Culture
Local Music Aficionado Aids in Cleveland Punk Legend Compilation
By: Emily Votaw
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Cleveland punk legend Peter Laughner has been memorialized by the publication of an expansive compilation put together by Smog Veil Records earlier this year. Laughner was a respected musician and music journalist who played with Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu during his tragically short life, and contributed to the punk rock scene in Cleveland in innumerable other ways.
Athens’ own Andrew Russ, a research engineer and scientist for the Ohio Research Institute for Transportation and the Environment at the Ohio University Russ College of Engineering and Technology contributed over 10 years of dedicated work as an assistant producer on the Peter Laughner boxed set. Russ is a real music aficionado who spent years collecting and trading tapes of various underground musical acts during the early years of the Internet, and who has an expansive knowledge of punk rock.
Russ came into WOUB’s studio earlier this year to talk about the short and troubled story of the very talented Peter Laughner, what kind of legacy the musical luminary left in his wake, and the work of compiling the materials and information for Smog Veil’s boxed set.