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- CLASSIC ALBUM OF THE
WEEK
- Rocket From The Tombs "The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs" rec. 1975, rel. 2002 (USA)
Last week of summer pledge drive!
This week's Classic Album is by one of the most important underground
rock bands, though they only existed about a year and no records were
released until long after they broke up. This is not a proper album of
studio recordings, it is culled from two local gigs in Cleveland and
one rehearsal they recorded, all between February and July 1975. So who
was this mysterious group? Singer David "Crocus Behemoth" Thomas
(founder and leader of Pere Ubu), guitarist and singer Peter
Laughner
(co-founder of Ubu who tragically died from drugs in 1977 and was
arguably the real brains behind RFTT), guitarist Gene "Cheetah
Chrome" O'Conner (who moved to
NYC and founded Dead Boys with Stiv Bators), drummer Johnny "Blitz"
Madansky (another founder of Dead Boys) and finally Craig Bell on bass.
Enamoured of the harder side of rock primitivists The Velvet
Underground,
MC5 and Iggy & The Stooges at a time when these groups were all "so
five years ago, and shitty no-talents anyway" and the dawn of
what we now call "punk
rock" (The Ramones first album) was still a year in the future
(though Television and Patti Smith had records out in 1975, they were
more like arty hippie throwbacks compared to the sub-metal of RFTT;
probably the closest thing to RFTT at the time would be the debut LP by
The Dictators, though again theirs was a more cartoony
wrestler-rock version of "punk" music with vibes reminiscent
of 1950's greaser culture).
Original members Thomas, Chrome & Craig Bell reunited along with
Television's notorious guitarist Richard Lloyd and new drummer Steve
Mehlman (a member of the modern lineup of Pere Ubu) in 2003
and finally released their proper studio debut Rocket Redux,
consisting entirely of the classic songs the group wrote back in 1975
(many of which had already been released when remade by Pere Ubu and Dead Boys). A
second studio album Barfly
consisting of the new lineup's first set of original tunes followed in
2011, though Richard Lloyd was "fired or quit" before the ensuing tour,
and Cheetah also left the band by the end of that year.
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