If Boston’s Modern Lovers quickly came to the attention of the record industry, as had the Stooges in Detroit and the New York Dolls in New York, there was one budding alternative scene that went largely ignored during the early Seventies – Cleveland. In a post-Velvets world, Cleveland’s premier band was powerpop combo the Raspberries. Raspberries aside, the city’s bars were full of bands playing a steady diet of Top 40 sounds and – at least as far as the industry was concerned – very little else.
Michael Weldon: Cleveland has a strong tradition of bands playing cover versions in bars and sometimes getting very popular locally.
In this vacuum of indifference, original ideas had time to develop. Potentially innovative bands could work on a sound (and the musicianship required to achieve it), and in the early Seventies that sound was largely Velvets- and Stooges-inspired.
David Thomas: [We] were working in isolation – we had no hope of ever being taken seriously by the mainstream establishment. All the other bands in town played Top 40 sort of stuff – the mainstream bands. They thought we got stoned and got on the stage and made stuff up as we played. So we had no hope of ever being successful, which is a heartening and creatively positive thing . . . So a lot of stuff was developing at that point that later, when the marketplace opened [up], had access to the market.
Despite being a very small, insular scene, Cleveland’s Seventies underground was divided from the start into two camps – what might be considered the Lakewood and Disc Records brigades. The prime movers in the Electric Eels – John Morton, Dave E, Brian McMahon and Paul Marotta – and Mirrors – Jamie Klimek and Jim Crook – all attended Lakewood High School. The two frontmen in Rocket from the Tombs, Peter Laughner and David Thomas, did not.
Charlotte Pressler: It is important to Cleveland punk history that Cleveland punks are West Side, almost exclusively. People from Cleveland Heights liked jazz and progressive music and folk music. It wasn’t a working-class social background, it was precariously middle class . . . John [Morton] . . . had been to one of the local private schools and gotten kicked out for being obstreperous: So Morton finished up at Lakewood High School . . . Jamie Klimek.’s family had moved to Lakewood [and] Jamie was a high-school dropout. Peter [Laughner] grew up in Bay Village, which is a sterile little bedroom suburb, a WASP suburb . . . David Thomas was from Cleveland Heights. His father taught for many years at one of the community colleges here . . . [All of us] emphatically did not want to join the class that our parents struggled into.
If there was one central. figure in Cleveland’s alternative rock scene, it would have to be Peter Laughner, even if his earliest musical influences were rather traditional primarily the blues of Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, etc. His first band, Mr Charlie, formed in 1968 while still in high school, played in the style of early Yardbirds/Stones until Laughner heard the first Captain Beefheart album, Safe as Milk, after which they began playing their blues ‘Beefheart-style’.
At the same time as his discovery of Beefheart, Laughner became seriously immersed in the recordings of the Velvet Underground. The impact of the Velvets was such that Laughner would later write:
When I was younger, the Velvet Underground meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern teen mutants . . . All my papers were manic droolings about the parallels between Lou Reed’s lyrics and whatever academia we were supposed to, be analysing in preparation for our passage into the halls of higher learning . . . I had a rock band and we played all these songs, fuelled pharmaceutically by our bassist who worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore and ripped off an entire gallon jar full of Xmas trees and brown & clears. In this way I cleverly avoided all intellectual and creative responsibilities at the cleavage of the decades.
Whenever the Velvets would play at La Cave, Laughner, along with Lakewood High student Jamie Klimek, would hang out in the back room between sets, ‘listening intently while Lou Reed strummed his big Gibson stereo and talked about chord progressions and life on the road’. Soon enough, Laughner was steering Mr Charlie away from its rhythm & blues origins.
Charlotte Pressler: The band worked up a thirty-minute, feedback-filled version of ‘Sister Ray’, at the close of which Peter generally leaned his guitar against the amp and walked away, letting it scream. They did originals too; there was a quasi-blues Peter had written called ‘I’m So Fucked Up’. It wasn’t your average high-school band.
Laughner’s tastes were not confined to rock and its blues-based antecedents. He was also a fan of free jazz, in particular of one of Cleveland’s more innovative sons, Albert Ayler. Charlotte Pressler, who would later marry Laughner, recollects their first meeting.
