Smog Veil's "Peter Laughner" box finally arrives!

Consider Peter Laughner: Creem scribe and familiar of Lester Bangs, his scrawl in local publications helped solidify the punk sensibility in the Rust Belt isolation of Cleveland. Multifaceted muso who co-led Rocket From the Tombs, mid-'70s proto-punk prophets without honor, whose members and repertoire formed the basis of both avant-rock iconoclasts Pere Ubu (also co-led by Laughner) and second wave Bowery punks the Dead Boys. Proudly indiscriminate substance abuser, dead from the effects of drink and drugs at 24.

Mainstream listeners who are attentive to songwriting credits (do such exist?) might know Laughner as co-writer of "Ain't It Fun" (covered by Guns N' Roses), or sole writer of "Amphetamine" (a snippet of which was used, with attribution, by Wilco in Being There's "Misunderstood"). Myself, I got hip to his music via From the Velvets to the Voidoids, and first heard RFTT via fan cassettes and CD-Rs -- atypically for his age cohort, Laughner self-documented much of his musical activity -- before laying hands on a CD copy of Take the Guitar Player for a Ride, a selection of home recordings and tapes from live gigs, compiled by Velvets to Voidoids author Clinton Heylin and released by Portland-based Tim/Kerr Records in 1993.

Reading Heylin's account of Peter's supernova trajectory, the one Bangs penned for New York Rocker (anthologized in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), and another, fictionalized one by Laughner's Pere Ubu bandmate Allen Ravenstine that Heylin included in The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing, I got the sense of Having Known This Kid: your typical record store smartass, but one who had formulated an aesthetic (a few years ahead of its time, but on the right side of history) and had the ability to write about it (usually for hometown giveaway rags). Beyond that, he possessed the musical ability to play the stuff he loved and wrote about, and ultimately to make his own contributions to the canon. His Achilles heel was that he bought into the mythos of the suffering artist, and the belief that one should live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. And it was his misfortune to live those out to their logical conclusion -- a phenomenon that's even more common today, goddammit, than it was in 1977.

Smog Veil, Ohio native Frank Mauceri's estimable Chicago-based indie, entered the picture in 2002, when they released The Day the Earth Met Rocket from the Tombs, which no less of an authority than RFTT/Pere Ubu frontman/conceptualist David Thomas declared a definitive document of the band. Mauceri first announced his intent to release a comprehensive box set of Laughner's recordings in 2006, with a release targeted for 2008. Thing was, every new tape Mauceri and researcher Nick Blakey unearthed, and every new interview they conducted, led them to another tape they needed to seek out, or another Laughner familiar they needed to talk to. (A biproduct of this research was Smog Veil's marvelous "Platters du Cuyahoga" series, initiated in 2015, which includes releases by Northern Ohio worthies X__X, the Robert Bensick Band, the Mr. Stress Blues Band, the Schwartz Fox Blues Crusade, Allen Ravenstine, and Hy Maya.) Earlier this year, Smog Veil announced that the Laughner box masters were finally at the pressing plant, and an August 2nd release was anticipated. And there was great rejoicing in the land.

Now it's here: Five discs, 56 tracks (same sequence on CD and LP), a hardbound 100-page book packed with photos and reproduced memorabilia; a generous selection of Laughner's published writings, starting with a couple of letters to the Creem editor, and including transcriptions of some of his "Gatherin' Crop" columns (sort of a hipper Christgau Consumer Guide) from local CLE publications The Star and Zeppelin; an informative essay and detailed track notes by Blakey (whose painstaking documentation of the Cleveland scene deserves recognition); and eulogies by Bangs, Pere Ubu's Tim Wright, and Cleveland creative Tim Joyce. As retrospective anthologies go, Peter Laughner ranks right up there with Dylan's Biograph, Bob Marley's Songs of Freedom, and the Velvets' Peel Slowly and See. With the crucial difference that most of this music is previously unreleased. The result is a more complete portrait of Laughner than we had any right to expect, revealing a multiplicity of new facets.

