up with something new and innovative. Pere Ubu does the same old thing. ‘New’ is a trap and a scam to dupe student-types and other naive people.” 

Although I was a student and a teenager when I discovered Pere Ubu and they sure sounded new to me, despite existing through 25 years and a half dozen iterations as a band at the time. The puke-inducing feedback of “Non-Alignment Pact,” the opening track of the band’s 1978 debut The Modern Dance was both the shit I craved and a gauntlet to be passed — you want to be weird? You want punk beyond the Warped Tour and the Hot Topic? Chew on this, and then have the song’s Stooges riff blast your face off so the synth can dig in the gristle, and then wander through the wastelands of “Chinese Radiation” and “Laughing.” It was clear this was operating on a different level than the aggressive music I was listening to in the late 90s, but what was not clear to me at the time was that Thomas was dead serious about his band’s position in the grand scheme of pop music. And now Thomas himself is dead, at 71, after a half century of making what he insisted was folk music, the abstract heart of the “avant-garage.”  Also, this music fucking rocked:

I have come back to Thomas’ quote about the mainstream versus the experimental again and again, not because I believe it is true so much as I want to believe in the possibility of its truth. To see the world in this way is more than opposition, it is a position that is off the grid. A demand that the axes revolve around you. “Nobody cared what these people were doing. If they did anything at all, they did it for themselves,” Charlotte Pressler wrote in an essay about the Cleveland rock scene of the 1970s that Pere Ubu helped create. “There was no reason why they should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet all of them turned their backs on this world … rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be the only choice.” Or maybe it is a desire to see the world in a way beyond the standard point of view, the way Thomas describes looking a cup from all angles. Front, back, top, bottom — “all of this is the cup.”

Thomas was the one constant in Pere Ubu, and their remarkable website (which goes well back into the mid-90s) details how members of Ubu could come and go and hold precedent, but the band is the band. It is impossible for Pere Ubu to have existed without Scott Krauss’ bedrock drums, Tony Maimone’s playful bass, Tom Herman’s ruthless guitar and Allen Ravenstine’s unwordly synths (and Pere Ubu could not have existed without Rocket From The Tombs, half of whom became the Dead Boys; the other half became Pere Ubu and the other guitarist, Peter Laughner, wound up dead). That is the classic lineup behind The Modern Dance and Dub Housing but barely a year after those classics Mayo Thompson had replaced Herman on guitar, with more art-noodly behavior that I personally am not a huge fan of. But it is an entity that demands to be considered on its own terms even as all Ubu lineups are part of the whole. The late 80s band veered pop in a way that is joyous even when it is ominous, the late 10s band delves into mood more than riff. Thomas’ lyrics and singing, and themes of yearning and stasis, driving and hope, the ecstasy of love and the despair of isolation, wind their way through the decades, finding different expressions of harshness and sweetness that can be seen as part of the same family tree. 

“The sun comes up, an open can of beans / I gotta say just what it means” Thomas sings on “333” and I do not and do know just what that means. Thomas’ voice as a singer, as a writer, is gnomic and implacable, even when he is confused and lost he holds to his unmistakable point of view and that incredible voice, high and clear and commandingly weird as an owl in daytime. He is not ironic in the indie rock sense (although Pere Ubu was arguably one of the earliest “indie” rock bands, releasing their first singles on their own Hearpen label) but in the narrative sense, where he knows more than the listener and that doesn’t help anyone. The late and I suppose final period Ubu albums circle around noir and Marlovian despair and Lynchian unease — “414 Seconds” is the Winkies nightmare on wax — but there is also the exuberance of the band’s late 80s and early 90s output, where Thomas can sound like an evangelist for a feeling you can follow. “We Have The Technology” takes a sitcom’s promise and turns it into the fact of a better life, although Ravenstine’s synths offer an uneasy and clashing counterpoint. “Hopes and fears,” Thomas croons in another song. “Hope and fear.”