Charlotte Pressler: I went over to Peter’s parents’ house, ‘cause he was still in high school, and I walked in the living room and there were his albums on the floor arranged in alphabetical order and the first one in the stack was Albert Ayler’s Bells, and I said to myself, ‘Boy, I think I want to get to know this person.’ ’Cause that was hip. He got me a job at Disc Records with the intention of seducing me.
Disc Records was a centre for those Cleveland rockers interested in less orthodox pop exponents. Jim Jones, later of Mirrors, recalls working alongside not just Laughner, but also fellow teenage dropouts Tim Wright and Scott. Krauss. All four had among the hippest record collections west of the Cuyahoga, and all would play their part in Cleveland’s mid-Seventies rock renaissance.
If Jamie Klimek knew Laughner from Velvets shows at La Cave, another Lakewood reprobate only came into contact with Laughner at Disc Records. John Morton’s tastes were even more unorthodox than Laughner’s. When Laughner encountered him, Morton had ‘peroxided blonde hair down to his shoulders, [and was] wearing secretary-blue eyeshadow and giant earrings shaped like Pepsi-bottle tops’, which in Cleveland in 1970 definitely qualified as off-beat. Morton had come into the Disc Records Westgate store to order most of the ESP jazz catalogue. Not surprisingly, Laughner struck up a conversation.
John Morton: I remember listening to free jazz, Ornette Coleman . . . we listened to John Cage, and Sun Ra and Ayler. That’s what [the. Eels] was supposed to be [but] we didn’t really understand it.
At this juncture Laughner was between bands while Morton’s interests still lay largely outside rock. Mr Charlie had disbanded the minute they graduated from high school. The rest of the band had their eyes .on college and, frankly, had little in common with a self-appointed leader who listened to the likes of Captain Beefheart and Albert Ayler.
Charlotte Pressler: The other guys in Peter’s band had never liked him very much. They all smoked a lot of dope and did a lot of acid; they liked to stay back from situations, calculating their next move. Peter drank instead, and was too full of restless energy, too full of scraps of knowledge picked up from William Burroughs and The Magus and the backs of album jackets to stay back from things long.
Laughner decided that Cleveland was not the place to make his reputation and, with Pressler in tow, headed for California. Given that this was the summer of 1970, Kent State riots et al, San Francisco did not seem the obvious locale for a Velvetized folksinger to make a name for himself.
Charlotte Pressler: We took off for California to make things better in a completely new environment . . . He was 18, I was 20. He was, believe it or not, going to make a living as a folksinger. He was into old timey/bluegrass . . . .[but] it was a mess out there and you don’t just walk in and take San Francisco. And he was also getting very strong pressure from his family to come back.
By the time Laughner returned to Cleveland, he found that fellow Velvets groupie Jamie Kimek had begun to assemble a formative version of his very own Velvet-derived rock band, Mirrors. After attending a gig by Mr Charlie at a canteen at Bay High, Klimek had come away sufficiently inspired to get his friend, Jim Crook, to show him the E and A chords on a guitar so that he could begin writing songs. Soon enough Klimek and Crook were making some home recordings and at the end of 1971 Klimek finally put Mirrors Mk 1 together.
Michael Weldon: Mirrors began with Jamie Klimek and Jim Crook being friends, playing together and being Velvet Underground followers. They had already recorded together, just home studios that friends had. I don’t know how far back they go playing music together but they had always wanted to have a band.
Having recruited Weldon on drums, Klimek blackmailed bassist Craig Bell. into joining Mirrors in order to gain access to Klimek’s sister, Karen. Mirrors could now begin rehearsals, ever, alert to possible venues to play. Though gigs in Cleveland were extremely hard to come by for a band who concentrated on original material, Mirrors made their first couple of appearances at a private party and a show at the local,YMCA.