Here's how it breaks down, disc by disc:

Fat City Jive 1972, culled from a pair of WMMS-FM radio broadcasts, finds Laughner immersing himself in the waters of songcraft with an acoustic trio that includes a couple of ex-bandmates from the Mr. Stress Blues Band, which he'd helped revive in late 1971 and from which he was summarily slung out in the summer of '72. Bill "Mr. Stress" Miller took umbrage at Laughner wanting to play and sing atypical blues band fare on the level of Dylan's "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat." For Laughner was no purist, as you can tell by the way he coaxes barrelhouse ivory tinkling from pianist Mike Sands on a Velvet Underground song. Besides covering his role models and exemplars Dylan, Lou Reed, and Michael Hurley, Laughner also essays toonage by the likes of Arthur Crudup and Jimmie Rodgers, along with a couple of originals. His "Solomon's Mines" and "It's Saturday Night (Dance the Night Away)" sound for all the world like Townes Van Zandt (speaking of tormented, doomed songwriters). But Laughner was just getting started.

One of the Boys 1973-1974 documents Laughner's "glam phase" with the bands Cinderella Backstreet and Cinderella's Revenge, in a series of club recordings that are uncommonly full of presence for the time. Vocals and all instruments are clearly audible as Laughner and his compadres play supremely confident extended jams on songs by Reed (including one of the most glorious versions of "Heroin" I've ever heard by anybody), Dylan-via-Hendrix, and Mott the Hoople, along with a sole Laughner original, the 16-year-old's manifesto "I'm So Fucked Up." Cynthia Black's Mellotron elevates the band, and it's worth noting that Laughner was ahead of the rockaroll curve in collaborating with strong female musos; besides Black, future Chi-Pig members Susan Schmidt and Deborah Smith (both ex-Poor Girls, an all-female Nuggets-era outfit from Akron) were mainstays of Cinderella's Revenge and Laughner's post-RFTT band Friction, while future Contortion and No New York catalyst Adele Bertei fronted Laughner's last band, Wolves, and sings a mighty "Rock It Down" on the eponymous disc in this set.

Pledging My Time 1973-1977 shows Laughner hitting his stride as a songwriter in an incandescent series of home recordings, several of which previously appeared (with inferior sound quality) on Take the Guitar Player for a Ride. Smog Veil's remastering has given these tracks a depth and fullness they previously lacked. While they are clearly of their time's state of technology, you can now hear the air in the soundhole of Laughner's acoustic, and the room he's singing in. "Cinderella Backstreet," "Baudelaire," and "Sylvia Plath" have never sounded better, while Deborah Smith's bass on "Down at the Bar" jumps out in a way it didn't before. The four previously unreleased originals -- particularly "(My Sister Sold Her Heart To) The Junk Man" -- have the blasted emotional directness of Laughner's best work, while occasionally betraying the continuing influence of Dylan. Laughner's blues roots remain audible in the covers of Robert Johnson's "32-20" and the somewhat chaotic overdubbed version of the Blonde On Blonde song that gives the disc its title, even though he sings (on "Cinderella Backstreet") that "Playing those blues you learned from the English dudes / Doesn't really satisfy."

Rock It Down 1974-1977 documents the years of Peter's apotheosis, starting with the pre-RFTT outfit Fins' cover of the Velvets' "What Goes On," once released on a rare early-'90s indie single. RFTT itself, well documented elsewhere, is represented here by a previously unreleased live-at-the-Agora "Ain't It Fun." There's a different take of "Amphetamine" from the Take the Guitar Player version, with Don Harvey on Velvet-ish organ and Peter still working out the lyrics, and a handful of tracks by Friction. The latter include rehearsal run-throughs of Tom Verlaine's "Prove It" -- for by late '76, Laughner had started checking out the Lower Manhattan scene, and even auditioned for the second guitar slot in Television when Richard Lloyd stepped out for a minute -- and Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso," as well as three tracks (two Laughner originals and a Dylan cover) from a blazing Pirate's Cove gig.

Nocturnal Digressions 1977 is, in some ways, the Holy Grail for Laughner fans: a solo home recording from the night before he died. He's himself to the end, playing an obscure Tom Verlaine song as a blues, mixing in a couple of Jesse Winchester numbers among favorites by Van Morrison, Richard Hell, the Stones, and Lou Reed. Knowing their provenance, it's hard to listen to these songs without hearing harbingers of doom, not just in Laughner's choice of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues," but also in the rhythmically idiosyncratic original "The Last Room of the Dream," in which Peter sings, "Show me the way to the next room of this dream." Or another original, "(Going To) China," which contains the line, "Gonna dig myself a hole down in the earth" (undercut at the end by a quick piss-take version of "Summertime Blues"). These sounds of a troubled 24-year-old who was drinking himself to death in his mother's house, singing his heart out to his tape recorder in the wee hours of his last morning, hold a special poignancy. While Mauceri, in his foreword to the book, cautions against "what-might-have-been" nostalgia, it's evident that Peter Laughner wasn't done with music that night. He just ran out of time.

