Rocket From The Tombs – The Day The Earth Met The... (Live From Punk Ground Zero, Cleveland 1975) (2002)
It's been very quiet on here for a couple of weeks, and there's a backlog of recent purchases to be dealt with. One of these is this album (for which Oxfam charged a ...er... realistic price), effectively three archive sessions (from 1975) from the punk/garage band which spawned both Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys.
Most of the main players of the band are no longer with us. First to go was Peter Faulkner, tragically young in 1977, while David Thomas, who spent a lifetime leading Pere Ubu departed this world in 2025, and this year we lost Gene O'Connor (aka Cheetah Chrome) who went on to form the Dead Boys. I saw the band in London in 2015, at one of their sporadic reunions, with only Thomas, and Craig Bell remaining from these recordings.
My expectations of this album weren't high, but it's far more listenable than I expected, both in terms of performance and quality of recording. The first set, from February 1975 while raw, contains some notable performances, including Laughner's graphic, slower Ain't It Fun, a cover of Iggy Pop's Raw Power, the frantic Life Stinks, and an early version of what would (later the same year) become Pere Ubu's debut single, the fantastic 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.
Equally welcome from the second session (July 1975) is Sonic Reducer, which O'Connor took with him when he formed the Dead Boys, and his Never Gonna Kill Myself Again is powerful. Final Solution is another great song which later emerged as a Pere Ubu favourite, while Foggy Notion, a Velvet Underground song sounds like the inspiration for Nick Lowe's Heart Of The City and Craig Bell's Read It And Weep is certainly worth a listen.
The sound quality on the third set (May 1975) isn't as good, but there's the frantic Down In Flames as the original stand out, as well as a solid version of the Stooges' Search And Destroy.
It's billed as not just a historical artifact, but the greatest album never recorded. Yet here it is, recorded! Whichever, it's certainly a powerful listen to some seminal US punk. Definitely recommended to blow the cobwebs away.
4* - a top slice of proto-punk from Cleveland
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