Michael Weldon: We did play out and we actually were paid a few times, which was quite an accomplishment for somebody that wasn’t doing covers, because at that time . . . if you didn’t play cover songs people would heckle from the audience and demand cover songs . . . When we were doing cover versions it was for the most part Velvet Underground songs, and then after a while we expanded the covers list to include songs by the Troggs, and Pink Floyd . . . The first places we started playing were a YMCA [and] a bowling banquet in somebody’s basement . . . [We were] playing for a very middle class suburban bowler [crowd] who drank beer and liked to dance. They didn’t care that we weren’t playing songs that they were familiar with, they just cared that it sounded good and had a beat you could dance to.
Though Mirrors played a cross-section of originals and covers, they recognized few antecedents save for the Velvets and Syd Barrett. Incorporated into their live set were such Velvets favourites as ‘Foggy Notion’, ‘There She Goes Again’, ‘Some Kinda Love’, ‘That’s the Story of My Life’, ‘Here She Comes Now’ and ‘Sweet Sister Ray’ (Klimek had had the foresight to record this song at La Cave back in April, 1968). Their originals boasted titles like ‘Amputees’, ‘Cheap and Vulgar’ and ‘She Smiled Wild’ and combined the Velvet-style delight in feedback and guitar noise with a keen melodic sensibility.
Up and gigging, Mirrors faced their first major setback when, in the early months of 1973, Bell found himself blackmailed once again – this time by the American government – and was drafted into the army. It seemed that Mirrors might have to disband when, at Craig Bell’s final gig, closet-guitarist Jim Jones, who had also been a regular attendee at the Velvets’ La Cave shows, volunteered his services.
Jim Jones: This kid used to come into the store, named Brian Kinshey at the time, [but better known as] Brian Sands. This guy was only into Captain Beefheart and David Bowie . . . He said his band, Milk, was going to be playing [a gig] . . . On the bill was another group called Mirrors, and here I’m watching this band doing Syd Barrett songs and Velvet Underground songs and Troggs songs, which were three of my favourite bands, and I was completely flabbergasted. So after the gig I went up to them and told them how great I thought they were, and how outrageous that they should be doing this material. Most people didn’t care for what they were doing at all, this is ’72/3 . . . They said, ‘Yeah, it’s too bad our bass player got drafted, if you know a bass player, let us know.’ So I said, ‘I play bass!’ which was a total lie – I played guitar! I said, ‘There’s only one problem. I don’t have a bass right now,’ and Jamie was able to find one, an old Rickenbacker six-string, and they had put bass strings on it.
It was not until the end of 1973 that Mirrors at last established their own weekly residency, at a club called Clockwork Orange, run by the notorious Clockwork Eddie. They had previously been sharing the ocassional bill at the Viking Saloon with Laughner’s post-Mr Charlie outfit, Cinderella Backstreet, but it was at the Clockwork Orange that they were at last able to develop their own material.
Michael Weldon: In later years we were booked into two different clubs that were in downtown Cleveland, one was just down the street from the bus terminal, and we played there one night a week . . . We played on a free-beer night a couple of times, again with the encouragement of Peter Laughner who was trying to get things going on a lot of different levels. There was a story in the Plain Dealer, by Jane Scott, who was important to what was happening in Cleveland at the time because she would write about anything. She did this feature story, ‘The New Underground?’
At the same time as Mirrors began gigging with a cross-section of Velvet and Velvet-influenced material, Laughner was putting together his own Velvet-derived combo, Cinderella Backstreet. Cleveland was taking its first tentative steps toward its very own, fully grown, two-hundred-pound underground.
The prodigal son had returned from California at the end of 1970 to few exciting vistas. If Laughner’s flair for the guitar and eclectic tastes meant that he could always play the odd acoustic gig at a ‘folk’ venue, his first post-California stint in a band was an unsatisfactory four or five months in the local equivalent to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Mr Stress’s Blues Band. The tenure proved short-lived because, although Bill Miller, aka Mr Stress, was fully aware of Laughner’s ability, he was not entirely happy with Laughner’s jagged guitar solos, continually resisted his attempts to introduce more rock & roll material, and disliked the idea of trying to get his band to record some songs, something Laughner was constantly pushing for.
Laughner needed his own band – like Klimek, but with musicians.
