Goodbye to David Thomas and Some Words on Pere Ubu

This week a great one died. If you know who he is, you know his greatness. If you don't, let me introduce you to something special...

When I first got into punk rock, I didn’t have a guide or a map or anything to lead me to great records other than a few primitive tells: Obnoxious or unusual band names, song titles that had nothing to do with girls, partying, or cars, and strange or rude album art. The music mags that I knew – Rolling Stone and even Creem – weren’t very helpful as their coverage mirrored what the major labels were pushing and, in the case of Rolling Stone, whatever good tips they provided were drown out by California cocaine rock. Fortunately, there’s more to music mags than Rolling Stone or other industry-oriented rags; there’s fanzines.

Driven by music obsession and fan-aticism, fanzines opened my ears to music I’d have never discovered on my own. There was Search & Destroy, Flipside, and New York Rocker, a newsprint mag that looked kinda pro but covered music like a fanzine. Sitting next to these classic reads, in Tower Book’s magazine rack, were the newest copies of the British sheets Sounds and NME, two bi-weeklies that took great pleasure in saying NO! to the music industry’s YES.

So, while a single tip and my initial primitive record sense led me to the Sex Pistols, Residents, Dead Boys, DEVO, and The Saints, it was fanzines that gave me more, more, more. Of course, record reviews were helpful, but just as important were the ads, and even more important were band interviews, especially the answers to the questions, “What are your influences?” and “Listening to anything good lately?” Back in 1978 and 1979, the most common answer to both questions was Pere Ubu.

Pere Ubu got together in Cleveland in 1975 after the legendary Rocket From the Tombs died. Its founding members were Peter Laughner, Tom Herman, Tim Wright, Scott Krauss, Allen Ravenstine, and David Thomas. From the start, there was nothing like them, that is nothing in Ohio except DEVO, who were a few cities over in Akron. Stuck in the Midwest, far from the New York City art world, the San Francisco underground, and the Los Angeles music industry, both Pere Ubu and DEVO made their own kind of rock & roll, each band influenced as much by the avant garde and their imaginations as Chuck Berry and The Troggs.

Like DEVO, Pere Ubu was influenced by the European art movements of Futurism and DADA, with DEVO leaning a bit more Futurist and Pere Ubu easing into DADA and, more importantly, French Symbolism and the eccentric musical genius Erik Satie. From Symbolism, Pere Ubu tapped into Afred Jarry and his 1896 play Ubu Roi, especially Jarry’s mix of absurdism, imagination, and outrage (the first word in the play is merdre, a corruption of the French word for shit).

From Satie’s Parade (and composer John Cage’s Satie-influenced writing), Pere Ubu understood that all sounds were musical sounds, which meant that anything that went grrrr, brrrrr, or boing could be incorporated into a song. Applied to rock & roll, a fairly conservative music structure, this meant that every single one of the genre’s restrictions could be challenged, which is what Pere Ubu did.

To be clear, Pere Ubu did not challenge rock & roll in a vacuum. The Beach Boys and the Beatles had done some challenging themselves. Psychadelia – in music and drugs – pushed thing further out. Prog rock and Krautrock also remixed rock & roll. There was Ubu’s Ohio spuds, DEVO, and a whole lot of weirdness happening in San Francisco (The Residents) and New York City (Suicide, Glenn Branca). Pere Ubu built on all that and took it further.

With Peter Laughner, Ubu made two excellent, highly-influential singles, all self-released on their Hearthan label - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo b/w Heart of Darkness [1975], Final Solution b/w Cloud 149 [1976]. After Laughner left the band (and promptly died), the band made two more important disks - Street Waves b/w My Dark Ages [1976], The Modern Dance b/w Heaven [1977]. Then Tony Maimone replaced Tim Wright (who left to form DNA) and a monster was born.

Now, like most Ubu fans, I cherish those Hearthan singles. I have the box set of the four, as well as the original pressings, which I’ve upgraded over the years. They are landmark records, that have influenced everyone from DEVO to the Pixies to my 1990s garage punk band Los Huevos, who covered “Final Solution” on our one and only album.* However, when it comes to statement pieces, albums that knocked rock & roll off its axis, The Modern Dance (Blank, 1978) is an equal (in my mind) to Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s, Exile on Main St., and Never Mind the Bollock… (I’d add The Residents’ Third Reich n Roll, if it had had the circulation of the four).

