Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”
I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.
Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.
SPLAT![1]
Fun weighs in at two-point-six-pounds. Infinite Jest class. Four-hundred forty-five, 10-inch-by-7-1/2-inch pages. All-in-glorious black-and-white. A graphic historical-cultural portrayal – or exhumation – of a time and a place few people may have felt the need to portray or exhume. Nary an Indian or Brown or Cav make the cut, fame and significance being in the beholder’s eye.
It took Lange seven years. (It took Wallace three-and-a-half.) Fun checks all boxes as an enthralling grappling with essential questions of existence, which resonate especially with anyone who’s lost a running mate seemingly too soon, whether from self-inflicted pills or speeding car, falls from cliffs or infections secondary to intravenous drug use. How do you develop a life? How do you carry it to fulfillment? Do you burn your candle at one end or both, and, if the latter, do you, as Laughner advised, apply a blowtorch to the middle?
After several large publishers turned the book down, Stone Church Press, which Lange had co-founded with Jake Kelly, issued it.
I.
Peter Laughner was born in Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland, and died there at 24 in 1977. (Wallace suicided at 46.) An alcoholic and drug addict (speed, heroin, Dilaudid), he had packed hepatitis, pancreatitis, anemia, dehydration, and cirrhosis into his trip before his mother found him, face down, on his bedroom floor in the family home. Natural causes, the coroner said.
Lange, who was born in Cleveland in 1981, calls Laughner the “patron saint of Cleveland’s drunks and fuck-ups.” The rock critic Greil Marcus called him “the mad fool of Cleveland’s punk movement – the person that everyone knew was true genius… (and) nobody could stand to be around.” The singer/songwriter Richard Hell summed him up as “the most self-destructive, drug-hungry drunk of all the many I have known.” Through two of the more than one dozen bands with which he was associated, Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu, Laughner created, Lange writes, “a sonic portrait of a great American city in the throes of its long decline,” wringing “something beautiful” from his – and its – “legacy… of abuse, decay, and squandered promise…”
But a fixation on a man four years dead at your birth? That would have been like me wrapping myself around Robert Johnson.
Not that this hasn’t been done.
II.
Fun is divided into three parts: (1) a survey of Cleveland’s past, with emphasis on events and people Lange selects out as likely to have influenced Laughner; (2) his subject’s active years, from when he was a cough medicine-swilling 12-year-old, launching his first group (The Fifth Edition) until his death; and (3) the post-Laughner years, MTV till now.
Lange begins Cleveland’s history with its founding (1796) and continues through its ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, eradication of timber wolves, and incorporation of robber baron obscenities. He brings in a serial killer, some urban riots, the Kent State murders, the degradation of a solid industrial base into rust and squalor, the frequent fires besetting the pollution-soaked Cuyahogu River. Geography is noted as mosquito-laden and swampy. Architecture and urban-planning is recognized, especially when Lange can attach mystical, occult and/or theological import to it. (He is big on solar and celestial references, solstices and obelisks.) Appearances, featured and cameo, are made by John D. (“Mephistopheles”) Rockefeller, Abe Lincoln, Albert Ayler, Alan Freed, a TV horror movie host (Ghoulardi), Harvey Pekar, Sam Shepard, Eliot Ness, and d.a. levy (sic.), the city’s signature hip poet, bridging the beat and psychedelic eras, dead by suicide at 26.
By the time Laughner hit his stride, Lange reports, whatever anyone had hoped to achieve had been “wiped out by drugs, cults,… assassinations, surveillance, concert violence, greed, and corporate assimilation.” A “deep numbness and despair settled over people,” says Laughner’s ex-wife Charlotte Pressler, “…like there was this slow-moving apocalypse going on and music and art was the response.”
…
Recounting Laughner’s life, Lange revisits much he had previously referenced: levy; Ness; Shephard; and the Cuyahoga, which, Lange notes, underlining his book’s sense of unease, bears a name of uncertain origin and meaning but, having once been the westernmost portion of the US, can be said to have separated the known from the unknown. These reappearances collapse time and space and establishing a fluid mix into which Lange sinks Lou Reed, Lester Bangs (O.D.’d at 34), psychogeography (“the point where psychology and geography collide,”) cartomancy, sadomasochism, the Electric Eels (“the most dysfunctional band of the Cleveland underground”), who lasted five performances and featured one musician with mouse traps affixed to his garments, W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath (suicide at 31), Hart Crane (suicide at 33), Malcolm Lowry (dead at 48 from alcohol and barbiturates), Baudelaire, a host of dive bars, and the industrial hellscape of the Cleveland flatlands.