Charlotte Pressler: There seemed to be nobody who would play his music. He envied Jamie at times; what Jamie was doing with Mirrors was in some ways what he would have liked to do. But Peter, unlike Jamie, could never have put up with the slow process of teaching non-musicians to play; he wanted people who were already competent. Though Peter never valued technical skill for its own sake, it was for him a necessary precondition for making music.
Laughner eventually placed an ad in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer newspaper, hoping to find some fellow punks he could play with. Among the few replies were two genuine musical misfits, guitarist Gene O’Connor and drummer Johnny Madansky. Though they jammed with Peter on a couple of occasions, nothing came of their association. As yet.
Meanwhile Pressler – whom Laughner had married shortly after their return from California – had come across an experimental trio by the name of Hy Maya, composed of two synthesizer players, Bob Bensick and Allen Ravenstine, and string bass player Albert Dennis. Hy Maya were approaching their music strictly from an art perspective. There was no knowledge of, or desire to emulate, rock & roll practices.
Allen Ravenstine: In 1971, I came back from Mexico to Cleveland and I got an apartment in Lakewood . . . and a guy moved in underneath me who was an art student at Cleveland State [University] . . . and he was doing these things where you take fuzztones and rewire them into oscillators . . . I [became] involved in this community of people who were working in the Art Dept at Cleveland State, but they were not musicians per se, they were painters and sculptors, but there were a couple of them who played instruments on the side . . . We would sit in [Bob Bensick’s] apartment and plug these things into his stereo and make noise . . . We even did a couple of gigs, we went out to a couple of art galleries and we did things with lighting and me making noises with these boxes, playing a processed flute . . . There was no music per se, it was more in the category of a happening, no drums, no guitars, just oscillators, and a flute.
Hy Maya may have suggested an untapped well of original musicians in the Cleveland area, but it was the informal jams that Bensick arranged at a house on 23rd Street that most interested Laughner.
Allen Ravenstine: Periodically, we had these jams where guys would come down from Cleveland State, one guy would play congas, there was a bass player, and Bensick, on flute . . . Scott Krauss was a friend of both of those guys, he played drums and he started to hear about what was going on out there.
When Laughner got around to calling Bensick he was invited down to jam with this loose association. After one jam session, Laughner asked bassist Albert Dennis, guitarist Rick Kallister and drummer Scott Krauss if they would like to form a band. Space Age Thrills, as the new combo was briefly dubbed, played their first gig at a 1972 midwinter party at the Cooper School of Art.
The band soon changed to a more cryptic nom de plume, Cinderella Backstreet, an obscure in-joke referring to the band’s sometime mellotron player/backing vocalist Cindy Black: Black had been drafted into Cinderella shortly after the Cooper gig as one half of the Leatherettes, whose job, to quote Pressler, was ‘to sing backup and look good – they were better at the latter than the former; in their feather boas, rhinestone-studded cutoffs and low-cut lace and velvet tops, they were beautiful, but chronically off-key.’
Cinderella Backstreet, like Cleveland’s surfeit of ‘Top 40’ bands, stuck to cover material, but their sets consisted almost entirely of ten-minute versions of Velvet Underground classics plus the occasional Richard Thompson or Bob Dylan song, all cranked out and metallicized à la Rock & Roll Animal. As such, Cinderella Backstreet did not really reflect the depth of Laughner’s musical interests.
Charlotte Pressler: Peter was listening to a fair amount of AACM-style jazz, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders . . . fair amount of blues . . . lots of Jimmy Reed albums, a fair amount of the weird folk stuff, Holy Modal Rounders. A little bit of Cage, Yardbirds – they were very important – the Velvets, Stooges albums as they were coming out, the post-Velvets stuff. He [even] listened to a bit of Terry Riley, Michael Hurley . . . [but] Peter liked to hide behind covers. He did not have much confidence in his own writing.
The policy of ‘hiding behind covers’ did little to help Cinderella Backstreet develop more than a local reputation. Yet, if Laughner was happy to perform other people’s songs, his choice of covers was not really in accord with Cleveland’s late-night revellers. When he booked Cinderella to play a regular gig at a gay club, the residency proved predictably short-lived.