Ten Questions for Nick Blakey

I've admired researcher Nick Blakey's work for years (somebody please give this guy a book contract -- I'm looking at you, Kent State University Press), so I was pleased as punch when he graciously agreed to answer a few questions via email (with a couple of interjections from Smog Veil label honcho Frank Mauceri).

Q: How did you get involved in Smog Veil's Laughner project?

Nick Blakey: The other researcher on the Smog Veil projects, Andrew Russ, and I met through the bootleg cassette trading circles in the early 1990s. We were both pretty big Pere Ubu fans, and were attempting to gather up as many live recordings of Ubu as we could find. This also included related groups like Rocket From The Tombs, Mirrors, electric eels, etc. There were some Peter Laughner recordings circulating, such as Nocturnal Digressions, as well as the spring 1976 Ubu show with Laughner from The Mistake that was eventually officially released [on Hearthan] as The Shape of Things.

Over time we managed to gather quite a bit of stuff. Some of it was kindly shared with us by Chris Hardgrove, a WMBR-FM DJ I had met here in Boston, who managed to grab this holy grail cache of tapes Andrew and I had been attempting to get for years. We also had acquired some recordings from the numerous Cleveland folks we had contacted looking for tapes, including some former members of Pere Ubu.

By 2009, we had heard that Smog Veil was beginning to put together a Peter Laughner box set; I decided to give [Frank Mauceri] a call out of the blue and let him know that we had some Peter Laughner recordings he might be interested in. The rest is history.

Q: What were some of the challenges you encountered in your research?

Nick: There were and are a lot of myths about Peter Laughner out there that we had to unravel and correct.

One of the more obvious ones [concerns] Fins, the brief 1974 band Peter had with Robert Bensick, Scott Krauss, Deborah Smith, and Lachlan McIntosh, of whom two songs were released as a 45 on S.O.L. in the early 1990s as Peter Laughner and The Finns. All surviving members have since said the group was simply Fins, with one "n" and no "the." Clinton Heylin's watershed albeit flawed book From The Velvets To The Voidoids stated that the group had been named for Brian Eno's 1974 single "Seven Deadly Finns," though we have been unable to find out what his source may have been for that.

Another myth was in regards to the live version of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" by Cinderella Backstreet that appeared on the Forced Exposure 45 released in 1987. That single's sleeve stated the song had been recorded live at the Brick Cottage, Cleveland in August 1973 though we eventually discerned it was actually June 24, 1973 at The Cellar, Sandusky, Ohio. It turned out that Cinderella Backstreet had never played the Brick Cottage, though Peter did play there in the spring and summer of 1972 during his stint in the Mr. Stress Blues Band and as well with his brief fall 1973 band Blue Drivers. We later discovered that the wrong date and venue had come out of a fanzine, and the publisher/writer of said fanzine had told me he had made a wild guess as to when and where the recording was from.

Through interviews with the other members of Cinderella Backstreet and numerous ads and references to the band Andrew located in publications such as Scene, we determined that Cinderella Backstreet had broken up by the end of June 1973. Archival searches revealed that Peter had placed classified ads in the Plain Dealer for two weeks during July 1973 listing the band's PA for sale following the group's split, and the band's former soundman, Pat Ryan, confirmed that the specs listed in the ads matched what he had used during the band's existence.

The last thing we found was that the chaotic end of the song was actually a piece called "Call The Ambulances" (plural) which Charlotte Pressler's archival notes stated had been written by the band's Mellotron player Cynthia Black.

In regards to Peter's general history, there are still some facts that are disputed or up in the air, and some disagreements among the various parties involved as to when and where certain things took place, or even as to what exactly went down. This is, as most folks probably realize, is par for the course when working on something like this as much of history and memory are perception and interpretation. I have grown quite fond of "The Rashomon Effect" (named for the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film) which one can use when you cannot discern exactly what the actual truth is. Using this method, you present all versions of the story you that have been given/relayed to you and, upon presenting them all, you let the reader decide and/or the words dictate what the truth may be.

Dispelling such myths was also one of the main reasons why I wrote Let Me Take You To The Empty Place: An Incomplete Story of Peter Laughner and Television (which I was overjoyed was approved by the Peter Laughner estate). The piece has been revised as new information has come to light since its initial publication on Aquarium Drunkard in 2016 and will see a re-release at some point this year.

