Agitated? Yes. Every job interview I get, think afterwards, whew thank god that is over, no reason for them them not to hire me, another disappointment.
The Electric Eels song, "Agitated, " is great. Easily found on punk anthologies. The Rocket From The Tombs material, I just downloaded recently via soulseek p2p, great angry stuff as is the Peter Laughner, "Take The Gitar Singer For A Ride, " Tim Kerr Records, o.p. unfortunately but, y'all can plunder it from my soulseek music files, http://www.slsknet.org/ http://faq.slsknet.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=266083&id=40&artlang=en
Excerpt from , "England's Dreaming, " by Jon Savage. http://www.electriceels.com/ee03/pg/savage.html " ...'Cleveland is a working-class town with very unsophisticated tastes,' says historian Mike Weldon, 'but for some reason it's a major music media city. Records break there, maybe it's a way into the Midwest. In the early seventies, Cleveland was a major market for Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie. The New York Dolls, Television played there beforethey had a record out, and at the same time, because of the strength of the local radio stations, we got the best British bands of the time: T. Rex, Dr Feelgood, Roxy Music.
'You always had a small group of people who loved that kind of music: The local media didn't write about them, there was no label interest at all, until 1978. In 1973 to 74, there was a small underground scene that included Rockets From the Tombs, who later became Pere Ubu, and who had members in the Dead Boys. There were the Electric Eels and the Mirrors. From Akron, there were the bizarros, Devo. Most of them had fallen apart by 1977.'
'Most of these people were from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds,' writes Pressler. 'Most were very intelligent. There was no reason why they should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet all of them turned their backs on the world, and that meant a number of very painful choices. Yet they were not drop-outs in the sixties sense: they felt, if anything, a certain affection for consumerist society and total contempt for the so-called counterculture. the sixties drop-outs dropped in to a whole world of people like themselves; these people were on their own.' The Cleveland groups used the same building blocks as New York or London, but their development in isolation resulted in a Bohemianism that was proud to fail. 'The most nihilistic were the Electric Eels,' says Weldon. 'John Morton was the leader: he and dave E., the singer, wrote the songs which had funny clever lyrics. There was a lot of violence attached to that group. John liked to call it Art Terrorism. Brian mcmahon, the guitarist, and John would go out to working-class bars where people worked in steel mills, and dance with each other. That caused serious fights.
'In 1974, they were wearing safety pins and ripped-up shirts, T-shirts with insulting things on them, white Power logos and swastikas: it was offensive and they meant to be offensive. they meant to distract people, but I don't think they were exceptionally racist: they were being obnoxious and outrageous Live they were often too out of control. I don't think they seriously thought anything was going to happen except they wre going to go out there and get arrested.'
It was the problem that would be endlessly repeated during the next few years: in trying to blast through the cultures complacency, the Electric eels succumbed to the very nihilsm that was their tool. Their first forty-five, recorded just before they broke up in mid-1975, mixed impossibly distorted production with words that seem to crawl up the wall. 'Cyclotron' spins flashing, surreal images taken from a vast wasteland of pop culture and suburban plenty, while 'Agitated' goes into the eye of the storm, a closed cycle of frustration and rejection: 'I'm so agitated/ So agitated/ So agitated/ That I'm so agitated/ I'm so agitated...'
'I would like to know the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged wire,' writes Charlotte Pressler. 'It wasn't precisely class hatred, it certainly wasn't political; it went too deep to be accepting of the possibility of change. The Eels perhaps came closest to embodying it fully; but it was there in everyone else. It was a desperate stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection: the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert, but our desert was the Flats. It should be remembered that we had all grown up with Civil Defense drills and dreams of the bomb at night; we had been promised the end of the world as children, and we weren't getting it.'..."
Some sexist, invective filled bile.Better than, "Under My Thumb."
"Ain't It Fun" (Cheetah Chrome/Peter Laughner)
Ain't it fun when you're always on the run Ain't it fun when your friends despise what you've become Ain't it fun when you get so high that you, well you just can't come Ain't it fun when you know that you're gonna die young
It's such fun... such fun
Ain't it fun when you're taking care of number one Ain't it fun when you feel like you just gotta get a gun Ain't it fun when you j.j.j. just can't seem to find your tongue Cause you stuck it to deep into something that really stung It's such fun
Well somebody come up to me they spit right in my face But I didn't even feel it, it was such a disgrace I punched my fist right through the glass But I didn't even feel it, it all happened so fast
It's such fun, such fun, such...
Ain't it fun when you tell her she's just a cunt Ain't it fun when she splits and leaves you on the bum Ain't it fun when you've broken up every band that you've ever begun Ain't it fun when you know that you're gonna die young
It's such fun, such fun, such...
http://www.furious.com/perfect/rockets.html The Collected Works of Peter Laughner from CREEM Magazine, 1973 - 1977 http://www.handsomeproductions.com/creemwork.htm http://www.handsomeproductions.com/petkovicpdpiece.htm Recalling a rocker whose time never came
07/07/02 John Petkovic Plain Dealer Reporter
It was 25 years ago that booze, drugs and a rock 'n' roll myth took Peter Laughner to an early grave.
Peter who?
Don't feel bad. Peter Laughner isn't a household name; he never was. But to those who saw him play guitar and sing his guts out, Laughner might've been a household name - had he not died at 24.