Charlotte Pressler: It simply didn’t work. He was up there every week emoting in a black vinyl jumpsuit and red lipstick and doing his best to look like a transexual-Transformer type. It wasn’t what the gay people in the club were at all interested in – they wanted disco. Anyway, Peter would go just so far and then he wouldn’t put out.
Despite his frustration at the lack of originality on the local scene, Laughner was reluctant to allow Cinderella Backstreet to perform a cross-section of originals and covers like Mirrors, even though he had several noteworthy originals to hand, including a rather fine Dylanesque song, which bore the same name as the band.
Charlotte Pressler: It is important to know this about Peter’s personality; it is part of his tragedy: acceptance meant everything to him . . . Peter had a deep need for approval; he could feel real only if he saw himself reflected in other people. As long as he was alive, he had great difficulty bringing out his original songs. He was convinced that no band would play them, and that, even if a band could be found, no one would want to hear them. The bands he was associated with, and especially the bands he led, always played a great deal of cover material; they were underground jukeboxes.
The preponderance of covers in their set did give Cinderella Backstreet a far greater chance of establishing a regular gig than Mirrors. Sure enough, they secured the Wednesday slot at the Viking Saloon, a hard-rock bar close to Cleveland State (Laughner then managed to coax the owner into booking Mirrors). But Laughner was taking Cinderella far more seriously than his fellow Backstreeters.
Charlotte Pressler: Peter. . . wanted a tight, committed band that would stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the world, a duplication of the camaraderie he imagined had existed in his high-school band . . . [the others] thought he meant a band along the lines of [their loose jamming ensemble] Froggy and the Shrimps; five or six people all used to each others’ styles who would work up four sets in a week and play out for fun.
In August 1973, Cinderella Backstreet played their final gig. But Laughner wanted another shot, and quickly formed a sequel band, Cinderella’s Revenge. The slimmed-down four-piece remained a covers band, and lasted less than a year. Laughner required an outfit with more conceptual integrity.
Though Cinderella Backstreet – and its 1973 – 4 incarnation Cinderella’s Revenge – were hardly pushing back the boundaries of rock & roll, they provided a useful training ground for several Cleveland musicians: Scott Krauss and Laughner himself both became founding members of Pere Ubu; Sue Schmidt and Deborrah Smith – both members of the Revenge incarnation of the band – would later play in Laughner’s post-Ubu outfit, Friction, before founding Akron’s Chi-Pig; even Chrissie Hynde (yes – that Chrissie Hynde), whose brother Terry played in Akron’s Numbers Band (aka 15 – 60 – 75), is alleged to have played in one of Cinderella’s incarnations.
Yet it was not as a musician but as a rock & roll journalist that Laughner first achieved a small degree of notoriety. Like Lester Bangs, who was Laughner’s primary inspiration as a rock & roll writer and soon a close friend, it was the Velvet/Stooges/Dolls garage-rock tradition that he sought to propagate in his articles, most of which were for Creem magazine. As early as 1974 he was writing (this time for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer):
I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York. I’m the guy between the Fender and the Gibson and I’m singing about you.
If Laughner’s own music was not yet at a stage where he was likely to inspire a generation of recalcitrant rockers, he could steer them towards bands who might – notably his most enduring love, the Velvet Underground. He was also keen to advocate the one local band he considered both talented and original, Jamie Klimek’s Mirrors:
Mirrors are as far from r&b as you can get. They’re so white they disappear in the daytime. Their sound is a composite of all that was promising in the Sixties . . . Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, the raunchiness of the Troggs and the Stooges.
If Cinderella Backstreet and Mirrors maintained only a poor gig/rehearsal ratio, they were considerably more successful in their attempts to perform in public than Cleveland’s other first generation underground rockers – the Electric Eels.
Charlotte Pressler: The Electric Eels were high concept, low gig.
The Electric Eels came into existence via an appropriately negative form of inspiration.
John Morton: Me, Brian and Dave E went to see Captain Beefheart, and Left End were [supporting]. And they were real bad. And I said that we could do better than that. We started practising on the back porch. I played guitar and Brian played piano ‘cause he didn’t want to play guitar. We figured Dave E could sing ’cause he didn’t do anything else. We had our ideas about playing anti-music back then.
