Garage Rock: Rocket from the Tombs' Rocket Redux

The cover of Pere Ubu’s The Tenement Year had a picture of a bicycle thrown into a snowpile. I think my copy of the recording came as a Christmas gift so the snow picture combined with a snowy Minnesota Christmas means that if the psychologist said “snow” in a word association test, I’d say, “Pere Ubu.” Thematically, The Tenement Year may have little to do with snow, but the sounds of the garage-formed, prog-but-not-prog, proto-punk rock Pere Ubu will for me strongly recall winter’s white wasteland.


Hearing David Thomas’ voice leading the band into the fray on Rocket from the Tombs’ Rocket Redux brings that all back. Released in 2004 after a non-reunion reunion of sorts, Rocket Redux captured the band in revival during the time of their 2003 tour, recorded in studio by Richard Lloyd with a very live feel. Rocket from the Tombs (RFTT) formed in 1974. Eventually Thomas and Peter Laughner went on to form Pere Ubu; Cheetah Chrome and John Madansky became the Dead Boys. The most recent RFTT line up brings Thomas, Chrome, and original bassist Craig Bell back together, along with Richard Lloyd (Television) stepping in for the late Laughner and Steve Mehlman (Pere Ubu) on drums.

RFTT only lasted eight incendiary months in 1974-1975, so perhaps that’s why many of the following generations have not spoken of them. However, listening to RFTT blazing through their revival set list, it is clear that this band had an impact far beyond those short-lived months together. In the songs, like the double-guitar attack of “What Love Is,” there’s all of the marks of the Classic Rock generation which you can hear RFTT pulling apart by the seems, tearing shreds in the stadium rock standards, chomping at the bit to be let loose from the bounds of the rock song expectations.

RFTT was not a band that came to my attention as I tried to quickly catch up to understand the Punk/Garage Rock world of the 80’s, trying to discover what had come before by lurking in the bedrooms of my friends’ older brothers who had all of these great music collections. As a little kid, I was raised on Pop/Top 40 radio. RFTT wasn’t coming out of the mono AM radio in my mom’s Oldsmobile Omega in the late 70’s. Even as I tried to get up to speed on where all of the punk of the 80’s had come from—namely the punk of the late 70’s—there were still large holes in my knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll pedigree.

Now, thanks to this new recording of an important sire in the line, I see how RFTT fits on the family tree. Call it proto-punk; it is Punk without the 2-minute, top speed limitations. (RFTT’s offspring, then, is Green Day). It is Garage Rock which is like an art school garage, experimenting with the form. (Here, then, their offspring is Hüsker Dü).

Those Classic Rock drum fills and riffs that greet you on the opening track, “Frustration,” may lead you to be thinking that you’re hearing a deep track on a station like Kenosha, Wisconsin’s WILL 95.1 FM, but Thomas’ squealing, warbling one word vocal is nothing most Classic Rock stations would be spinning. “That ain’t a rock song for listening to while you’re tuning up your ATV in your garage,” the program manager would say. “That’s some kind of punk thing.”

“30 Seconds Over Tokyo” is the song Pere Ubu took with them from the RFTT days. An extended haunting creeping through the first couple of minutes until all hell break’s loose. Nothing’s held back from being smashed double-speed. Throw down the guitars, bass, cymbals, tom-toms, snare, and the kitchen sink in a heap of sound out of which emerges a blazing guitar solo.

So the bike is still in the snow pile. Pere Ubu is still pushing the form. And Rocket from the Tombs still is the one that sent them there.

Thanks to Smog Veil Records for the review copy.