Those lines come in “Electricity,” on 1995’s Ray Gun Suitcase, the first album of what the Pere Ubu site defines as “The Modern Years” and the era of the band I came in on, the sound I love. Longtime partner Jim Jones has joined Tom Herman on guitar at this point and with some controversy (go to the website!) Steve Mehlman is on drums, Robert Wheeler has taken over synth and Michelle Temple is locking the bass down like if Duck Dunn was the T-1000. We are three decades past the classic songs and with 80 percent of a new band and yet the songs remain … not the same but on the same singular frequency. Thomas is marching on the home of the blues, he has a vacuum cleaner in his head. A few years later he is driving into the void in “Dark,” a song that in its two-chord riff and motorvating rhythm is a purposeful photo negative of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” a plea to find someone on the other end of the radio. “Like driving down a backroad out in the country and going thru a ghost town and you think, ‘This is the way it used to be,’ and you never forget the sight because it’s a perfectly shaped moment in time and space and like a vision of the distant future that will never be and you know it as you dream it, and you think, ‘We can renovate one of these old store fronts and move out here’, and, of course, you know you never will but the vision has power because it answers a need,” is what Thomas wrote in “Media Priests Of The Big Lie,” the liner notes to Ray Gun Suitcase. Here’s something else he wrote there:

We live in strange times wherein Order & Meaning are terror-osterized, reduced to grist for the post-modernist vacuumizer. Yet in the cracks and seams of the world ordinary people go about their business, scrabbling Order & Meaning back together using the materials at hand. It’s a heroic chore– oh, ultimately doomed and empty but heroic still in a relative way next to the banality of establishment culture/anticulture which is just as doomed and just as empty but must be more reprehensible because of its cynicism, cruelty and passion for the darkness.

I had the good luck to get Ubu-pilled in the city, in Boston, a hip urban place Thomas probably regarded with skepticism but a place that had good record stores. So I found Datapanik In The Year Zero, the band’s out-of-print box set that collected their early singles and first five albums, as well as a few live sets from that time. But the final disc was a compilation of fellow Cleveland bands, an album of tracks from weirdos who I had never heard of before and in many (although not all) cases never heard again. Ordinary people scrabbling — well, if not Order and Meaning — a song together using the materials at hand. The more I learned about David Thomas and his life, the youth of watching Ghoulardi on TV and the young adulthood of performing as “Crocus Behemoth” on stage, the less I had in common with him personally. And I ultimately understood this was liberating, in the same way Thomas’ understanding of Pere Ubu’s “same old thing” was liberating. Where the rest of the world is is the rest of the world’s problem, where you go is your choice. “And I drive into the wilderness / And I drive to find a sense of purpose there / And I drive to find a perfect world / Where I hope to build a house,” Thomas sings in “Dark.” You can search for if maybe not find what you need away from where everyone says that need can be fulfilled. You might not even know where it is until you hear someone singing from there.

David Thomas sang from a chair the last time I saw him, with a reconstituted Rocket From The Tombs. He was pretty pissy when he was not singing. At a Pere Ubu show a few years before he was also in a mood. But he was happier in the fall of 2000, when I caught Pere Ubu’s 25th anniversary tour, the day before I had a big sociology midterm that I wound up bombing because I stayed up all night, listening to a self-released bootleg of the band I got after the show. I had never heard “Final Solution” until that night. As Thomas describes it, the title is a riff on the Sherlock Holmes story “The Final Problem” and the chord structure is clearly riffing off “Summertime Blues.” The lyrics are the mordantly bitter musings of a young person angry at and longing for the rest of the world, but I didn’t know this then. I didn’t know how Peter Laughner dug into the sadness of the song and found its sonic reduction in the final Pere Ubu single he would play on, unleashing a guitar solo that is brave and beautiful and heartbreaking in a way that is hard to describe but speaks in a language I can understand without words. That night, I was just watching David Thomas on the stage. He brought the band down while he sang the song’s bridge, quietly crooning over the clink of bottles at the bar and the mild talk of randos in the back. I can see it now, how Thomas looked out at the crowd and smiled, like he knew and could tell us all the secrets of the universe. And then the band kicked in and the sound filled the room, and they did.