On June 22, 1977, aspiring Cleveland musician Adele Bertei checked into New York City’s seedy Chelsea Hotel, where generations of artists, musicians and writers had stayed, including Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin and, famously, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, there.
It was her first step in what has turned out to be a long, varied career, a step encouraged by legendary Cleveland musician Peter Laughner who served as her musical mentor for a brief put intense period starting in the fall of the previous year.
By the time she’d checked in, I’d gotten an early morning phone call from Peter’s mother. (In failing health, Peter had moved back in with his parents in Bay Village). She told me she’d gone to wake him up and found him dead. Adele learned of his death that evening while she attended a show at NYC punk mecca CBGB. Peter was 24.
In the ensuring 43 years, Peter has become a legend as the founder of influential bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu. In the process, his self-abuse has been glamorized, as has his status as an acolyte of dark-side musical raconteur Lou Reed and wild-man rock writer Lester Bangs. He’s been celebrated as an early punk rocker. Much of what made Peter so compelling and such a musical genius was lost — until last year’s release of the comprehensive Peter Laughner box set on Smog Veil Records, a project of ex-Clevelander Frank Mauceri.
Now Smog Veil has released another project with equal potential to reclaim the real Peter in all his dimensions: Adele’s short, lyrical book Peter and the Wolves, in which she explores her relationship with him and how he helped set her course.
She brings to life in vivid, poetic prose someone who’s often been wrongly reduced to a one-dimensional caricature and reclaims Peter as someone whose musical influences were far wider and deeper than has generally been portrayed, who likely would have gone on to greatness had he not died so young. Those of us who knew him yearn to have heard the music he might have made.
The new book is a revised version of a book she wrote several years ago, with a limited number of copies printed.
“I wrote a book about my childhood, kind of a veiled memoir about my childhood, which was really traumatic,” she recalls. “I ended up not getting it publishing; it’s sitting in a drawer. But I said, I have to write the Peter story. I was originally going to write about it as first part of my New York story. I thought about the Peter story as bridge between my early life and my life in New York City.”
When Mauceri contacted her about using a couple of songs she co-wrote with Peter on the box set, he expressed interest in publishing her book. It’s an essential companion piece to the box set, revealing in words Peter’s internal conflicts apparent in the music and exploring their potential roots.
“A huge handicap to Peter was his father’s influence,” she says. “His father fought in the Second World War. He was really a son-of-a-bitch, and he wanted his son to be a hard-drinking, tough-on-women, gun-toting kind of guy. But that really wasn’t Peter. Both his parents doted on him but he was totally dependent on them. Peter never had to work; they gave him everything he wanted. He played with guns, it was part of his whole persona but his persona wasn’t him. He was a really gentle person.”
In the process of trying to break away, Peter developed a burgeoning addiction. His adoration of Lou Reed didn’t help. As Adele notes in the book, “He fetishized Lou. If it were something he thought Lou might get up to, Peter would damn well try it on.” Most significantly, that included any drug he heard even a rumor Reed might have done.
Peter idolized all the new punk rockers emerging from the CBGB downtown New York music scene, where drug use was rife. He arranged to bring two of his favorites, Television and the Heartbreakers, to Cleveland to play at the Piccadilly, a hot underground club located where today’s Board of Elections stands. How badly did he want to be like them and accepted by them? He called me at dawn the morning after the Heartbreakers show, excited to tell me, “I shot up for the first time with the Heartbreakers last night!” When I reacted with a lack of enthusiasm, he stumbled to backtrack saying, “I just had to see what it was like, what they experience.”
As Adele relates in her book, by the end of 1976, Peter’s addiction was out of control and hers was starting to as well. She had been sharing an apartment with him, and while that was great for her musical education, it wasn’t so good for her health.
“We didn’t know about things like AA then,” she says. “We didn’t know you could get sober in a program where other people like you can help you. I have terrible survivor’s guilt. If I had been able to stop drinking myself and had been able to get through to him maybe he would alive today. His self-destruction was increasing and I had to move out. It was hard but I had to save myself. But it was very heart-breaking because he was so unselfish and such a mentor.”
In her book, Adele not only shines a light on Peter’s extensive musical knowledge and his eagerness to share it, but also his raw talent as a musician.
“His guitar playing was just so phenomenal,” she says. “If he had lived and had not been so self-sabotaging and such a fuck-up and an alcoholic, he could have been known as one of the greatest guitar players in rock and roll.”
Finally, her book foregrounds another essential aspect of his character that was highly unusual in the misogynist music scene of the ’70s: he openly encouraged women musicians, playing with a number of them, including Adele, Cindy Black, and Debbie Smith and Sue Schmidt of Akron’s Chi Pig. He was a cheerleader for their efforts, much as he was a cheerleader for David Thomas, who fronted Pere Ubu and turned the band into a lifelong project. He encouraged me as a writer.
“He was very generous and he loved women,” says Adele. “He was never condescending. Like I’m the man and I’m better than you.”
You can order the book (and the box set) here. It’s a compelling and illuminating read.
smogveil/adele-bertei-peter-and-the-wolves-book