ALLIANCE Musician and television producer Harvey Gold will be a special guest when the Alliance Vinyl Club meets inside the Rodman Public Library Auditorium Nov. 1. Gold, who says he was culturally altered by The Beatles and had his brain chemistry altered by the Velvet Underground, has had a career in the entertainment industry […]
No discussion of Cleveland's punk scene would be complete without a chapter on Peter Laughner, who helped start half a dozen bands, including Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu. And yet, Laughner, who died at age 24, has not received that chapter, really, until now. A new 5-disc box set retrospective by Smog Veil Records has been released, an event that sent PKM's Todd McGovern in search of the Peter Laughner chapter, using the voices of many who knew Peter well, including Cheetah Chrome, Miriam Linna, Robert Kidney, Anton Fier, David Thomas, and others.
The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail. Peter wrote for
Creem, a gig he d scored not only with his writing chops but also through his friendship with the reigning bard of rock and roll journalism, Lester Bangs. To the air between us he offered up a pretty guitar with reverence, as if it were a holy artifact. A guitar with a rosewood neck, like Tom Verlaine s, he said proudly. Verlaine was the lead singer and guitarist in the band Television. I hadn t yet heard their music, which set Peter to shuffling through a pile of 45s as I continued inspecting the room. Above the stereo equipment was a black and white photograph nailed to the wall by a switchblade. A skeletal man. An Auschwitz inmate? It was Lou Reed in his Metal Machine Music phase. On another wall, he d stapled a slip of paper with a scrawl; It s so cold in Alaska. The Alaska line was from Lou s
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Writer and author Adele Bertei revisits the ghosts of Cleveland’s 1970s punk scene in her book “Peter and the Wolves,” which focuses on her time spent with the mythologized Peter Laughner.
Writer and author Adele Bertei revisits the ghosts of Cleveland’s 1970s punk scene in her book “Peter and the Wolves,” which focuses on her time spent with the mythologized Peter Laughner. Laughner was a founding member of the influential “avant-garage” band Pere Ubu and performed with members of The Dead Boys and Rocket From The Tombs. Before his untimely death in 1977, he and Bertei bonded as outsiders in a decaying Midwestern city.