“Take the guitar player for a ride.” Legions of Wilco fans know these words by heart as part of the band’s “Misunderstood”, originally released on Being There in 1996 and played at most of their concerts ever since. But few probably know that Jeff Tweedy borrowed them (with due credit) from Peter Laughner. The co-founder of the Cleveland proto-punk pioneers Rocket From the Tombs (and Pere Ubu, the band that rose from the Rocket’s ashes), Laughner is perhaps the ultimate underground anti-hero. The uncommonly talented guitarist, singer and songwriter made his mark on music history—but just barely. Laughner’s name appeared on only a handful of officially released recordings during his all-too-brief lifetime. (He died in 1977, at age 24.) A posthumous compilation, 1994’s Take The Guitar Player For A Ride, has been out of print for well over a decade. But close to 40 years after his death, music fans and fellow songwriters are still discovering Laughner through a wealth of unreleased material.
In the Cleveland music scene of the early 1970s, Laughner had a reputation for being the hippest guy in the room. He knew all the best records, and often knew about them before anyone else. “[W]hen I was younger, the Velvet Underground meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern teen mutants,” Laughner (who moonlighted as a rock critic) wrote in the pages of Creem in 1976. “Lou Reed was my Woody Guthrie, and with enough amphetamine I would be the new Lou Reed!” But this wasn’t just I-Was-There-First braggadocio. A recently surfaced 1969 tape of Mr. Charlie, Laughner’s high school band, playing in Bay Village, Ohio, shows that he was an extremely early adopter of the VU aesthetic.
And it’s not just that Laughner and his cohorts had worn out the grooves on White Light/White Heat. Mr. Charlie clearly spent plenty of time listening (and listening hard) to illicit live recordings of the Velvets (most likely made at the Cleveland club La Cave, where the band played frequently in the late 1960s). The slowed-down “Waiting For The Man” is clearly modeled off of a now-well-known La Cave recording and the manic “Ferryboat Bill” wouldn’t even appear on bootleg until 1976 (it was finally released officially in 1986). VU covers would become a dime-a-dozen in the years to come, but in 1969, they were exceedingly rare. These teenagers were ahead of their time, to say the least.
The Velvets would be a constant source of inspiration for Laughner in the years to come, but he was nothing if not a musical omnivore. His ex-wife, critic Charlotte Pressler, called him an “underground jukebox”; his bands covered deep cuts by Brian Eno, Richard & Linda Thompson, Robert Johnson, Jesse Winchester, Television, Bob Dylan and many others, often taking the tunes in clever and unexpected directions. Laughner’s 1976 unplugged rendition of Richard Hell & The Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” reimagines the punk anthem as a slinky, spacey folk blues.
But Laughner was more than just an underground jukebox, however much he loved highlighting songs by other artists. From “Ain’t It Fun” (later purloined by Laughner’s compadres the Dead Boys, and then covered by Guns N' Roses in the 1990s) to “Baudelaire”, his original compositions ranged from feedback fueled, nihilistic scrawls to hallucinatory, Dylanesque folk trips. His masterpiece is “Amphetamine”, the song from which Jeff Tweedy borrowed lines for “Misunderstood”. Using the VU’s “Heroin” as a template, the song dreamily drifts along as Laughner slips into confessional tone. He played “Amphetamine” as a full-band number with Rocket From the Tombs (a live version appears on the compilation The Day The Earth Met Rocket From The Tombs) and in a more hushed mode that perhaps suits the song better. The definitive version, recorded in early 1976, remains unreleased. Accompanied by Don Harvey on ghostly reed organ, Laughner stretches the song out to more than 11 minutes, free-associating lyrics in a visionary style reminiscent of Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison and picking out casually elegant guitar lines. Laughner was just 23 when the recording was made, but he sounds as world-weary as they come.
On the other end of the spectrum is the rowdy, drink-and-drug-fueled tape Laughner recorded with legendary rock critic Lester Bangs in 1974. It doesn’t have anything near the touch of genius that the pair were capable of, but it is certainly a fun listen. Laughner and Bangs careen through re-written covers and off-the-cuff originals, just two friends fucking around and blowing off steam after hours. It all comes back to Lou Reed, of course. “You wanted me to play ‘Sister Ray’, right?” Laughner asks. “Play it upside down and backwards,” Bangs retorts. The ensuing “Lester Ray” is a hoot, though with hindsight, its shit-faced vibe brings with it a tinge of melancholy: both Bangs' and Laughner's self-destructive lifestyles would lead to tragically early deaths.