REDISCOVERED

PETER LAUGHNER

Peter Laughner SMOG VEIL

8/10

Cleveland’s proto-punk spirit in excelsis. By Jon Dale

YOUNG, precocious, a bit of a hipster, Peter Laughner had grand designs for his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and its underground scene: “I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York,” he told a reporter in 1974. Three years later, Laughner was taken by acute pancreatitis, but he’d already fitted an incredible amount into his life – a record-store clerk and music critic for legendary American rock mag Creem, he was also an early member of Pere Ubu and was key to their immediate precursors, Rocket From The Tombs. Along the way, he’d helped dictate the aesthetic infrastructure that would make Cleveland such a great American rock’n’roll city.

Peter Laughner sometimes reads like the ne plus ultra of the underground rock musician and, looking back at both his writing and his music, he was one of the first in a trajectory of musician-cum-rock-scholar figures, a template for enthusiasts such as Bobby Gillespie and Epic Soundtracks. As with peer and editor Lester Bangs, Laughner was deeply rock-reverent. Lou Reed and the Velvets are core to Laughner’s repertoire – indeed, a lot of Laughner’s recorded material is covers and reinterpretations, and his purview reflects a certain orthodoxy, from Robert Johnson’s blues through Jimmie Rodgers’ country, Michael Hurley’s folk songs, Dylan, Reed, Jackson Browne, Lowell George and Tom Verlaine.

So, there’s a conscious construction of self undertaken by the young Laughner here, and a dedication to a very particular vision of what rock’n’roll could, and should, be. The magic