David Thomas, the founder and frontman of the influential, avant-garde rock band Pere Ubu, died yesterday (April 24) at his home in Brighton, England, the band wrote on Facebook. The statement attributed his death to a long illness, adding, “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.’” Thomas was 71 years old.
During their initial run from 1975 to 1982, Pere Ubu were an untamable band, merging the loose energy of garage rock with 1960s rock, as well as funk bass, unwieldy saxophones, and Thomas’ commanding presence. Though they predated the surge of the post-punk genre, Pere Ubu embodied that sound in all of its sharp, pent-up, and unpredictable nature, largely thanks to Thomas’ wild spirit and exclamatory delivery of tirades about rejection, war, and defiance. Once alt-rock started taking off in the 1980s, Pere Ubu’s artful absurdity inspired other bands in their wake, including Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Pixies, and R.E.M.
Though born in Miami, on June 14, 1953, Thomas primarily grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where the city’s burgeoning rock scene would impact his passions. After toying with the idea of starting a band, Thomas finally started his first formal project, Rocked From the Tombs, in 1974. Their raucous punk take on rock never materialized into a record deal, and the band chose not to enter a studio to record their original songs. Barely a year later, Rocket From the Tombs fizzled out, with Thomas feeling particularly disheartened by his bandmates’ desire to play cover songs.
Eager to continue pursuing original music, Thomas funneled his adventurous nature into the formation of a new band, Pere Ubu, with Rocket From the Tombs guitarist Peter Laughner, as well as bassist Tim Wright, drummer Scott Krauss, and synthesizer player Allen Ravenstein. Lifting their name from a character in an Alfred Jarry play—“I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in,” Thomas later said—Pere Ubu debuted with the sprawling, noisy, avant-garde single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and followed it with the sneaky jam “Heart of Darkness” and the explosive rock song “Final Solution,” the latter of which would become perhaps their most popular single in underground circles.
After dropping a few more singles, Pere Ubu signed to Blank Records and released The Modern Dance, their debut album, in 1978. Though never a commercial success, the LP made its way into the hands of oddball punks and art-rock weirdos in the Midwest, intriguing many with its aloof approach to merging rock, punk, new-wave, and experimental prog.
