Life Stinks 'Cuz I Like the Kinks, by Will Samson

Musician, writer and SOS by SP co-host Will Samson chronicles the impact of the late songwriter Peter Laughner on Rocket from the Tombs, an Ohio noise damaged proto punk act that presaged Pere Ubu

At a cursory view, it’d be tempting to write off Peter Laughner. An early figurehead in the early ‘70s North Western Ohio Freak Scene and founder of not one but two legendary bands (Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu), there isn’t much of a traceable footprint of his contribution. Beyond the early Ubu singles and the Rocket From the Tombs live bootleg, all we have is a box set of various live recordings that are mostly cover songs. His most enduring artifact is arguably his obituary, penned by Lester Bangs. So why even write this? Is there anything to discuss beyond the squandered potential of an alcoholic rocker?

Let’s look at the Rocket from The Tombs record. What’s immediately apparent on first listen is that it isn’t very good. Important? Absolutely, but not “good”. Performances are sloppy, songs are underdeveloped, and everyone’s still finding their footing and trying to learn how to do what it is they do. This partially stems from the fact that there are essentially two factions within RFTT. After they split, one sect, headed by Cheetah Chrome, splits off to form the Dead Boys, while David Thomas and Laughner go on to form Ubu. Which is to say that, even as a single unit, there's an aesthetic tension within RFTT. The would-be Dead Boys are (overly) concerned with the gritty street realism of The Velvets, leaning into the romantic nihilism of Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll

Meanwhile, Thomas is writing songs like “Sonic Reducer”, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”, and “Final Solution”. On one level, these tracks are just as steeped in Rock n’ Roll solipsism and self-destruction as the rest of their material. On the other hand, the Thomas penned material is operating on a completely different scale by juxtaposing these themes with Pharaohs, the Doolittle Raids, and the Holocaust. There’s a humor distinct from the snide proto-punk sneering of tracks like “Ain’t It Fun”; an ironic distance (though Thomas would rightly loathe me for being so reductive) and a sense of historical scale on full display in the Thomas material.

The antagonism between these two methods of songwriting is perfectly embodied by Laughner. In many ways, Laughner is RFTT, at least insofar as he’s the binding agent that allows the band to exist at all. Nothing better demonstrates this than his solo songwriting contribution to the group: “Life Stinks”. While on the surface a straight ahead banger, the song in certain respects is more lyrically sophisticated than what either faction of the band was producing at the time. Composed of a series of terse, disconnected, rhyming declaratives, Laughner found a way to retain the aesthetic minimalism of garage rock while developing on the forms latent modernism. Its clipped style has clear similarities with Hemingway, Pound, or the Wyndham Lewis of BLAST! Its thematic content isn’t far afield from these figures either. What better encapsulates the fragmented, alienated state of modern consciousness than:

Life stinks
I like The Kinks
I can’t think
I need a drink

Aside from laying the groundwork for a style of lyricism with Ubu that will be elaborated on at least up until The Art of Walking, this perfectly straddles the line between the grander vision of Thomas and the derelict diary keeping of Cheetah and Co. By assuming the perspective of a character of the same stripe that you’d find in “Ain’t It Fun” and radically stripping back the lyrical content, he was able to stress themes similar to what was being written by Thomas, but from the opposite direction. To be fair, “Ain’t It Fun” and songs like it get at this contradiction in their own ways. Putting a song like that next to “Sonic Reducer” necessarily situates it within a certain interpretive context. But the larger point here is that “Life Stinks” gets at this within the actual text of the song, not just through its juxtaposition with the material around it.

And this isn’t even addressing what Laughner brought to the group sonically. Crucially, much like Rowland S. Howard would later do with The Birthday Party, Laughner brought the fuckin’ noise! One need only look to the Rocket and Ubu recordings of “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” to hear the jagged, machinic quality of his use of feedback. Leaping forward to the Ubu days, the use of noise largely gets pawned off on synth player Allen Ravenstein. While this specialization allows for a more refined and expressive use of noise that begins to take on greater symbolic significance within the syntax and grammar of Ubu (and the Rock idiom more broadly), it’s important to note that this is rooted in the use of guitar noise in a rock band, which still carries narrative weight within a given piece. Ravenstein’s synth playing is an extension of the increasing use of noise in Rock music, but the point he is extending from is Laughner’s work within RFTT. The thread connecting Ubu to the Futurists and a figure like Luigi Russolo goes back to Laughners’ contributions in RFTT.

