Ain't It Fun

from the LP The Day the Earth Met the…, Smog Veil Records, released: 2002, recorded: 1975



Cleveland rocks, period. Having lived there, trust me, you can take my word for it, but those who need more convincing need only do a brief search on proto-punk music and you’ll find that an uneven percentage of the groups deemed as such (and who actually sound like punk rock) came from the Cleveland area: Mirrors, The Styrenes, The Electric Eels, and this crew, Rocket From the Tombs (RFTT), who wound up splitting into the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu upon their collapse in 1975. Surely the town’s proximity to Detroit (in both locale & deserted ghetto vibe) had something to do with this odd musical factoid, Motown being the birthplace of pre-proto-punk’s like the Stooges & the MC5, but geography alone isn’t enough to explain just what the fuck turned the 216 into such a hotbed of prophetic dissonance. Granted, the entire “rust belt” (i.e. S. Michigan, Ohio, W. Pennsylvania, W. New York state, NE Indiana, etc…) had seen the systematic dissolution of the American dream long before the economic decline of the late ‘70s, something which most music scholars point to as an essential element of punk rock’s rise to prominence in both England & the US; that said, it still doesn’t answer the question: why Cleveland? Well, I can tell you that there is a certain feeling up Thieveland way, one that says ‘we’re all in this together’ and means it, as I have never again felt such a general unity of purpose (namely, to get very fucked up and to heartily root for the Indians & Browns) amongst the population from a city that size in all my travels & travails since; no, it is not a utopia by any means, I’m just saying that there was this understanding of how dead the area was, and a dedicated agreement to have fun regardless. Sadly, this tale of living fast & dying young proved to be a prescient one for it’s author, Peter Laughner; “…ain’t it fun when you’re always on the run, ain’t it fun when your friends despise what you’ve become; ain’t it fun when you get so high that you can’t cum, ain’t it fun when you know that you’re gonna die young…I broke the windows, crashed my fist right through the glass, but I couldn’t even feel it, it just happened too fast, it was fun, such fun, oh such fun…”