David Thomas passed away at 71 in Brighton, England, after fighting a long illness, and his band shared the news on Facebook.
Even though he was born in Miami, most of David’s childhood happened in Cleveland, where he got really into the wild music scene there. He tried starting a band called Rocket From the Tombs back in 1974 with some friends who liked to play loud and messy punk rock, but they never made any records because things just didn’t work out; honestly, Thomas wasn’t happy when everyone wanted to play other people’s songs instead of making up their own.
After that fizzled out (which must’ve been pretty disappointing for him), he decided to start something totally new—Pere Ubu—with Peter Laughner and some other musicians. They picked their name from an old Alfred Jarry play; Thomas once joked, “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.” Their first songs were weird and noisy—“30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Heart of Darkness,” and especially “Final Solution,” which became super popular with underground fans.
Fans think it’s amazing how one person can change so much music just by being stubborn about doing things differently.
In those early days from 1975 until about 1982, Pere Ubu was totally unpredictable: they mixed garage rock energy with funky bass lines and screechy saxophones while Thomas shouted about rejection or war or just not fitting in. Some people say they basically invented post-punk before anyone knew what it was supposed to sound like—and later bands like Joy Division and Sonic Youth definitely paid attention.
Their first album The Modern Dance came out after they signed with Blank Records in 1978. It didn’t sell like crazy or anything—but all the oddball punks found it anyway. The album mashed together rock noise with new-wave experiments so well that it still sounds strange today.
The band wrote that when David died MC5 were playing on the radio at his house; he always said he wanted his body thrown into the barn back home on his farm in Pennsylvania.