If their intent all along was to play ‘anti-music’, they required some musical input to play against. Morton had gone to Lakewood High with Paul Marotta, one of those rare figures whose avant-garde musical ideas matched his technical competence.
Paul Marotta: We used to have this thing in high school when we were hippies and most of the jocks used to try to beat us up. I would start fights and John would finish them. That was like our friendship.
Marotta was invited to join the Eels sometime in the fall of 1972. The Electric Eels have had their performances described as a form of Art Terrorism – a very accurate term of reference. But early gigs were not few and far between – they were non-existent.
Charlotte Pressler: [Early on it was] hard to say whether [the Eels] were even a band . . . The Electric Eels seemed more to be the name of a concept, or perhaps a private club.
In the winter of 1973 they finally secured a job opening at a local bar for legend-in-his-own-lunchtime Jamie Lyons. After their debut show, John Morton, an intimidating hulk of peroxide-bedecked muscle at the best of times, and Dave ‘E’ McManus were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Morton was apparently wearing a coat hung together with safety pins and McManus’s stage ‘attire’ was covered with rat traps. The cops generously broke Morton’s hand during the arresting procedure.
When the Eels resumed their brief residency, Morton had a slide-rule taped to his cast and wrenches taped on his arm. When they introduced a new instrument to their repertoire – a large sheet of metal which Morton hit with a sledgehammer – the owner pulled the plug and they were minus a gig. Forced to organize their own gigs, they spent the remainder of 1973 and 1974 relocating to Columbus and rehearsing. Gigs in Columbus were no easier to come by than in Cleveland. After all, Art Terrorism was not the easiest concept to sell to a club – or bar-owner.
Michael Weldon: Mirrors was unusual enough to not get bookings, but were civil enough to get bookings if they tried. The Electric Eels looked stranger, played stranger and either didn’t care or purposely wanted to antagonize people, or a combination of the two.
Though Morton has attempted to downplay its bearing on Eels performances, violence was a central part of their aesthetic. It was not restricted to their shows, either, often carrying over to rehearsals.
Paul Marotta: An Eels practice was like literally breaking chairs over people’s heads.
Morton, at some point, physically attacked all three residual members of the Eels, and the others frequently left the band, only to return when they had licked their wounds, literal or metaphorical. Morton’s penchant for violence – or in his terms, confrontation in a direct, physical sense – was such that he and Brian would sometimes go to working-class bars and dance together until the inevitable fight broke out.
John Morton: We didn’t go out to be terrifying. We just were. We didn’t have any thought for what we were doing, we were acting on our instincts. Dave E felt himself a sinner who was going to hell and he didn’t have any choice. He knew he was wrong but he had to do what he was doing . . . I never planned any violence. We would plan certain things, like to wear power tools, but that was entertainment, but the philosophy sort, of evolved . . . We were more like the Detroit [bands], we were unaware ... we thought what we were doing was right, it was just that the other people didn’t know it. We didn’t have the facility to sell ourselves to the public . . . we were a dichotomy, to have that fragile and explosive a thing made it exciting but it also made it doomed.
Anti-music or not, Morton was most definitely influenced by America’s underground forerunners. That element of immediacy and confrontation that Iggy Pop brought to the live ‘rock’ performace had an obvious appeal to Morton who – like many of his contemporaries in New York and Cleveland – entered the rock arena from a most obtuse angle. His enduring vision was as a visual artist.
John Morton: It was our music. We heard the Velvets and the Stooges and Beefheart and we felt that’s what we should be doing. I liked the excitement of being a ‘rock star’ but I also liked doing artwork and I wanted to combine the two, because doing artwork didn’t have the excitement of performing.
The Eels’ self-conscious punkdom predates and previews many punk outfits on both sides of the pond, even if they gigged barely half a dozen times in the three years they existed.
If their form of Art Terrorism could involve the use of anvils, gas-powered lawnmowers and, more often than not, fists, it was their songs - with titles like ‘Agitated’ (‘5 a.m. and I’m crawling the walls/waiting for imaginary telephone calls’), ‘Anxiety’, ‘Cyclotron’ and ‘Jaguar Ride’ (‘there are no words to describe our jaguar ride’) – that presaged the amphetamine-fuelled early English punk bands.
