“It’s just a shame that we’ve never been successful, you know? But maybe that’s why.” He thinks there could be some other reasons, though: “I’m kind of handsome, but I’ve always been overweight. “Pere Ubu is not like any other band that there’s ever been or that there ever will be,” Thomas says. Out of the ashes of Rocket emerged two bands: the Dead Boys, who relocated the chaotic and nihilistic side of their previous band to New York City at the behest of Joey Ramone and Thomas’ next group, Pere Ubu, who stayed in Cleveland, advancing a sonic language that was entirely unique and thoroughly Midwestern. In 1974, Cleveland’s Rocket From the Tombs was the proto-punk exit ramp, the final blast of the violent pursuit of power going back and forth between Cleveland and Detroit via the extraordinarily strong signal of Windsor, Ontario’s CKLW in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Most people don’t know who Thomas is, despite the fact that he has been revolutionizing American art and music for nearly half a century. “And I’m the guy who directs it and conducts it and puts it together and keeps it going.” “I’m the guy who guides the thing, you know?” Thomas says. And I approach every single band the same way: I put interesting people together, or I help put interesting people together, and develop the music, develop the sound out of that.” To Thomas, it’s all been one long road. At various points, I just use different people, you know. “Or you could say it’s all been Rocket From the Tombs. “Every band I’ve ever done for the last 40 or however many years it is-50? I don’t know what it is anymore-has been Pere Ubu,” Thomas says today over Zoom from London, laughing at the impossibility of recounting it all correctly. But it’s still a cup, regardless of how it is viewed or presented, and David Thomas has spent many decades conditioning a small, but devoted audience to understand every angle of the cup. Most people won’t recognize a cup when they see it from a strange angle-they wouldn’t buy cups if they could only see the bottom of the cup, tilted to the side. In the analogy, a cup is still a cup, regardless of the angle from which you look at it, and regardless of ingredients added or removed. He responded with an analogy about Pere Ubu being like a cup that he is holding.
#Bandcamp thessa series
In an interview on the TV series Rockin’ in the UK in 1989, David Thomas was asked if he looks back with regret, or experiences embarrassment about what he is doing now in comparison to the past.
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