Great Lost Band Members # 15 Peter Laughner

Peter Laughner, founder member and guiding light of Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu was a self-consciously dark character. He chose darkness, as Lester Bangs lamented in his eulogy essay about him 'Peter Laughner is Dead'. Laughner was an early casualty of the New York Punk scene, dying before Pere Ubu made the massive statement of their first album release The Modern Dance though his imprints are certainly on that record. Life Stinks, first song, second side, is his. His influence of course is everywhere. Allen Ravenstein, the bands synth player, wrote a great short story fictionalising the band's early days and Laughner features strongly in it. A self-destructive, brooding presence. here's the first paragraph. Laughner is Billy.

'In those days we'd play wherever they let us. We were in our early twenties, still alert keyboards for the devilish fingers of adolescent heart warp, and we thought it was not true that we were untested. We had piloted ourselves through the mazes of failed love and the temptations of the material world. We knew the realm of the spirit. We had chosen our poisons. We had learned to speak and we were certain that our voices were endowed with something to say. We lacked only opportunity but its arrival was foretold. There was a certain current that ran through the air around us, something that seemed to be in the light that fell everywhere we went, a vibration that ran though all our conversations; our antennae were up and singing. It was like putting your ear to the rail, and we could hear the rumble of that train any time we bothered to listen; our time had come. It was as tangible as the modern noise we made. When it arrived we would board with a giddiness that it felt unmanly to express, so we rode smugly in those windows with an unstated arrogance that fuelled all of our bad decisions. There would be a trail of goodbyes mottled with the kind of smiles that come with the departure of a train headed for trouble, one in which the passengers are ignorant of their destination and certain of it at the same time. Those who remained on the platform were glad to be left behind. We were the lover you have to say goodbye to, the one you can't live with. And while they no doubt felt a hole opening up at the parting, one that in some cases would be a long time filling, they were glad the fighting was over. I too, would stand waving one day, having found that the empty places in me would have to be filled elsewhere. But all of that was still a few years away, these were still the days before the record contracts and the European tours, the days when Billy was alive.'