Q: What was the most thrilling discovery from your research?

Nick: A single cassette that a friend of Peter's had which yielded five previously unknown 4-track demos by Peter and the last surviving complete recording of Allen Ravenstine's "Terminal Drive." Three of the five Peter demos appear on the box set, and four of the compositions were previously unknown to us. The fifth, "Lullaby", which appears in a different version on the summer 1976 session with Albert Dennis (which also yielded "Baudelaire" and "Sylvia Plath," among others), was nevertheless a completely different solo recording. There were other thrilling discoveries, but this one cassette seems to have yielded the most earth-shattering stuff.

Q: What were the criteria you used to make your selections? 

Nick: There were a lot of different factors, but in terms of selection, we knew there were certain things we wanted to definitely release, such as the sonic upgrade of Nocturnal Digressions and some of the aforementioned uncirculated demos. Sound and performance quality were key as well. For example, while there are some stunning performances and unique covers on the numerous tapes of Peter and the Wolves live at the Bottleworks in early 1976, the sound quality of these recordings was consistently poor, despite us having some of the master cassettes.

There were some disagreements among the team about tracks some wanted over others, and I personally felt that we should not include certain recordings that had already been released a number of times before (unless the sound quality of what we had was a significant improvement, which in many cases it was). Thankfully I was overruled on that! I won't get into what I had hoped for inclusion that did not make the cut. However, I will note that we had enough material to easily do a ten LP/CD box set with a 200 page book.

Q: From the earliest recordings here, Peter emerges as a fully formed performer. What do you see as the keynotes of his style?

Frank Mauceri: I like to think of his early work as that of a fully informed performer. He very much matched the popularity of the time. While listening to Fat City Jive (Disc One of the box set), think about the popular style of movies of 1972 and 1973. What’s Up Doc, The Sting, Paper Moon, lots of westerns and period pieces. Peter’s originals on that entry would have fit quite nicely into the soundtracks of those films.

Nick: Peter was a sponge. He seems to have listened to everything he could get his hands on in terms of folk, blues, rock, and jazz, and soaked up as much of it as he could without bursting at the seams. He is so often portrayed as merely a proto-punk gunslinger who lived fast and died young, and while this is partially true, it is only one part of the total picture of who Peter Ravenscroft Laughner actually was.

This is a guy who was playing Velvet Underground covers with his high school band...while the Velvet Underground were still together! This is also a guy who as a 19-year-old kid was playing lead guitar in the Mr. Stress Blues Band, a slot that had been previously held by the likes of Glenn Schwartz (James Gang/Pacific Gas & Electric), Kenny Klimak (Dr. John), and James Emery (The String Trio of New York), along with local heroes Chuck Drazdik, Donny Baker, and Chip Fitzgerald. Peter also made great use of Gibson ES and Fender Stratocaster guitars, Fender amps hot-rodded with JBL speakers, and the Morley Fuzz Wah pedal.

Since he was such a chameleon, it's somewhat difficult to sum up Peter's style succinctly. Despite this, while it's fair to say he arrived at his own style around late 1974 in such a way that one could easily point to and say, "Yep, that's Peter," he never stopped learning, listening, and evolving. It should also be noted that Peter wrote "Amphetamine," "Baudelaire," "Cinderella Backstreet," "Down At The Bar," "I'm So Fucked Up," "Life Stinks," "Sylvia Plath," and the words to "Ain't It Fun" all before he was 24.

Q: Peter was ahead of the curve in working with strong female musicians. Did anyone you interviewed comment on that?

Nick: It's something that has been a constant acknowledgement since Andrew Russ and I started researching Peter in the 1990s. I can't really think of any other male musician in the years Peter played (1965-1977) who did the same for women musicians in their bands who were not merely singers and/or dancers. One could cite Bo Diddley here, but he did it to a much lesser degree.

Q: The sound on this set is phenomenal, given the sources you had to work with. Can you give any insight into what the mixing/mastering process was like?

Nick: That is all due in thanks to the pre-mastering/restoration and mastering team.

Sam Habash, who does our pre-mastering/restoration, is truly magic, and we've worked with him on every release starting with the Mr. Stress Blues Band Live At The Brick Cottage 1972-1973 LP/CD. Working with him is always an utter joy, and he also comes out of the old bootleg tape trading circles. Sam and I essentially "speak the same language" which is extremely crucial when working on projects such as these. (Sam and I were introduced to each other by the same mutual friend, former KDVS-FM DJ Mike Siou, who connected me to Andrew Russ all those years ago. At this point I owe Mike big time!)

