Peter Laughner “Amphetamine” “Life Stinks”"Cinderella Backstreet”

Feeling morose this Monday, so gravitated to the Peter Laughner. Briefly, this is the late great guitarist and songwriter for Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs, a recently resuscitated proto-punk outfit that spawned Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys.

Laughner didn’t find a lasting place in either group, and flamed out at 24. (For more, take a look at my second-favorite Lester Bangs piece, “Peter Laughner is Dead.”)

The sadly out of print Take the Guitar Player for a Ride collected a bunch of demos and home recordings of Laughner’s. It captures a wide swath of what made the man so special. Hero worship with heart. Gutter-poet romanticism one moment, bleakest nihilism next. A singer-songwriter with guitar hero chops.

Bangs’ piece tips the hand that the Velvets, and particularly Lou Reed, were a guiding inspiration for Laughner. Not as if you’d need to be told; “Amphetamine” is a bald rewrite of “Heroin.” But perhaps this makes it even more affecting? It’s just a midwestern kid chasing truth in a syringe, mostly on the prescription of his leather-clad poet idol.

And it comes through. Reed’s decadence and transcendence are replaced with something altogether more mundane, and realer for being so. The refrain alone tells us cool requires too much effort–in one turn, “I was so easily overexcited”–and transmits a dead-weight resignation that you’ll never be granted entrance to the things you’ve desired most–”there was always a party/but I was never invited.”

“Life Stinks” starts dada and slides into a demented chant of endlessly resquenced, desperate easy rhymes over stinging guitar scatter. In some ways it feels like more of a coarse trifle next to Laughner’s soul-searching elsewhere. Call it a palate cleanser. What’s scary, or confusing, is that (a) you get the sense he meant it and, furthermore, that (b) the song’s fun.

If you scratch Lou Reed in his classic years, a little bit of Dylan bleeds out, and “Cinderella Backstreet” finds Laughner and his 12-string guitar on a Blood on the Tracks style ramble. This, as much as any other song, shows Laughner developing his own voice and creating his own masterful piece of sad-sack heartbreak while dressing up in the style of his heroes.

Bill Callahan would sing a couple decades later “I’ll never be a rock ‘n’ roll saint…I’ll never be a Bowie/never be an Eno/I’ll only ever be a Gary Numan.” Back-handed diss aside, it’s that same fear of being earthbound, fear of reaching ever in futility for the constellations of the tapped-in and truly worthy, that same self-doubt that makes Laughner’s music so much more than the work of an inspired copyist.

Rarely has a wasted pub crawl, and its attendant catalogue of lost souls, been rendered with such bottomless reserves of sympathy as in “Cinderella Backstreet.” Laughner is perched at the divide–a regular guy, just doing his best, as much or more a character in the song than the beatnik blue troubadour who records the scene for the ages.

And out of this, deepest sadness and a certain kind of genius.

Take the Guitar Player for a Ride is findable but sadly ridonkulously expensive at Amazon,(UPDATE) but lots of tasty Laughner scraps can be found at Handsome Productions.