Rocket From The Tombs - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Cleveland, Ohio’s Rocket From The Tombs was among the most inspired of the Stooges’ and Velvet Underground’s mid-70s heirs, and of all of the bands in the US rock underground, Rocket From The Tombs is the one that most deserves an illustrated family tree poster of the kind that head shops used to sell. David Thomas wrote for the Cleveland Scene and heralded the arrival of the future by dressing in aluminum foil and calling himself Crocus Behemoth. Craig Bell had played in Cleveland’s Mirrors since 1971, excepting the two years he spent in the Army. Peter Laughner was a Velvet Underground evangelist friendly with rock writer Lester Bangs, and he visited New York, where he once auditioned for Richard Lloyd’s spot in Television. After Rocket From The Tombs broke up, Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz formed the New York punk band the Dead Boys and Thomas formed avant-garage masters Pere Ubu with Laughner.
Thomas put together the first lineup of Rocket From The Tombs in the summer of 1974 with Kim Zonneville, also from the Scene, and guitarist Glenn “Thunderhand” Hach and drummer Tom “Foolery” Clements. At their first show that June at Cleveland’s Viking Saloon, RFTT played most of the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams—Thomas had lived in a White Panther commune—and an early version of the original song “What Love Is.” Thomas met Peter Laughner in a Cleveland folk and blues club across the street from the Viking Saloon, and after they had gotten to know each other Laughner asked to join Thomas’s band as guitarist. Thomas and Laughner assembled a new lineup of Rocket From The Tombs with guitarist Gene O’Connor and drummer Johnny Madansky, who had played together in glam rock cover bands, and bassist Craig Bell, whose involvement with RFTT got him fired from the Mirrors. This RFTT played its first show at the Electric Eels’ “Special Extermination Music Night” on December 22, 1974, again at the Viking Saloon, with the Electric Eels and the Mirrors.
Laughner knew a DJ at Cleveland’s WMMS radio station who agreed to broadcast a tape of the band, so Rocket From The Tombs recorded its February 18, 1975 rehearsal on a borrowed two-track reel-to-reel and the tape was broadcast the following week. RFTT played several shows at Cleveland’s Agora, one of them opening for Iron Butterfly. Laughner introduced O’Connor and Madansky to their future singer, Steve “Stiv” Bators, at RFTT’s April show at the Berea Community Center. Madansky quit the band that month, reportedly because his girlfriend didn’t like it. Drummer Don Evans filled in for the band’s May 5 show at the Agora; five songs were recorded from this performance, and WMMS broadcast two of them, “Down In Flames” and a cover of the Stooges’ “Search & Destroy.”
Drummer Wayne Strick joined the band after the show with Evans. Laughner brought Television to Cleveland for two nights at the Piccadilly in July, and Rocket From The Tombs opened both shows. Thomas and Laughner became increasingly alienated from O’Connor and Strick during those performances, and the band’s last show took place at the Viking Saloon that August with the Mirrors. Towards the end of the set, O’Connor brought Bators onstage to sing and Thomas walked off. Thomas and Laughner then formed Pere Ubu, initially conceived by Thomas as a studio project rather than a live band. As Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz, O’Connor and Madansky formed the Dead Boys (originally called Frankenstein) with Bators as lead singer.
Perhaps the only similarity between Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys is that both bands played Rocket From The Tombs songs on their first releases. The A-sides of Pere Ubu’s first two singles, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” (Hearthan 1975) and “Final Solution” (Hearthan 1976), were songs that Thomas had written in Rocket From The Tombs, and Ubu’s classic first LP The Modern Dance (Blank 1978) included Peter Laughner’s RFTT song “Life Stinks.” The reason that the Dead Boys’ first single, “Sonic Reducer” (Sire 1977), has such uncommonly interesting lyrics is that David Thomas wrote them in RFTT; the Dead Boys recorded the song against Thomas’s wishes. The single’s B-side, “Down In Flames,” was another RFTT song. The Dead Boys’ debut LP Young Loud And Snotty (Sire 1977) included both songs from the single and another RFTT song, “What Love Is.”
Laughner, who wrote or co-wrote “Amphetamine,” “Never Gonna Kill Myself Again,” “Ain’t It Fun,” “Transfusion,” “So Cold” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” has been much mythologized since he died of pancreatitis in June 1977. Pere Ubu kicked him out because of his self-destructive behavior in 1976, and the first two Pere Ubu singles were the only records he played on that came out before he died. After Ubu, Laughner formed the short-lived band Friction. There have been several posthumous releases of Laughner’s live and home recordings, among them Peter Laughner (Koolie Productions 1982) and Take The Guitar Player For A Ride (Tim/Kerr 1993). At the time of this writing, Smog Veil Records is finishing up its long-promised definitive Laughner collection, expected to include 125 songs. Bassist Craig Bell, who wrote “Muckraker” and “Read It & Weep” and co-wrote “Final Solution” and “Frustration,” declined invitations to join the Dead Boys and moved to New Haven shortly after RFTT broke up. In Connecticut, Bell started the Saucers and the Bell System before moving to Indiana and giving up music.
The rarities disc on Pere Ubu’s Datapanik in the Year Zero box set (DGC 1996) includes two Rocket From The Tombs recordings, “Amphetamine” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” as well as a live recording of Friction’s “Dear Richard” and numerous other 70s Cleveland gems. The Rocket From The Tombs material that had been broadcast on WMMS was bootlegged during the 80s and 90s, but the first official Rocket From The Tombs release is The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs (Smog Veil 2002), which collects a February 1975 rehearsal and two live sets from the band’s final months, including one of the Piccadilly shows from the engagement with Television.
Thomas, Chrome and Bell reunited in 2003 with Richard Lloyd of Television in Laughner’s place, as Laughner had once sought to be in his, and Pere Ubu’s Steve Mehlman on drums. Their first staggeringly loud performance at Thomas’s Los Angeles Disastodrome! festival that February, billed as a one-off reunion, sent some elderly UCLA Live subscribers shuffling out of the venue but transfixed everyone else. That summer, Richard Lloyd recorded the band in a New York studio, resulting in RFTT’s excellent first studio LP Rocket Redux (Smog Veil 2004), first made available at shows on the band’s US tour. The band reunited for another tour in 2006 and has since recorded new material. Late in 2009 Thomas’s Ubu Projex site (http://ubuprojex.net) promised a new Rocket From The Tombs single, “I Sell Soul” b/w “Romeo & Juliet.”
