Sarre-Chasm
A Different Kind of Art Rock
by Jon Sarre
illustration by Tim Walker
Late last year (just in time for Christmas, natch), Scat Records blessed us with the issue of Those Were Different Times, a collection of three
10-inch vinyl EPs containing unreleased material by early ’70s Cleveland before-you-were-punkers, The Mirrors, The Electric Eels, and
The Styrenes. The very design of the album cover, two pieces of plain brown cardboard held together with machine screws, is probably enough to ward away prospective dilettantes (if the near thirty bucks the damn thing costs isn’t). If ya bother to dig out the records though (carefully, cuz they’re just kinda shoved into more cardboard, so it’s likely that the more ya play ’em, the more you’re gonna scratch the hell outta ’em), you’re gonna hear some great music; some of it near light and ambient, some incredibly harsh and grating, some just yer typical VU-inspired rip-off.
Not only that, the twenty-two pages of notes (which ya kinda haveta remove the screws holdin’ the cover together to read), shed some light on the proto-punkrock scene in Ohio pre-NYC/London. Well, to be fair, the notes actually give the impression that there wasn’t much of a scene at all, just a few inspired people grapplin’ with a whole lotta inertia. Rock’n’roll was the medium of these mostly blue-collar midwesterners (work, beer and the draft was the rule; peace, love and student deferments the exception). They turned to music to fight the tedium of their everyday lives. They had no impact on the radio waves or the industry and didn’t even play live very often.
In the end, the Mirrors contributed one future Pere Ubuer (Craig Bell), the Styrenes, a Golden Palomino (Anton Fier), as well as a kind of perpetual life as a band through founder Paul Marotta (he puts out approx. one new record by the Styrenes a decade – the most recent one this March); we can thank the Electric Eels for a Cramp (Nick Knox) and for being, in general, people more disagreeable than Peter Laughner (who founded Rocket From The Tombs, which upon splitting, provided most of the personnel for Pere Ubu and about half The Dead Boys).
They say history is written by the winners. That probably also goes for a loser history like this one. Peter Laughner’s stature as the death-tripping Dylan/Rimbaud proxy-Dad of midwestern punk comes from his friendship with legendary rock scribe Lester Bangs (if you’ve heard of Laughner at all, then you’ve probably read Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, good for you), a failed marriage to poet Charlotte Pressler (who always seems to crop up in histories about stuff like this, see England’s Dreaming,Velvets to the Voivoids), and the fact that he made the ultimate career move and drank himself to death before he hit 30. Laughner’s nihilism (or his “perennial preoccupation with his own personal darkness,” as Clinton Heylin wrote in the liners to Take the Guitar Player For a Ride (1993, Tim/Kerr) – I still don’t know if that was meant as a compliment or not) colors not only his songs (“Life Stinks,” “Ain’t It Fun,” “Sylvia Plath,” his take on Robert Johnson‘s “Me and the Devil Blues”), but somehow peculiarly ends up labeling the entire scene.
Sure, I’ll grant that the Dead Boys learned enough from Laughner to stage their “hope I die ‘fore I get old” attitudes and Ubu absorbed just enough for Dave Thomas and Craig Bell to dump the guy at the first opportunity (I’m just hypothesizing here, but refusing to perform “Final Solution” live all these years cuz it’s too nihilistic considering the “Nazi images in the new culture” (Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming) smacks of disavowal of their mentor, I dunno).
It’s when punk historians like Savage start babbling in print about how “the Electric Eels succumbed to the very nihilism that was their tool” (England’s Dreaming again), that I get the feeling that art schlock romanticism is outstripping reality. When the “serious” art types hi-jack the whys and hows of a “movement” even as willfully disparate and born (or planned) to lose a mini-scene as Cleveland, plainspeak like Mirror Jamie Klimek’s estimation of Laughner as a “lost soul, but still a jerk” is always gonna take a back seat to the pretensions of constructed bohemian revisionism.
As an illustration, here’s a few lines by Charlotte Pressler: “The Eels perhaps came closest to embodying it [the perceived rage of the Cleveland art-dropouts]; but it was there in everyone else. It was a desperate stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection: the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert… We had been promised the end of the world as children, and we weren’t getting it” (quoted from England’s Dreaming). Heady stuff, right?
Compare that to an excerpt from “At Home With the Electric Eels,” by Mary Burzynski McMahon (from Those Were Different Times): “…the Electric Eels were pathologically disagreeable. The Eels created their own reality. They blurred all lines and built formidable barriers, turning fact into fiction and fiction into fact. They barely got along with each other and each was at war with himself.”
Part-time Eel (and Mirror and full-time Styrene) Paul Marotta today offers things along the lines of “what on Earth were we thinking?” with regard to a song with the ridiculously un-PC chorus (courtesy of a Nazi newsletter) “Pull the triggers on the niggers” (that number, the Beefheartean “No Nonsense/Spinach Blasters” was written as a commentary on societal racism – uh, sure). The Eels, by their own admission, were a bunch of jerks who hurled beer bottles at each other or booby-trapped the path to the bathroom in their communal home/practice space when irritated. They pointed out each other’s personal flaws in their songs. They covered their amps in pink fiberglass insulation and made their speaker cabinets impractically heavy (apparently to make them more difficult to move). They dressed like brownshirts for kicks and wondered why people gawked.
Art rock wasn’t part of their program. They thought they would fit in with Springsteen, the Stones, and Aerosmith on FM radio. It seems laughable, but reality was subjective to the Eels. They constructed their own places in the world, maybe that made them nihilists. It was the Dave Thomas/Craig Bell/Peter Laughner crowd, however, who took negation seriously and, by and by, applied it to the Eels. As for the Electric Eels, Shane White’s epitaph for The Mummies applies (Pure Filth Magazine, March ’92, reprinted as notes for The Mummies: Play Their Own Records [Estrus]) “… (they) were not cool in any way shape or form. They made complete asses out of themselves on stage, and were never even bothered by it… Popularity always takes the piss out of good things.”