Rocket from the Tombs

Considered as a murky slab of ur-punk history alone, this first legit/unlimited release of Rocket from the Tombs material has a prime place in every collection of American rock music that isn't purely ornamental. Formed in 1974, a time of bloated superstars and sensitive singer-songwriters, when rock first started to settle into its cosy role as the self-perpetuating soundtrack for harmless "youth" activities, Rocket From The Tombs lurched out of Cleveland and survived just long enough to play a few gigs and lay down a demo tape before splitting into the still thriving art-rockers Pere Ubu and thankfully forgotten sham-glam metal-punks the Dead Boys. That the embryonic components of these two bands could have cohabited for a year is pretty astonishing but the tension between them undoubtedly played a major part in what gave Rocket from the Tomb their full-on blaze of raw sonic intensity. With half the band into the stoned metallic excesses of Black Sabbath, Kiss and Alice Cooper, and the others into the art-from-noise experimentation of the Velvets and Stooges, and elements as disparate as Captain Beefheart and the New York Dolls coming in from who knew where, united only by a love of the raw. elemental power of hard electric rock, there was no-one to smooth the edges, keep the needles out of the red or think about finding a sympathetic record company. At odds with each other in a group that was at odds with the market, singing about self-destruction, alienation and all the other then unfashionable aspects of human darkness, it's surprising they managed even these primitive two-track recordings without exploding.

Aurally speaking, this is raw stuff and even old-time Guided By Voices and Sebadoh fans might be dismayed by the sound quality. I used to have the demo material that makes up the first half of this album on an n-th generation cassette tape back in the mid-80s and although it would barely make it through the deck without unraveling it didn't sound much worse than this. But the inexorable, vivid, overloaded energy of much of this music is so immediate it could have been recorded on a wax cylinder and would still deliver the fearless, near-epiphanic, fingers-in-the-mains-socket thrill of being alive that only the very best rock music can connect you to. It's a shame that you have to resort to being some sort of nerdy rock historian to appreciate something with the undiluted, visceral impact of this album, but there's little if any music of this kind around today, the dynamics and scope of hard rock having long since been appropriated and traduced by all manner of gurning, hair-metal stadium chumps....

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