PERE UBU/DEAD BOYS Though Rocket From The Tombs was dead, its songs lived on. Stiv Bators, Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz went on to form the Dead Boys, who would redo five Rocket tracks. David Thomas started Pere Ubu, named after a grotesque character in a French play. Despite the ugliness of Rocket's breakup and his escalating substance abuse, Peter Laughner signed on to Ubu.             Pere Ubu's first single was a radical, art-inflected reworking of Rocket's garage-punk-tinged "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" strafed with analog synthesizer. After Ubu's debut single, the Dead Boys released their first album, 1977's Young Loud And Snotty, which included four old Rocket songs.             But in Ubu, Laughner's behavior grew more and more erratic. On a trip to New York to play Max's Kansas City, the coked-up guitarist took out a gun from under his leather jacket. "It was just becoming very obvious that Peter was only going to get worse," recalls drummer Scott Krauss. In May 1976, at a time when Ubu's star was in ascension, the band restructured its lineup and fired Laughner.             Soon after, says John Morton, "Paul [Marotta] saw him hitting his head on the floor at some club saying, 'I wanna die, I wanna die.’"             Laughner started new bands, but his abuse of speed, alcohol and painkillers accelerated. The substances led to a pain Laughner described in a letter to a friend as "like some kind of rat eating at my guts." it was pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas, which sent him regularly to the hospital and would soon kill him. He confided to a friend, rock critic Lester Bangs, that doctors had told him he would die if he didn't slow down. Bangs later quoted him as saying, "It's gonna hafta be Valium and grass from here on out ... Shit, you gotta have something."             But Laughner didn't follow even this somewhat slower pace. Bangs saw him a final time in the spring of 1977. On May 4, while Patti Smith performed at a Punk magazine benefit at CBGB, a drunken Laughner tried to go onstage and jam with her. Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye and Smith's brother kicked him off the stage. The Dead Boys—who had moved to New York and joined the burgeoning CBGB scene—played the club earli- (continued on page 122)      URBANLEGENDS (continued from page 57) er that day. "We stuck around after we played," says Chrome, "and here's Peter walking onstage with Patti Smith and getting friggin' tackled and thrown out."             After the gig, Chrome was hanging out at the club with the sound man, and they heard someone banging on the door. It was Laughner. "He was drunk and wandering around," says Chrome. "He was in a great mood. So we went back to my house. We sat around, played records, drank beer, smoked pot and just had a really great reunion. First time we had really hung out since the band had broken up. We made plans to see each other."             The next day, Laughner went to see Bangs, who refused to let him in. Bangs warned him that he was killing himself. "He looked at once ghastly and pathetic, the T-shirt and askew cap creating a nightmare Little Rascals effect of some horribly diseased eight-year-old," Bangs wrote in New York Rocker. Laughner returned to Cleveland, where he was living with his parents. He died on June 22; he was 24.             Michael J. Weldon notes the sad irony of Laughner’s timing: "He died just before record-label talent scouts started sniffing around Cleveland and Akron." In the next couple of years, major labels signed a handful of area bands, including Pere Ubu, Devo, Tin Huey and the Rubber City Rebels. The legend of Laughner has grown exponentially since his death. British writer Clinton Heylin practically canonized the guitarist in his 1993 book From The Velvets To The Voidoids; the same year, Guns N' Roses covered "Ain't It Fun."             "I knew the real Peter Laughner, the living Peter Laughner, the sitting-around-the living-room Peter Laughner, and I liked him a lot," says Craig Bell. "I always respected his talent and his abilities. The mythical Peter Laughner I don't know ... [But] I think anything they say about his music is totally justified. Some of it is just absolutely incredible stuff."             "I think [Laughner's reputation] is not deserved," counters Morton. "I mean, 'Ain't It Fun' is an incredibly maudlin, silly song. I liked the guy-in retrospect. There was that distance because he was in another band, But we were probably more similar than dissimilar ... You know something? I'm really personally pissed and hurt that he killed himself. I'm still around playing music. So he should be. Or else he should have gone into his father's adhesive-tape business. But he died too young. Given the way my life turned out, I should've been dead, too. So why is Peter dead and I'm not?" next page!!!!