All influenced Laughner’s aesthetic and world view. (“Ain’t it fun, when you know you’re going to die young” and “Life stinks. I need a drink” being the lyrics Lange quotes most often.) They also shaped Laughner’s live performances, occasioning him to wave a gun around on-stage (and off) and squirt blood from a syringe. (He once fronted a band, Brain Damage, which featured a three-year-old girl pounding on a mini-synthesizer while screaming nursery rhymes, leading audience members to call child welfare. It folded after its second gig.) Then there was Laughner’s journalism, which included, when reviewing Kiss, the judgment that, “Rock and roll… is a jaundiced, pus-filled corpse lurching down a backstreet… Makeup won’t hide the rot!!”
We were, Ruby Port (Not her real name), Peter’s girl friend – and mother of the three-year-old – explained, “experimenting with drugs, driving too fast, becoming anorectic, living in bad neighborhoods… posturing… maybe trying to gain some control over our lives.”
…
In the concluding portion, Laugher, though gone, remains a miasma-like presence. People report being “haunted” by him and “living with (his) ghost.” They dedicate albums to him and incorporate his voice and scream into their recordings. In this fog, familiar figures reappear and vanish. (Freed, Ghoulardi, levy, Ness, Pekar, Shepard). Zines (“Cle”), clubs (Pirate’s Cove) and record labels (Terminal), not to mention rock groups (Dead Boys, Pagans), flare-up and fade. Port, Pressler and ex-Eel John Morton assume major speaking roles. Cleveland remains “bombed out.” To its burning river is added a sky blighted by an improvidently released 15 million balloons which plummet down upon it.
III.
The visual art is as impactful as the prose. Lange relies heavily on portraits, usually head shots, capturing character and personality to be shaped by time and events within and beyond control. Perkiness and swagger, lush beauty and burning charisma give way to lost hair and lost teeth, gained wrinkles and exhausted eyes. Similar representations may reappear each time a speaker is quoted or may be altered substantially. (Is identity constant or transient?) The image may not conform to chronology, younger the first time and older later, or older at first and younger, though time has passed. (Do we remain who we were when an event occurred or are we as we are when we recall it?) The faces confront you, usually eye-to-eye, inviting you to weight their soul and imagine they are taking stock of yours.
Lange is equally attentive to the iconography of the culture he is capturing. Syringes, swastikas, cat pianos, and crucifixes sit like fruit bowls in Dutch still lifes.
…
The amount of research that went into Fun is staggering. According to his end notes, Lange utilized in-person interviews, overheard conversations, personal observations, e-mails, FB posts, web sites, books, literary and general circulation magazines, high school year books, newspapers (free and commercial), graphic novels, poems, memoirs, fanzines, recordings (released, unreleased and bootleg), liner notes, letters, song lyrics, radio shows, You Tube videos, films, museum visits, census records, eulogies, and historical society and university archives. The notes have been written with a wicked humor, sweeping aside the dust of “scholarship” while documenting it has taken place. Lange notes the irony of the person he interviewed most often perhaps possessing the worst memory of anyone to whom he spoke. He says that, while he has a “high tolerance for weird bullshit,” some of what he turned up was “practically unreadable.” Barely stifling a proud chuckle, he reports that when he “tried to interview Richard Hell… he told me to go fuck myself.”
Even without a passion for Cleveland and/or punk, you have to respect the commitment, the perseverance – and the mania – that went into this work.
…
By book’s end, fish and wading birds have returned to the Cuyahoga. Coyote, if not wolves, abound. Blast furnaces again light the sky. But for Lange, a big question remains.
Just how good is it to die young. He has recognized that Laughner’s “manic enthusiasms… (and) self-destructive propulsion” had once attracted him. But after becoming older – and himself kicking drugs and alcohol – the “sublime horror” of Laughner’s “willful… slow motion” death became his paramount interest.
When I asked Lange if he had come to any conclusions about such deaths, he emailed:
Well, I was an alcoholic fuck-up on such a self-destructive course… it was only natural that Laughner’s story resonated with me. I don’t like to glorify or endorse such behavior, but I am also uncomfortable with moralizing or manufacturing a cautionary tale. I think Laughner – and other artists like him who flamed out – fill some sort of archetypal role. I suspect there is something necessary in this, that each generation needs a martyr figure or someone who is sacrificed. I don’t know why this is. I just think it is true on some atavistic level.
It is something to think about – and a book to read.
Note
[1]. To be fair, this musician was not, in fact, Laughner but a colleague – but I liked how the paragraph worked with this detail included.