ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS In addition to working as a bouncer at the Viking, burly David Thomas wrote for The Scene, sometimes under the pseudonym Crocus Behemoth. Cheetah Chrome remembers the "strange little column" Thomas co wrote with Mark Kmetzko under the name Croc O'Bush: "They had one character, the Fuzzy Bunny of Death, with a picture of this really cute Easter bunny. Real twisted stuff.” In 1973, Thomas and fellow Scene writer Kim Zonneville formed the Great Bow-Wah (Death) Band, which played satirical, Zappa-influenced songs. The group evolved in June 1974 into the harder-rocking Rocket From The Tombs, which inherited a few Bow-Wah songs but also played most of the MC5's . The longer the Rockets played together, says Thomas, "the more ambitious we became, and personnel began to shift to reflect that. [In the fall of 1974] Peter Laughner asked to join, and that accelerated the process."             Laughner's band Cinderella Backstreet had broken up, and the guitarist was playing solo at a folk club near the Viking. He fantasized about creating an innovative, rocking Cleveland scene to rival New York's, with himself as impresario and star. In his Mirrors-referencing piece for The Plain Dealer in 1974, Laughner described a scene that existed only in his imagination: "It's all too obvious at this point that Cleveland is about to become the musical focal point that the 'Big Apple' has been ... I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York."             John Morton admits that "Laughner was a good guitar player, [but] he was very much a chameleon. I mean, 'Oh, I'll dress like Lou Reed.' He looked ridiculous."             Not only did Laughner join Thomas' band, he also recruited new musicians. Responding to an ad Laughner placed in the paper were two buddies from Cleveland's housing projects, guitarist Gene O'Connor (a.k.a. Cheetah Chrome) and drummer Johnny Madansky (known later as Johnny Blitz). "People back then didn't know what to think of me and Blitz," Chrome says. "I had hair down to my ass [and was] wearing motorcycle jackets and shit. We looked like roadies for the MC5."             Chrome met up with Laughner at a bar, where they had a couple of beers and a bowl of chili. They decided their musical tastes were similar enough at least to jam together. "I remember jamming—it was dead cold—and drinking Rolling Rock, playing Velvets songs," says Chrome. "It was great." As for Thomas, Chrome recalls, "I thought he was kinda crabby. But he was very funny, too." To get to know the singer better, Chrome went to the Viking on slow nights to chat while Thomas worked the door. "From 8 o'clock at night until it started getting busy," Chrome says, "Crocus would sit there writing lyrics."             Meanwhile, Mirrors were going through a quiet spell. An impromptu band meeting took place in the kitchen while Paul Marotta's wife was cutting Jamie Klimek's hair. "We were talking about the fact that we hadn't been rehearsing lately," says Craig Bell, "and nobody seemed to have a real desire to rehearse and [were asking] what was going on. And there wasn't really an answer." So when Laughner asked him to work with Rocket, Bell agreed.             Rocket From The Tombs spent four nights a week practicing at its rehearsal loft. The band not only generated steam heat, its members also wrote great songs together, like Thomas and Chrome's "Sonic Reducer," which could serve as the theme song of the Cleveland proto-punks: "People out on the streets, they don't know who I am." Laughner wrote the grimly prophetic "Life Stinks," "Amphetamine" and, with Chrome, "Ain't It Fun" ("when you know that you're gonna die young").                As was also the case with the Eels, Rocket went to foolish lengths to shock or be misunderstood, sometimes employing Nazi imagery (swastikas adorned Blitz's drumkit) or invoking racist language. "Cleveland's one of the most racially cool places I've ever been in the entire country," says Chrome. "Blacks and whites got along well. So we thought it was funny. I got into collecting Nazi stuff just because whoever designed their uniforms really had an eye for cool shit. Therefore Kiss' uniforms—and they're Jewish! One of the things they had was little stickers [that] had the swastika on one side and some stupid slogan on the other. So we put 'em on the drum cases and stuff. One of them [read] 'Hitler Was Right.' Now who the fuck in their right minds who ever read a damn book is gonna think that? And if I thought Hitler was right, do you think I'd have hair down to my ass, be wearing a leather jacket, be carrying a fucking pipe in my back pocket and playing the guitar? No. Hitler would've locked my ass up."             Alas, it was also clear that the band's strong personalities were destined to clash. "It wasn't disagreements or fights that broke us up," says Thomas. "it was simply that we all wanted very different things, and the only place we were in agreement was in the pursuit of overdriven, hard, Midwestern groove rock. It was a doomed group from the beginning."             But unlike the Eels, Rocket had some hope of commercial success in the mid-'70s. The band recorded a tape at its rehearsal loft that local FM rock station WMMS agreed to play on the air in February 1975. While introducing one song, Laughner told the MMS listeners, "There's a lot of talent out there in Cleveland ... just get it together."             Thomas didn't approve of the pronouncement. "I certainly thought that a rock band shouldn't be doing chamber-of-commerce stuff," he says now. "Peter was always saying embarrassing stuff. That was Peter. Why fight it?"             Soon enough, discord entered the band's ranks over Thomas' unconventional singing. "I wouldn't want to hear him sing 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,'" says Chrome. "But he sings our shit just fine." Friends of Laughner didn't agree, "As soon as outsiders started having any sort of an influence, " says Chrome, "it broke the shell on the egg."             Thomas, though, says it was his idea that he surrender most of the lead vocals: "I was fed up with having to sing songs like (Laughner's) 'Seventeen.' I hated that stupid melody that made no sense at all and all those cloying teen-angst words that you were supposed to deliver with a straight face. I wanted to do rock music, not Who pastiches. I hated it, so I didn't sing it well, and that began to sap my confidence."             Says Bell, "Everyone was asking, 'What's the next step? What do we do from here? Is David gonna be the lead singer? Or is Peter gonna start singing more? Is Cheetah gonna sing more? Or am I gonna sing?' Somebody should've just stepped up and said, 'You've got a good thing going-just shut the fuck up and do it." The band also considered bringing in a new singer, an acquaintance of Laughner's named Stiv Bators.             “It was David's band, and it did get taken away from him in a way," says Chrome. “It became kind of Peter's band."             As the differences intensified, Blitz quit and Rocket cycled through drummers. During a final, tense show at the Viking with Mirrors in August 1975, Bators made a guest appearance and Thomas left the stage. After less than a year together, the classic Rocket From The Tombs lineup was history. next page!!!!