Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
Rocket from the Tombs
Day the Earth Met Rocket from the Tombs
(Smog Veil)
This transfixing 77-minute collection of
ear-shredding demos and live tapes is the
legacy of America’s greatest unknown punk
pioneers.  With only the Stooges and MC5
as guidelights, Cleveland’s Rocket from
the Tombs debuted in 1974 as a performance
art joke and ultimately metastasized into
Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. The best of
the Ubu and Dead Boys repertoire originated
with RFTT, particularly from the pen of
bassist/singer/heroin addict Peter
Laughner. Ubu standards “Final Solution”
and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and Dead Boys		Music Review Index
songs like “Sonic Reducer” and “Down in
Flames,” appear here in raw, raucous
renditions. Written and sung by Peter
Laughner, “Ain’t It Fun” has a terrifying
authenticity the Dead Boys version can’t
touch; the line “ain’t it fun when you
know you’re gonna die young” bears the
chilling credential of Peter Laughner’s
drug-related death two years later.
Latecomer Stiv Bators pushed David Thomas
out of the front man position, stream-
lining RFTT’s mayhem into the Dead Boys'
macho roar, while David Thomas led Pere Ubu
up the avant-garde high road, losing much of
Rocket's muscle in the process. An amazing
document of an era of infinite possibility
and insurmountable opposition.
Published in Worldly Remains #8, 2003
www.smogveil.com