Peter Laughner hands us the keys to a new universe before slipping into the night: A Review of the Smog Veil Records Box Set

Written by Joe Biel 

Photo by Cynthia Black

Singer-songwriter Peter Laughner (Rocket From The Tombs, Pere Ubu) was a punk rock legend in his own right, putting Cleveland underground music on the map. Archival label Smog Veil Records recently released a box set containing remastered songs, demos, and a 100-page book of photos and writings on Laughner's life and legacy. This review discusses Laughner's music, and bringing his reckless creative genius into the present. 

When I was 28, dozens of close friends that I'd grown up with passed away. It was like the dam broke and everyone who had been teetering on the brink for so many years were struck by the same single straw that broke them all. Then my dad died that summer. It was such a clean sweep that I was convinced that all of my friends would be dead before my birthday in November. Some died in very gruesome ways. Many took their own lives or overdosed or some undeterminable combination of the two. Yet others died in spectacular displays of hubris. It remains crushing to me till this day; the culmination of pain that I can't understand.

It's been clear to me for most of my life that the people I became close to were of the creative and reckless and genius variety. And those archetypes cannot be separated from each other. I've often wondered if this was a product of the time and environments that I grew up in or because of the kind of person that I am. It's likely a combination of the two. If I hadn't grown up during the Cold War, thinking the world was going to end so nothing mattered, I wouldn't have invested so much time and energy into the things that I cared about.

And that's why the story of Peter Laughner always hit me in the gut. He's the type of guy that I've been friends with my whole life; whom you bump into at the diner nursing off the night before, who is chipper and tells you an enthusiastic story about the previous weekend while failing to mention the many darker undercurrents that should be more pressing for conversation. Then one night at the bar you hear that he's dead at 24, not from an intentional overdose, but from the sheer amount of stuff that he's been pumping into his body his whole life. And you realize that you have been doing the same thing.

Laughner was before my time. We missed each other by months, and there's a certain poetry to that as well. Because many people carried his torch in the Cleveland that I grew up in. Most of those people I met as burnt out husks of their former selves, dragging their legacies behind them. That's not to bash anyone; it's hard to move on in a rock n' roll world when you fear that your greatest accomplishments all transpired before you turned 25. How is a rocker to imagine themselves turning 30, 40, or 50?

But it was these people who inspired my peers, who in turn inspired me. And we created so much in the spirit of Peter. And this box set is one of the first opportunities to see who he was creating in the spirit of.

In a way these are tired old tropes, explored by writers more capable than myself in cannon regenerative back to the 1950s. But there is something that strikes the listener to hear Peter Laughner in an outfit that sounds like it could be any of our high school bands playing Bob Dylan or Velvet Underground covers. I mean, that's the stuff we do as kids that is laughable and embarrassing and you destroy the recordings a year later. Yet, it's all here in its naked splendor, revealing Peter's trajectory to the world.

I always thought Dylan was an asshole who was full of shit but I didn't grow up in the 60s. So hearing it through Peter's ears and voice does change things, because you can see where it's taking him. And part of me wonders if Peter's best friend's life partner just kept all of this stuff in a box for 50 years or if everyone just sorta knew that this guy would be important later; that he'd change the sound for his generation.

If I may introduce yet another tired, old trope, it's no longer a huge secret that punk began in Cleveland and Detroit and then reached New York and England, who took all the credit. The sole difference, aside from Detroit and Cleveland being the world's punching bags, is that London and New York had marketers and media who named this trend and told the world about it. I appreciate John Holmstrom's contributions with Punk more than just about any other, but as a result, Cleveland doesn't get its due once again. And part of me has to think that this all swelled up into Peter's pain.

That pain held up Peter's unique and inventive guitar playing style that he mastered through this progression of this box set. So it's like we get to go for a walk with some of his friends to understand how he got there. And on that walk I've come to believe that Peter was the type—through encouragement and example—that convinced you to "do the thing." I hadn't realized that Peter also wrote for Creem, and reading these pieces 50 years later, it's obvious that he had to tell the world about the thing that he is so excited about. I mean, hell, he's one of the most compellingly innovative guitar players I've ever heard to this day, but his real trick is that he makes it seem so easy. And that's the real brilliance here.

That's the sorta thing I wanted to know about Peter when I cracked open this beautiful box set for the first time. How does a kid from Bay Village find Bob Dylan and then distort that to create a genre for the next generations? I've been listening to the No Dogs in Space series about Patti Smith on the same journey in New York at the same time. The excitement is in the environment and people around you and Cleveland always had that underlying urgency and desperation that I crave in any music that I listen to from my childhood till today.

Through a series of obvious covers and shitty recordings, Peter Laughner makes you feel you could do this. And that is what created the gateway for my punk, carrying multiple torches for the next generation. In some cases, he will issue a literal calls to arms, like in his review of Punk #2 "it's up to you...to support still another branch of this creeping mindmold in media form." Laughner eviscerates Eric Carmen's solo album as "useless" on the grounds that it doesn't rock. I don't think of myself as one to hold a grudge but this is comforting, if only on the grounds from what I know from growing up with his band members' children. Not to hold up a put down, but these words carry more weight from someone who rocks so hard.

I got clean and sober at 21 and held to it for more than 24 years. It wasn't Peter's example that pushed me to make that change. It was the sea of imitators and realization that I have so much more that I want to accomplish—some of it stuff that my younger self wouldn't have understood or appreciated. It's hokey to think of the stuff that you do as your "legacy" (maybe that's just the Cleveland in me), but we all have goals and ambitions and visions and ideas and values that we want to perpetuate and demonstrate. A friend of a friend runs a grindcore tape label from his bedroom in the house that he and his brother inherited when their parents passed away. I have no use for the stuff but they have hundreds of dedicated fans who order that stuff and there's a beauty in that; finding your people.

I had two more Cleveland friends pass away through tragic circumstances in the past year. Just like Peter, nobody was operating in isolation. The cycle is changing though. Three other friends got into recovery and are figuring out how to navigate their own emotions, boundaries, and needs. Part of this is a generational shift. But I'd like to think that these are the lessons that Peter offers us: that there is life past 30, 40, and 50 and it's not a sad version of turning into our parents or reminding everyone that we were cool once. We have role models for getting older now. The people that survive do interesting things with their lives. They create the world that they want to live in.

During the final years of his life, Fred Cole of Dead Moon would walk into our bookstore like he was any other patron. Once, he asked me for a suggestion for a gift for his mom's birthday. When I jokingly showed him an instructional book about pole dancing, he took me completely seriously and said "Eh, perhaps something else." So really he was like any other patron because that was the generational shift since Peter, you can grow up to be a 69-year-old rocker with the same values that you had at 20 and still find a thoughtful gift for your 90-year-old mom. And the ways out and up have nothing to do with drugs or death but navigating the places in your own life that you still want to explore.

I don't romanticize the dead as a rule so the brilliance of this box set is that it's not a yearning of nostalgia, of believing "Cleveland was better then," because we live in the now. And I want to bring all of these creative reckless geniuses with me to the present. After reading the oversized hardcover book full of beautiful slices of history and listening to the five LPs in this set, I put on the Rocket from the Tombs LP that Smog Veil released years ago. It makes everything here makes even more sense and suddenly it's not a cover band in a bar doing Television and Jonathan Richman covers, but Peter's the guy that watches his bandmates load up the van after the show and just as you're about to get pissed at him for not helping, he hands you the keys to a new universe before slipping away into the night.
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​The Peter Laughner Box Set is currently sold out.
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