Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning (Part One)
from The Shape of Things to Come, 2006
With David Thomas’s death on April 24, I want to do what can to keep the work of someone I was lucky to know alive in the little corner of the public mind this newsletter might reach. I’ve written a lot about David’s work over the years; my piece from Artforum in December 1997, and this chapter from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it.
“My name is David,” David Thomas of the pre-punk, post-dada Cleveland band Pere Ubu sang in 1980, in a dashed-off ditty he called “Lonesome Cowboy Dave.” “My name is David, and I’ve got a hat the size of Oklahoma,” he croaked. “I’ve got shoes that look like Florida / I’ve got a coat that’s like California / I’ve got spurs on my feet / Whoopie-ti-yi-yah.”
Trying on the nation as if it were a wardrobe, Thomas was drawing on the oldest, richest strains of the tall tale. He was Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan or Uncle Sam himself, dispatching his foes, crossing the continent in a dozen strides, kicking its mountains aside and drinking its rivers dry. He was Stagger Lee, shouting “rattlesnakes has bit me and crawled off and died”;1 he was Goliath shouting and bragging in a minstrel show: “I kills my friends and makes hamburgers outer my enemies. Tornadoes and harrycanes follow me round like pet dogs, and lines and tigers is my playmates. I’m bad. I’m mean.”2 With claims as big as Thomas’s, “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” should have been a signature song, but Thomas didn’t sing it when Pere Ubu appeared in October 2000 at the Knitting Factory in New York City, one stop on the band’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Tour. Thomas didn’t sing it as part of Disastodrome! the three-day, multi-act theatrical he staged in Los Angeles in 2003. He didn’t sing it at a one-night solo stand, just himself and an accordion, in Seattle in 2005. He didn’t have to. In Pere Ubu or out of it, Thomas has never made the charts; he’s never had any hits, so he doesn’t have to play them. “I know that the sacrifice of success breeds longevity,” Neil Young once said of why he scatters terrible concept albums among dissonant masterpieces and craven comfort-food crowd pleasers. “Being willing to give up success in the short run guarantees a long run. If you’re really doing what you want to do.” But it’s unclear if David Thomas’s story allows the words success or failure any meaning at all. Light and darkness, the riverside and the superhighway, the private eye’s big city and the country singer’s small town, the television screen and the all-night diner are only a few of the warring territories that come into view when he opens his mouth to speak.