Pere Ubu’s David Thomas and Some Other Buckeye Punks

It was supposed to be kind of funny when the Drew Carey Show’s theme song brayed that fist-pumping chorus “Cleveland Rocks!” because the winking implication was that, come on, of course, really we all know that – Hall of Fame notwithstanding – Cleveland does not in fact rock. I mean, ask anyone and they’ll tell you that, by and large, Ohio does not rock. We don’t have a Seattle or an Athens or a Detroit. And punk rock? Forget about it. Sure, this placid midwestern expanse might spawn your occasional Joe Walsh or Twenty One Pilots, but nobody who could plausibly pull off a CBGBs shirt. I mean how punk can you really be if you gave the world Procter & Gamble? Rutherford B. Hayes? Skyline Chili? And, I mean, well, Drew Carey?

Right?

Well, maybe it’s more accurate to say that Ohio doesn’t rock except on those occasions when it does. Because what is punk if not resistance to an inhospitable environment; and also, what’s more punk rock than setting your river on fire?

We got a recent reminder of Ohio’s limited but viable punk rock street cred recently with the news of the death of musician David Thomas, the yawping Cleveland-raised frontman who gave the world such boundary-pushing ensembles as Rocket From the Tombs and – most notably – Pere Ubu. Thomas was a big guy with a jacket and tie and an accountant’s haircut; he conformed to nobody’s stereotype of a rock dude, especially in 1975. Didn’t act or sound like one, either – Pere Ubu was named after a chaotic French-language proto-dadaist stage play, the music was noisy and disorienting even by punk standards, and Thomas, who had no musical training, called the discordant sound “avant-garage.”

Pere Ubu never sold many records or made much money, but critics loved them, musicians took inspiration from them, and the ensemble persisted in one form or another for almost fifty years.

In his New York Times obituary, Thomas is quoted as saying this about his musical origins amidst the industrial blight of 1970s Cleveland: “Everything from Cleveland was doomed. So if nobody likes what you do, and nobody is ever going to like what you do, and you’ll never be seen by anyone, you do what you want to do.”

I mean, that’s pretty punk rock.