Pere Ubu Founder David Thomas Dead at 71

The Miami-born and Cleveland-raised Thomas began his musical journey by fronting the band Rocket From the Tombs in 1974, only to form Pere Ubu a year later with Scott Krauss, Peter Laughner, Tom Herman, Tim Wright, and Allen Ravenstine. The band’s name came from a character in a Alfred Jarry play, and Thomas had wanted to start a band that “Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.” Pere Ubu’s debut single, the “Doolittle Raid”-inspired “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” established them as one of a great Midwestern garage band. They released studio LPs all the way up until 2023’s Trouble On Big Beat Street, and Dub Housing and New Picnic Time remain some of the finest North Coast records of the era.

Pere Ubu was as essential to Ohio’s ever-formative rock scene as Devo, Michael Stanley Band, and the Raspberries. If Eric Carmen was the city’s ticket to the mainstream, then Thomas was its bizarre, underground defender. Like the Stooges building the proto-punk template in New York a decade prior, Pere Ubu injected avant-garde, musique concrète into the Heartland by singing Krautrock-colored nursery rhymes with demonic rock weirdness. They made the Moondog Coronation Ball look like a Sunday School. Pennsylvania may have been home for David Thomas, but his ghost will linger above the pit floor in Cleveland’s Agora Theatre until music exists no more.