perfidy

Please excuse me; I'm writing this under the gun. In two days I turn thirty, and I need to get this review article cranked out before they come to take all my punk away. It's what happened to all my friends: a white van screeches to a stop in front of your house at 7 AM on the first Sunday after your 30th birthday, and a team of masked men swarm into your house, replacing your favorite cds with copies of Jim Nabors' Greatest Hits and Josh Groban Sings Songs of God, Country, and Neckties. I'm a little unclear as to whether this will happen before or after I'm injected with the microchip that makes me vote Republican, but I guess I can just wait and see on that point.

You see, I was recently blessed with a visitation from the long lost and legendary punk band Rocket From The Tombs. I spent a lot of years reading about this half-apocryphal group in Greil Marcus' punk rock history Lipstick Traces and countless 'zines, wondering if any band making punk music in the days before punk was even a word, much less spirit made flesh, could possibly live up to the breathless hype they've been accorded in the back pages of fanboys-only treatises. Well, guess what: yes it can. Unfortunately, I don't have very much time to spend with the band before I lose them forever, so I will make this as brief as I can [about 1200 words, as it turns out].

Rocket From The Tombs was a short-lived band that came together in Cleveland in 1974 when a local music writer named Dave Thomas took the alias Crocus Behemoth and recruited some friends to make music inspired by The Stooges and the Velvet Underground. The band's classic lineup took shape with the addition of local singer, guitarist and Lou Reed fanatic Peter Laughner, bassist Craig Bell, guitarist Gene O'Connor (better known as Cheetah Chrome) and drummer Johnny Madansky (later "Johnny Blitz"). Just eight months after this lineup came together, Rocket From The Tombs would disintegrate thanks to squabbling over artistic direction, the artier camp championed by Laughner and Thomas taking flight in the legendary Pere Ubu, and the hard-rocking wing comprising O'Connor, Madansky, and sometime Tombs singer Steve "Stiv" Bators later founding CBGB mainstays The Dead Boys. For a band whose entire recorded output amounts to a few one-mic radio tapes and a handful of live shows, Rocket From The Tombs' status as one of the first bands to capture the dirty magic of punk has grown over the years out of all proportion with the number of people who have actually heard their music (funny how that happens). In 2002, Smog Veil Records released a set of rehearsal tapes and live demos in 2002 as The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs, the first time that the bulk of RFTT's output appeared on CD anywhere. Improbably, Rocket From The Tombs would reform in 2003 for a series of live dates, teaming Thomas, Chrome, and original bassist David Bell with Television guitarist Richard Lloyd and Pere Ubu drummer Steve Melman and producing a live album, Rocket Redux.

So how does it all sound, after thirty years of waiting?

On one hand, it sounds just as you would expect. The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs is essentially the sound of some desperate kids in a dying city translating the Rosetta Stone with a Cap'n Crunch Decoder Ring and a copy of Kick Out The Jams, and just like most first drafts of later greatness, it can be hard to see what's valuable underneath the muck (I feel the same way about The Replacements' debut Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash! and The Flaming Lips' first EP as well, among many others). Since most of the tracks were recorded on one mic the quality is muddy, and the playing is at times ludicrously sloppy. On the other hand, however, all the murkiness and fumbling in the world can't obfuscate the fact that Rocket From The Tombs had incredible songs, great energy, and a stunningly original idea of what rock should be. Fueled by equal parts Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the MC5, the band combined swagger, angst, and plain freaky weirdness into a sound far greater than the sum of its garage-band parts. The songs that don't fall apart into messes spill over into feedback, Crocus Behemoth simply can't sing, and the brilliant, funny lyrics are buried under layers of guitar fuzz and drum fills. The same tension between "make art" and "kick ass" that eventually drove the group apart makes The Day The Earth Met... a brilliantly original artifact of punk before its time.

The bulk of the songs on The Day The Earth Met... appear in finished form on Pere Ubu and Dead Boys albums. Particularly interesting to punk completists are early versions of Pere Ubu's strange and chilling "30 Seconds over Tokyo" and "Final Solution" and The Dead Boys' "Down In Flames," "Sonic Reducer" and "Ain't It Fun" (later massacred cruelly by Guns 'n Roses), but the lesser known songs are where the fascination lies. The RFTT originals "Amphetamine," "Never Gonna Kill Myself Again," and "So Cold" are musically tight, hypnotic, and excellent on a par with the songs later made famous. In particular, Peter Laughner's sardonic lyrics deserve a place in the all-time songwriters' hall of fame. Moreover, though the sound quality is rough, the guitar greatness of Laughner and Cheetah Chrome-- one of the only great lead guitarists of the punk era-- shines through loud and clear. If you are a hardcore punk fan, it is hard to deem this collection as anything but essential.

Fast forward to 2003, when Rocket From The Tombs regroup to answer the unasked question, "what would Sonic Reducer sound like if played by a bunch of fifty-year-olds who haven't seen each other in years?" Bizarrely enough, the answer is a wholly unexpected and completely welcome "fantastic." With Richard Lloyd of Television on board providing guitar support, and with decades of experience behind them, Rocket Redux pulls the haze of tape hiss, methamphetamine shakes, and teenage mania aside to reveal a group of men with more energy than a schoolful of teenagers playing a set of songs which uniformly deserve to be all time classics. Everything works, especially the way that the dual Richard Lloyd-Cheetah Chrome guitar attack and Dave Thomas' strained growling vocals turn decades-old demos into modern-day monsters. The drug hangover of "Ain't It Fun," the adrenaline-fueled punch of "Sonic Reducer RFTT" and the surging "Frustration" alone are worth the price of admission, but every one of the twelve tracks on Rocket Redux proves that Rocket From The Tombs deserve every last word of their legend.

Please excuse me. I need to go enjoy these records while they last, because in less than forty-eight hours, they're coming to give me a minivan, a haircut, and a backache.

Catch Rocket From The Tombs/Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome on tour with Terri Texas Bomb:
8/6, St. Louis MO, The Creepy Crawl
8/7, Columbus OH, Club 202
8/8, Akron OH, The Lime Spider
8/9, Richmond VA, Nancy Raygun
8/10, Baltimore MD, Side Bar
8/11, Passaic NJ, Connections
8/12, New York NY, The Continental

Also posted to blogcritics.org.