Peter Laughner early 1976. Photo Credit: Mik Mellen
 
Peter Laughner was a singer-songwriter-guitarist and apparent force of nature who has been credited with jump-starting the underground music scene in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1970s. Laughner was perhaps most famously a founding member of Pere Ubu—you might say he was their Syd Barrett—and before that Rocket from the Tombs, the legendarily bonkers Ubu predecessor with David Thomas and three soon-to-be Dead Boys. He had a group with future Contortion Adele Bertei called Peter and the Wolves. Laughner was involved in many different combinations of Cleveland musicians, all of them short-lived. He was a Dylan-imitating folkie (although a very good Dylan-imitating folkie to be sure), in a jugband blues combo and he went to New York to jam with Tom Verlaine when Richard Lloyd briefly left Television. He was also a memorable writer for CREEM and various local Cleveland alt-weeklies. His biography makes it seem like he was trying several musical directions simultaneously and enlisting others to his various causes, and volunteering for theirs in turn, creating sparks and willing a scene to happen by sheer force of personality.

The new Peter Laughner box set from Cleveland-based Smog Veil Records is a very, very unusual pop culture product. It’s also a difficult thing to “review,” resistant to any sort of standard approach to that task. Many box sets celebrate a lifetime’s musical achievements, greatest hits, but Peter Laughner died at the age of 24. He had no hits, in fact he was apparently only ever in an actual recording studio once, with Pere Ubu to record their first single. This is a scrapbook of memories, newspaper and magazine clippings and a box of old tapes that had been made by a dead friend that have been fashioned into something at once a highbrow rock collectible fetish item and a sincere tribute to someone who died over 40 years ago, but is still fondly remembered. The target audience for a box set (five CDs or albums and a hardback book) of amateurishly recorded live performances, 4-track recordings made late at night in his bedroom at his parents’ home and so forth is going to be very, very small, consisting mostly of Pere Ubu fanatics, rock critics, otaku rock snobs, people who actually knew Peter Laughner and other curious Clevelanders. Or maybe you, who knows? (If you are intrigued, I suggest acting quickly as 80% of the run—which will not be republished—has already been sold according to the label’s website.)
 

 
For someone who died so young, he actually left behind a helluva lot of stuff. Over the course of Peter Laughner‘s five discs, you see this young guy’s talent forming and it’s sad to think what he might’ve gone on to do had he not been so self destructive. (Even his one-time partner-in-crime Lester Bangs stopped seeing him near the end.) Obviously (and I do mean very obviously) the original material is highly derivative of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, indicated even by his song titles—take “Amphetamine” or “Baudelaire” for two pronounced examples. This is not to say that these songs are bad, not at all, but merely to indicate what the listener is in for. There are a lot of cover versions, some of them very good, but ultimately they are just cover versions, and made from lo-fi sources at that. Repeat plays are not something I anticipate, frankly.

For such a young man Peter Laughner had pretty serious talents as a poet/lyricist but as a guitar player, holy shit, get the fuck out of here. He could go from playing something that would have tied John Fahey up in knots to his utterly astonishing flamethrower guitar work in Rocket from the Tombs, a band that left behind a live tape made at a loft party in 1975 that became a legendary bootleg. (That crazed performance, released by Smog Veil along with two other live shows as The Day Earth Met The Rocket From the Tombs in 2002, was rhapsodized over lovingly for an entire chapter in Julian Cope’s Copendium, and deservedly so. It sounds like early KISS being tasered as they sing and play and manages to be far, far more violent than anything Pere Ubu or the Dead Boys would ever record. RFTT songs have been covered by Guns n’ Roses, Peter Murphy, Mission of Burma and others.)
 

Handwritten note and photo booth photo of Peter Laughner, October 1976,courtesy of Carol A. Aronson.
 
For me, the star of this set is the book (designed by longtime DM contributor Ron Kretsch) which features reminiscences by friends and associates, an explanation of the ten-year-long project’s gestation, and crucially, Laughner’s own writing clipped from local papers and CREEM magazine. The CREEM pieces I recall vividly as they were published in the very first issues of that magazine that I would buy (or rather my innocent mother would buy for me at Kroger) in 1976 when I was ten. Seen in hindsight, he had extremely good taste in music.

This is how Laughner’s CREEM review of Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby album began. As I read it again decades later every word came back to me:

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn’t go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)

I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record.

I came on to my sister-in-law “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out.” I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution…I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must’ve figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water…

A line like “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out,” first read at such a young age, well, tender poesy like that stays with you, doesn’t it? And who knows how much of it really happened? With Laughner’s reputation as a world class wastrel, I’d wager that all of it probably did, exactly as described.

In summation, Peter Laughner is certainly not for everyone, but if it sounds like it might be for you, then it most probably is. I prefer to think of it the way I approach Robert Johnson’s music. Lo-fi though it might be, it’s all we’ve got of him. It’s worth it to ignore the tape hiss and scratchy 78 rpm record sound to get to the heart of the blues. And that’s what we have here, but it’s the blues channeled through the voice and mutant guitar of an immensely talented middle class white kid living in Cleveland who burned out at the age of 24, but never completely faded away.