Charlotte Pressler: John and Dave E [once] refused to ride in Marotta’s Volkswagen Microbus because hippies had microbuses and they were not hippies . . . you could describe them, pretty accurately, as spoiled rotten but looking at it another way they were very uncompromising.
Above all else, the Eels were totally original. Their roots, like Suicide in New York, led them to deconstruct rock & roll, retaining only the noise element, the polemical nature of the rock lyric and the confrantational aspect of the live performance.
Paul Marotta: There was no drummer in the band. That was part of the reason it didn’t catch on – it was ridiculously loud and noisy and . . . it was pretty confrontational.
Though their lack of musicianship – Marotta excepted – meant that the Eels’ attempts at anti-music were largely unconscious and lacking in direction, they were taking the Stooges’ original aesthetic to its logical conclusion. This set them apart from both Mirrors and Cinderella Backstreet, who were derivative of the Velvets in both style and content. When Cinderella Backstreet played Columbus, Laughner called on the relocated Eels during one of their rehearsals. His wife, recognizing in the Eels an essential quality of originality that Cinderella lacked, tried her best to convince Laughner to offer them his services.
John Morton: I remember Charlotte saying she would divorce Peter if he didn’t join the Eels. That’s when he had the band Cinderella Backstreet. They came down to play Columbus and where we were practising she heard us and said that. They actually had a big fight about it . . . he couldn’t understand any of us. He read Bukowski and we read Burroughs, he liked the Grateful Dead.
It is quite possible that the impact of that visit on Laughner was more profound than Morton realized. Cinderella Backstreet was in reality Cinderella’s Revenge, which was on its last legs by the spring of 1974. Laughner needed to channel his gifts down a more productive boulevard. Soon after his return from Columbus, Laughner saw the first performance of David Thomas’s new band, Rocket from the Tombs, at the Viking Saloon on 16 June 1974. They were billed as The World’s Only Dumb-Metal Mind-Death Rock & Roll Band.
In the early Seventies, the rather imposing Thomas had briefly fronted a spoof rock band called the Great Bow Wah Death Band and was writing for a local paper about rock music, with Mark Kmetzo under the joint pseudonym of Croc O’Bush, and under the alias Crocus Behemoth in his own right. But when he formed Rocket from the Tombs, Thomas was largely detached from Cleveland’s small scene of original musicians. Like Laughner at this stage, Thomas’s primary role was as a professional cynic of rock & roll, even if his own tastes as journalist and fan leaned more towards the Stooges than Laughner’s beloved Velvets.
David Thomas: I was reviewing stuff. We’d go to shows and he was reviewing things for other people so that’s how I ran into him. Peter was always really into the Velvets. I thought the Velvets did interesting music but I thought the rest of it was baloney. I tended to be more into Zappa, Beefheart, MC5 sort of thing . . . the Stooges, but Peter was into the Stooges, too.
Laughner realized that the Rockets had potential at a time when Thomas saw it purely as a vehicle for parody, and conceived of an outfit that could fuse the pretensions of the Velvets with the performance art of the Stooges. The sporadic gigging and marginal public profile of Cleveland’s first generation underground bands, and the isolation of Cleveland itself from the major meccas of American music, precluded any awareness of a new movement in the early to mid Seventies. But Cleveland’s subterranean strata were mobilizing by the summer of 1974, having survived into the punk era.
On 22 December 1974 the Electric Eels, Mirrors and Rocket from the Tombs played the Viking Saloon, billed as a Special Extermination Night. The Viking was the one local venue to endorse original music – the Rockets had debuted there, Cinderella had played a regular Wednesday night gig, and even Mirrors had enjoyed Viking hospitality. Aside from affording the Eels their first gig in many months, it was the first gig for a new incarnation of the Rockets, featuring Peter Laughner, David Thomas, Craig Bell from Mirrors, and two of Laughner’s old partners-in-jamming, Gene O’Connor and Johnny Madansky. They were soon to become Cleveland’s leading garageband and one of America’s most important precursors to punk.