The same is also true for Jeff "The Wizard" Lipton -- whom I also met through bootlegging circles -- and Maria Rice of Peerless Mastering. They do absolutely stunning work and when I listened to the finished masters, I have to admit I cried.

We used to use the late Paul Hamann for mastering prior to his untimely death in 2017. Paul worked out of his historic SUMA studio in Painesville, Ohio, which was started by his late father Ken in 1977. Just about every Pere Ubu album from Dub Housing forward was recorded at SUMA, among so many other important recordings, so it's very holy ground.

Working with Paul was a very different experience than working with our current team; not negative, but I know I drove Paul crazy a lot of the time -- partially because he could never figure out why I wanted to dig through the tape library so badly! Because his experience far outpaced mine, Paul and I sometimes needed a "translator" such as [original Pere Ubu drummer] Scott Krauss, who was so crucial when we were working on the Hy Maya release. Paul did truly awesome work, and it was a gift to be able to work with him closely on these releases. After Paul died, we began working with Peerless, who I had personally worked with in the past and always been incredibly happy with. SUMA, by the way, is still operating but under different ownership.

Q: As you point out, the writing Peter did for Creem was just the tip of the iceberg. I particularly enjoyed his "Gatherin' Crop" columns. Is there more of this stuff out there? Is there a physical repository of the Laughner archives?

Frank: Smog Veil does continue to collect Peter’s works, including his writings, which I think in the end, will number equally in volume with his audio recordings. The archive, both physical maintained in the Smog Veil offices and digital maintained by our research team of Nick Blakey and Andrew Russ and myself, contains numerous examples of Peter’s writings not included in the box set book. These include columns, reviews, and features written for various free weeklies, as well as original poetry, essays, and letters. What we do with these things is still a matter of discussion, but at some point, I hope to make these available at a research library. Peter very much wanted to be known as a writer, and wrote about those desires in his seven-page college entrance essay.

Q: Having spent over a decade with Peter, how would you assess his importance?

Nick: I think Peter's greatest importance was as a catalyst and centering point for much of the Cleveland underground during the time he was alive. This is, mind you, my retrospective view, and I was not there at the time. I know that several folks in Cleveland had nothing but disdain for Peter, and some of them have even put that in print.

Regardless, his influence continues to be felt after his death, be it directly, such as the undeniable impact he had upon The Pagans, or indirectly, via his former bandmates in the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu coming to international prominence with repertoires that included numerous songs that they had done and/or wrote with Peter. That Peter's influence continues to flow through these bands to this day (as Cheetah Chrome is touring again with a new version of the Dead Boys), 42 years after his death, is frankly incredible.

Besides the ones you mentioned earlier, songs that Peter wrote, co-wrote, and/or played on the original versions of have been covered by such folks as Pearl Jam and Bullet LaVolta ("Sonic Reducer"), Peter Murphy and Living Colour ("Final Solution"), Death of Samantha ("Sylvia Plath"), and Mary Lou Lord ("Cinderella Backstreet").

In regards to the Cleveland underground of the '70s, while electric eels/X__X and Mirrors/Styrenes tend to be the best known, we've emphasized that there must also be an acknowledgement of Robert Bensick's various bands (such as Hy Maya and Berlin West), Orville Normal (who we are still digging up recordings by), and later shots in the arm such as Wild Giraffes, Lucky Pierre, and Don Young's Production. Also of great importance are the Akron bands such as Bizarros, Devo, Rubber City Rebels, and Tin Huey. Cleveland's Jimmy Ley and Kent's 15-60-75 aka The Numbers Band, while both playing more traditional hard blues in the same realm as the Mr. Stress Blues Band and Robert Jr. Lockwood, must be cited as they were both heroes of Peter's.

To echo something I stated earlier, not a bad legacy for a guy from the Cleveland suburbs who didn't live to be 25 and whose only record releases while alive were the two Pere Ubu 45s he appears on. As, again, his influence is still being felt, his importance in relation to American music and the subsequent cultural landscape will hopefully be cemented (at last) with the release of this box set...or at least, we hope so.

Q: Does Smog Veil have further plans to document the '70s Northern Ohio underground? Will there be another Platters du Cuyahoga series?

Frank: Yes, we have completed preliminary work on Platters du Cuyahoga series 3 and I plan to release that sometime in 2020.