Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Hello
Satan, I Believe It's Time to Go Dept.: In the end, it's not so
much that Peter Laughner died young (age 24, of
pancreatitis, and don't tell me that's not hard
work) but that he left behind such a frustrating
body of work. Laughner didn't aim for lo-fi
pioneering, he was simply too broke and too
whacked to set levels; his posthumous compendium Take
The Guitar Player For a Ride (Tim/Kerr)
appeared in the thick of things, right after Exile
in Guyville, in the midst of Guided
by Voices' transmissions from the Laughing
Gnome. So this guitar hero whose guitar is
frequently out of tune ("Amphetamine"),
this great songwriter whose lyrics have to be
picked out of twenty year-old sun-aged tapes of
off-mike muttering ("Don't Take Your Love
Away," which accurately sounds, as someone
wrote inaccurately about Roky Erickson's
"Heroin," like it was "recorded
with a Walkman outside the club.") had a
peghole to further a public pitch. What the
guitar player might make of that pitch, where he
might have taken a talent with the flash and the
civility of a streetcar amputation, are matters
to ponder, but not to solve, on this side of
life.
Laughner the
singer was two steps ahead of of Laughner the
lyricist; in the disc's early, quiet numbers he
sounds Dylanish for the first five or so spins,
until you warm to the rasp that powers through
tasty lines ("Secrets hidden in the eyes of
cats/And other vagrant lovers") and almost
masters the clinkers (something about a
"river of cruelty"). Laughner the music
writer had'em both beat--witness "Don't Take
Your Love Away"'s chorus, forcing
forgiveness of a muddled anemic verse, or the
instrumental "Lullaby" with its lazy
arpeggios.
Laughner the
twanger more than outstripped all the rest,
though, and perhaps fittingly the two guitar
workouts here are cover version: Richard
Thompson's "Calvary Cross" and Brian
Eno's "Baby's On Fire," recorded when
both men were passwords in collectors-rack
backrooms, released after they'd both become
venerated elder statesmen. On both miserably
recorded songs the maestro donates his spotlight
to deserving sidemen (a violinist and saxophonist
respectively, neither credited) and then steals
it back with lethal fuzz ray static on the
latter; on the former, he uses darkly chiming
marine-band stomps that root the fiddle down.
With its breath-defying silences, vengeful
slamdowns, and a wet, ruined howl over the top,
"Calvary Cross" might stand as the
album's finest track.
Save two.
"Dear Richard" and "Ain't It
Fun" fuse Laughner's facets with results
worthy of Lucian Freud. "Richard" turns
Bohemian poetry into a stumbling vamp; the
chords, and the linoleum knife attack (the intro
predicts the Edge, the solo outspits Fripp)
envelope the ethos. "Ain't It Fun"
ain't fun; created before PC thinking, it
deserves no credit for its bluntness and is in
fact, only a little less painful than a whiskey
drunk pigeonholing you with slipping eyes as he
demands to know if he looks like the kind of
asshole whom the bartender has just cut off.
Laughner the lyricist knew this. Laughner the
philosopher of holistic malevolence knew that
ones finds oneself on the wrong side of those
eyes later if not sooner, and also that one
deliciously insectival guitar solo would uplift
and possibly validate cheap nihilism made all the
cheaper with alcohol and death extending a few
grotty fingers to meet one halfway. Which is why,
I suppose, I think it's a perfect song.
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