While it’s important to note that Hendrix and The Velvets both brought noise into the vocabulary of rock music in very important ways, and Reed did his part to raise the literary ambitions of your average rocker (for both good and ill), Laughner is important on these fronts for how well-wedded his approaches in both domains are. While Thomas undoubtedly has the vision and Ravenstein the capability to extend and further the approach, Laughner is the one introducing both strains of modernist techniques into the Ubu vocabulary and, while RFTT is extant, surpassing the modernism of Thomas. This isn’t to say Laughner is a greater lyricist or noise freak than Thomas or Ravenstein, but rather to stress the integral role he played in shaping what Ubu was at its inception. 

Aside from simply being a key figure within the context of Ubu, his contributions to the band should also be situated within the context of Rock music writ large. The contributions discussed up to now shouldn’t be seen as mere novelty, as “noise for the sake of noise”, or as lyrical abstraction as a signifier of literary pretension. The under recognized importance of Ubu as an ongoing project should be understood as a cultivation and advancement of human consciousness within the modern world, best encapsulated by their lyric:

We Have the technology
Not available before
We have the technology
Of thinkers and poets of the past

Human thought and consciousness itself are technologies developed and transmitted via cultural artifacts, be it songs, novels, paintings, etc. This is why “Life Stinks” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” are important aesthetic touchstones. As poetic encapsulations and reflections of what it’s like to be alive in a post-WWII West, they offer perfect points of departure for further articulating and reflecting on where we are as a civilization and how we got here. Ubu aren’t alone in this. This is the larger project that many artists of this era (Devo, The Residents, Throbbing Gristle, David Lynch) are engaged in, explicitly or not. They were, as we are, children of the Spectacle. They all started from identifying a shared language that, in some ways, has been expropriated from and sold back to us in the form of popular music and mass media generally. Their project was to reclaim that language in an effort to regain a sense of historical agency.

It’s unclear to me how many of these people would phrase what they are or were doing in this way, but, with hindsight, it seems clear that this is what was happening. They also share a desire to wed aspects of the High Modernism of the early 20th century with popular music. Aside from the greater ease of access to these things allowed by the passage of time, there seemed to be an implicit understanding amongst these people that what these artists were dealing with had something to say about their (and, likewise, our) situation. They saw continuity. A nascent stage of what afflicted them was being grappled with (it’s worth mentioning that this is in no small part probably due to McLuhan. A cursory glance at The Mechanical Bride would be more than enough to bear this out). That being the case, those strategies would be just as relevant to Devo or Ubu as they were to Marinetti or Pound.

This is precisely why “Life Stinks” is a crucial text. As we’ve already noted, the original Laughner penned lyric is “Life Stinks/I like The Kinks.” When Ubu gets around to recording it for Modern Dance after Laughner’s demise, there’s a very small, but critical, change:

Life Stinks
‘Cuz I like The Kinks

We’ve gone from a series of disconnected thoughts to an attribution of cause. Life stinks because You Really Got Me, in all its crude glory, speaks to me. Life stinks because the horizon of possibility for me is the sex, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll depicted in this music. This isn’t to shit on The Kinks or rock music at all, but a simple acknowledgement that there’s more to life than these things. Ultimately, life stinks because the media environment of the time only speaks to these base hedonic impulses. This acknowledgement is an early step towards narrativization, towards connecting and contextualizing these stray thoughts and making sense of the world and one's place in it. And, once again, this is an extension of something that Laughner brought to the group.

All of which is to say that whatever shared aesthetic sensibilities Laughner may have had with the Dead Boys, I think it’s clear that he had more in common with the larger vision Thomas was working from. Laughner may have been as much of a Rock n’ Roll degenerate as the Dead Boys, but they were average street junkies. Laughner fancied himself a something of a modern Rimbaud (asinine as that is). And while the Dead Boys were interested in the street poetry of The Velvets and the Stooges, they were reticent in their own songwriting to engage in the sonic experimentation of either act at their peak. 

But this lingering affinity with the Dead Boys is what makes Laughner's split with Ubu inevitable. For all that he brought to the band in establishing its basic grammar, he was seemingly too enamored with the romantic image of the “Live Fast, Die Young” Rock n’ Roller. After all, he indeed co-wrote “Ain’t It Fun”.

Will Samson is a musician, writer and the co-host and editor of Safety Propaganda’s audio misinformation arm System of Systems

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Peter Laughner
2. Rocket from the Tombs
3. Dead Boys
4. Lester Bangs
5. David Thomas
6. The Residents
7. Peter Laughner