I was introduced to Pere Ubu in 1991 when I was a “format show” DJ at WKKL the college station on Cape Cod where I went to school. The record Cloudland had been released a little earlier and we had a slow as molasses music director so it was still in the rotation clock even though it had come out at least a year before I got my Saturday morning show. The song we had in rotation was Bus Called Happiness.

A good tune for sure, but at the time not enough for me to really become amazed by their range and longevity. See, when I started DJing it opened me up to a whole new world of music. Acts that I had never heard of were suddenly in regular rotation for me that would not cross over to the mainstream MTV audience for months or sometimes years. So in that sea of new experiences, Pere Ubu was lost.

I’ll let Dave Thomas one of the founding members, and until last weekend, the only surviving member of the band.

Pere Ubu have been around since the mid 1970s and ultimately helped define the “post punk” movement before the punk movement really started. Their first real record, The Modern Dance has some of my favorite weird, rocking, stripped down, essence of punk songs like Non-Alignment Pact.

Previous to Pere Ubu, Dave Thomas was a founder of the short lived band Rocket from the Tombs. Some of the songs they created, and later rerecorded as Pere Ubu are some of the best of their early output.

By the time I really discovered them I was already an adult, with kids, and possibly even already widowed. I was reading something on the internet and it mentioned them playing live in Denmark and there was a link to a live video of them performing Waiting for Mary, the real single pushed off of Cloudland.

I vaguely remembered it, or at least remembered playing something from that record as a DJ. I watched the video, then another, and another, live, studio, interviews, and the world of Pere Ubu just opened up to me. I hunted every record I could find, and there weren’t many to be found! One of the things with weird outsider music like this is that people don’t sell their used copies, and new copies aren’t really printed all that often. So, once Dave Thomas was selling these directly it was easier. Though Pere Ubu is still at the top of my list of records whenever I go used record hunting.

I was fortunate enough to see Pere Ubu twice live - 2013 and 2017. By then Dave Thomas’ health was in steep decline and he was performing from a chair. That said he and his band were able to put on an amazing show.

That blurry blob in the middle there is Dave Thomas in 2013. The second show in 2017 was better attended and in a slightly larger venue. Their records are very much outsider music, for every Final Solution there is a Lonesome Cowboy Dave and all of their records are different and strange. The lynchpin holding it all together was Dave Thomas. The last record of theirs was 2017’s Trouble on Big Beat Street. This throws back some towards their most acclaimed record, “The Modern Dance” from 1978.

This is Pere Ubu in the last iteration that I saw, 2017, doing arguably their most famous song, Final Solution.

I have my records. I have my memories. I’ll always have Pere Ubu.

Rest in Peace, Dave Thomas. I’ll miss you.