Like the five aforementioned records, The Modern Dance was unconventional for its time (and like The Residents contribution, a bit weird in context). While the songs fit in the avant garde of “New Wave,” the lessons Ubu learned from Jarry, DADA, and particularly Satie, push rock & roll further than it had been pushed (and, unlike the Sex Pistols, Ubu did their damage with more finesse and less volume).

Listen to the “Modern Dance” (and try to block out anything that was record after its release). Immediately, Ubu introduces a sound that kind of belongs but doesn’t. It is a bell-like ding and it comes at the top of the song. At first it sounds simply like a bit of odd percussion, but then at the six second mark there is the hiss of steam, a factory sound, which now established, is also what the ding is. Following Satie’s Parade, the factory sounds become part of what we now hear as a unconventional, but still hooky, pop song.

Then David Thomas’ vocals come in – part wail, part yodel, part strange, still song-like (once described as sounding like the actor Jimmy Stewart if he was an oboe) . Sure, you’ve heard similar singers - DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, or even the B-52’s Fred Schneider. All three of them have cited Thomas as an influence. To find someone who sings like Thomas pre-Ubu/Rocket From the Tombs, you have to dig deep into the obscure parts of rock & roll.

About fifty-seconds into “The Modern Dance,” following the first chorus, something strange happens: Atop a very simple, percussion-less run of tones, Pere Ubu layers a loop of street noises. Today, a listener would hear nothing unusual, but in 1978, this was not the kind of song construction you heard in rock & roll. After the tone chorus, the main riff is back, along with the factory sounds and Thomas’ yodel vocals, there’s another tone/noise chorus followed by one of the most innovative guitar solos you’ll ever hear, one run through of the verse, and a semi-satirical ending. It’s an exhilarating ride, especially when first encountered by a teenager in a Sacramento suburb in 1980, which is when I stumbled on The Modern Dance (and, yes, the rest of the record is both exciting and groundbreaking).

So, I’ve mentioned Erik Satie quite a few times and, while I am sure, some of you know who he is and most of you have heard his music whether you knew it or not, unless you have more than a surface level interest in music, especially the avant garde, Satie’s name might draw a blank, so I’ll babble a bit.

The first thing you need to know is that Satie was a genius, an iconoclast, an antagonist, a drunk, and a very difficult person. His genius, iconoclasm, and antagonism drew creative types like Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Claude Dubussy, Maurice Ravel, and Rene Clair to him. His drunkenness and his difficulty, repelled many of the same people. Outwardly, none of this mattered to Satie, as his sole goals in life were to make and play music, provoke, and party, often alone. He made his living playing piano in a cabaret and never recorded any of his work. He died in poverty, squalor, and obscurity.

What established Satie’s genius after his death were to of his works, Gymnopédies (1888) and Gnossiennes (1889 and 1890). Dismissed at the time as “furniture music,” a term Satie was happy to embrace, Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes did away with stuff like tempo and structure, as well as strict instructions for how to play the music. Again, this might seem trivial in 2025, but in the late 1800s, Satie’s breakthroughs were so radical that debate about Satie often turned into fistfights, and performances of his work into near riots. Satie was free jazz way before free jazz and punk nearly a century before punk.

One of Satie’s most controversial works was Parade, the score to a ballet composed by Satie and written by Jean Cocteau for Sergei Diaghilev with Picasso designing the sets. There were a lot of things that set Parade apart from traditional ballet. Cocteau’s “story” was surreal (before surrealism), Picasso used cardboard for costumes, and the choreography was unconventional and strange. But, what most upset conservatives and critics was Satie’s music.

Like “The Modern Dance,” Parade riffs off of public expectations, but it does more and that more changed everything. First, Satie introduces ragtime and jazz into classical music, a provocation that was so far gone that only Satie’s second innovation pissed more people off. Along with the jazz, Satie interjects the sounds of siren, typewriter, steamship whistle, and cannon, not as special effects but as instruments, an outrage that John Cage mainstreamed decades later.

All of this shows up in Pere Ubu.

Pere Ubu made a lot of great music after The Modern Dance, but it’s that album, along with the four singles that preceded it, that make Ubu and iconic band. It is also the album that introduced me to the band and led me to Satie and other late 19^th and early 20^th Century avant gardists. And it was my first taste of David Thomas, Pere Ubu’s singer and leader, one of the most unique and innovative performers of our time, and one of my favorites.

On April 23^rd, after years of bad health, David Thomas died.

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