Adele Bertei's "Peter and the Wolves"

Smog Veil Records' Peter Laughner box set was my most anticipated release of the millennium. I'd been fascinated by Laughner ever since When the Velvets to the Voidoids made me aware of the fertile Northern Ohio music scene that spawned Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Fellow fans shared tapes of Laughner's band Rocket from the Tombs, which before fragmenting into the two aforementioned outfits, managed to contain the "art" and "rock" impulses that they, respectively, came to embody. Moonlighting in a record store, I was able to obtain a copy of Take the Guitar Player for a Ride, the compendium of lo-fi Laughner recordings Velvets to Voidoids author Clinton Heylin compiled for Tim/Kerr, which only inspired more curiosity. Who was this muso/scribe, whose world could encompass punk progenitors, arty experimentalists, and singer-songwriters, who would destroy himself at age 24 for what his friend Lester Bangs called "something torn T-shirts represented in the battle fires of his ripped emotions?" The Smog Veil box gave a fuller and more complete picture of the musical Laughner (surprisingly, the most emotionally resonant tracks were performed solo acoustic). But I continued to be troubled by the idea of his death-wish romanticism. 

Now Smog Veil has republished a slim memoir by Laughner's last collaborator, Adele Bertei, of the time they spent together (and her own emergence as an artist). Bertei's probably best known as a player on the "no wave" scene that germinated on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the late '70s. It was through her agency that Brian Eno produced the No New York compilation that introduced the world to the sounds of the Contortions (for whom Adele played Acetone organ), Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. Beyond that, she's read her prose and poetry on stages with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; acted in underground films; sung with Tears for Fears and Whitney Houston; cut dance tracks with Thomas Dolby and Jellybean Benitez; and taught songwriting to the incarcerated with Wayne Kramer's Jail Guitar Doors. As a writer, she offers a unique perspective on Laughner: that of a compassionate friend and confidante, rather than a sensation-seeking voyeur.

Bertei's narrative sets the scene with vividly rendered sketches of Cleveland and her own troubled beginnings, with music as her refuge and sanctuary. Hanging out in Cleveland's gay bars, she encounters photographer Nan Goldin, who gives her an inkling of a more hospitable world, "a queer utopia by the sea." The first time she meets Laughner, she's channeling Janis Joplin at a local blues jam. "You're really good," he tells her. They get together to sing and write together. (Sorry, Mr. Heylin, but they weren't an item -- she likes girls, remember.) Laughner introduces her to a whole world of music and literature, gives her an electric guitar -- a Fender Duosonic -- and provides her entry into Cleveland's underground music scene, which is noteworthy for the relatively high number of women musicians active there. It remains a boys' club, though. "Violence as art performed by men who use it to shock and abuse," Bertei writes, "impresses certain male critics -- those who'd rather celebrate white male rage spewing misguided testosterone than give a great female artist two cents-worth of deserved praise."

Her portrait of Laughner is more nuanced than the self-immolating wannabe rock star other accounts have painted. Besides being a talented singer, songwriter, and guitarist (albeit one plagued by self-doubt and the need for peer approval), he was a great cheerleader and advocate for fellow musicians he liked -- Pere Ubu's David Thomas, Television's Tom Verlaine, Bertei herself. Her prose conjures the magic of their shared enthusiasm in a way any music geek will get: "Hearing that snap of cellophane ripping over the sleeve, the soft crackle of the needle on the first grooves of wax and BAM, new songs, new stories to get lost in for a good forty minutes of rollercoaster bliss." She traces the roots of his alcoholism, drug addiction, and penchant for gunplay to his upscale suburban family. A trip to NYC to see Peter's friend Lester Bangs provides Bertei with a couple of musical epiphanies (seeing the Ramones, hearing Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), while the two men's manic substance abuse foreshadows their early demise. Bertei accompanied Laughner only part of the way on that journey, arriving in New York to seek her fortune there on the very day of his death. 

Peter and the Wolves is, among other things, Bertei's way of processing grief and loss, which is another way of saying "being human." "Ghost of a hope," she writes, "a prayer of life filling in the lines of the remembered, conjured." She pays her friend and early mentor great heartfelt tribute with this remembrance. She has other stories to tell; a book about Labelle (whom I saw almost booed off stage opening for the Who in Forest Hills in '71) will be published by University of Texas Press next year. I look forward to reading her more.