In the 1970s, Laughner founded two of Cleveland's most important bands, punk pioneers Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu. He co-wrote "Sonic Reducer," "Final Solution" and "Ain't It Fun" - songs covered by everyone from Pearl Jam to Guns 'N Roses.
More than that, he believed in himself and inspired others to do the same, says guitarist Rick Kalister.
"He was the most enthusiastic guy I ever met," he says. "He would light up a room."
Creative sparks definitely flew when Kalister met Laughner in 1973.
"I was jamming with some guys at this house on Superior and East 23rd," says Kalister. "We were just regular guys playing blues tunes."
"Not Peter. He walks in, dressed in black, wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses," he recalls. "We start jamming and he starts jumping around, doing Pete Townshend windmills, going absolutely nuts."
There was a method to his madness: Laughner was hell-bent on injecting some life into a stagnant music scene in Cleveland.
Within days, he and Kalister had formed Cinderella Backstreet, the first of many Laughner-led bands that hit the stage running.
"Back then, you basically had cover bands who played songs everybody wanted to hear," says Kalister. "Peter was hip to new music and was going to play it, regardless of who came."
Most shows were in front of a few people, in gritty bars like the now-closed Viking Saloon, which was near Cleveland State University.
But Laughner was on to something, says former Plain Dealer rock reporter Jane Scott.
"Peter was three steps ahead," says Scott. "He knew what was happening, and he became an advocate for it."
Scott recalls Laughner - who also wrote about music for Creem and The Plain Dealer, among other publications - dragging her to see Bruce Springsteen's first area show, in 1973.
"Bruce was totally unknown, except to Peter. He kept on saying, 'This guy is the next big thing,' " she says. "Peter was really a New Yorker trapped in Cleveland."
By 1976, Laughner almost was a New Yorker flat out. He often traveled to Manhattan to soak in its burgeoning punk scene and to hang out with its icons: Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine of Television.
"He auditioned for Television," says Dead Boys guitarist Jimmy Zero. "The word was he got the gig but was afraid to move to New York. At heart, Peter was a well-to-do kid who couldn't leave his hometown."
Still, Laughner brought a bit of New York to Cleveland. He convinced Television and seminal punk band the Heartbreakers to play their first out-of-town gigs here. More importantly, he inspired Cleveland musicians to greatness.
"Peter was a dreamer who dreamt for everybody," says his father, Luke Laughner, from his home in Sarasota, Fla. "He'd tell people, 'You're as good as anybody. Now, go do it.' "
His confidence and leadership stemmed from his upbringing, says Anastasia Pantsios, who photographed Laughner often.
"He grew up in Bay Village in a well-off family that supported his every effort," she says. "He had self-confidence. He was a leader."
After co-founding Pere Ubu in 1975 with singer David Thomas, Laughner led the band into action. Within months, Ubu had released two singles, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" and "Final Solution," on the band's own label. An amalgam of brains and brawn, the little discs that could turned the punk world on its head.
"Back then, bands didn't dream of putting out their own records," says drummer Scott Krauss. "We did and, thanks to Peter's contacts, we started playing New York."
The only thing faster than Pere Ubu's rise was Laughner's fall.
"He worshipped Lou Reed," says Pantsios. "That meant doing every drug Lou did. One morning, he called me at 7 a.m. just to tell me that he had shot up [heroin] for the first time."
Within months, Laughner became so erratic that he was kicked out of Pere Ubu.
"He'd be totally out of his mind, waving his gun around like a madman," says Krauss. "We couldn't take it anymore."
Within months, Laughner was in and out of hospitals, suffering from liver problems. But he didn't let up. Even after he was told to stop drinking or die, Laughner made a beeline to the Flats club the Pirate's Cove. He drank until he passed out, according to Pantsios. Laughner also played on, but couldn't keep a band, says Kalister, who played with Laughner at the Eagle Street Saloon in May 1977.
"He was lying on the stage, screaming, 'I can't get no satisfaction,' " Kalister recalls.
It was Laughner's last show. On June 21 of that year, at his parents' house, he recorded a tape of originals and songs by Robert Johnson, Richard Thompson and Lou Reed. The following day, he died in his bed from acute pancreatitis.
For years, Laughner's death received more attention than his music. It was immortalized in stories and books, including a famous eulogy by legendary rock scribe Lester Bangs that celebrates his life, but also chronicles his downward spiral.
Then, in 1993, a collection of Laughner's songs, "Take the Guitar
Player for a Ride," brought him notoriety as a poetic songwriter. His
role as a rock 'n' roller and a prime mover in America's punk scene
was recognized earlier this year with the release of a CD of Rocket
>From the Tombs material.
"There's this outsider quality to his music that resonates with people, especially those familiar with his life," says Dave Sprague, a New York rock critic for Variety and the Village Voice.
"When most people do it, it's contrived. But Peter's songs take on a different meaning when you hear lyrics like, 'Ain't it fun when you're gonna die young.' "
"Here's a guy who romanticized about tragic heroes, and by doing so, became a tragic figure," says Sprague. "He didn't realize that Lou Reed exaggerated his drug use to create an image."
That, says Jimmy Zero, is what killed Laughner.
"He was so talented," Zero says, adding that he also wasted his talent. "If only Peter would've been content being himself, he might have achieved greatness."
-- Michael Pugliese