Speaker 1: Before we get started, you should know this show has
Speaker 1: some explicit content not for the faint to thought, so
Speaker 1: don't say you haven't been warned.
Speaker 2: It's a spring day in nineteen eighty three. A car
Speaker 2: joins the crash of traffic on the one oh one
Speaker 2: heading west. The passengers sit silent. They have a solemn
Speaker 2: job ahead of them. In the passenger seat is Anne Ramis,
Speaker 2: clutching a small plastic bag. In the back seat is
Speaker 2: Anne's young daughter Violet. Behind the wheel is screenwriter Rod Falconer.
Speaker 3: So all the way out to Malibu, we went out.
Speaker 3: We're driving out the one on one, and Violet, who
Speaker 3: didn't know what was going on. Of course she knew
Speaker 3: Peter was dead, possibly, but she didn't really know we
Speaker 3: were carrying ashes or anything like that.
Speaker 2: The plastic bag contains some of Peter's ashes. Lucy Fisher
Speaker 2: has some too, as does Peter's mother, Merle. The silence
Speaker 2: in the car is deafening. Violet Raymons is seven years
Speaker 2: old at this point, in that way that kids sometimes do,
Speaker 2: she senses the heaviness of the moment.
Speaker 3: She starts singing, just really spontaneously and very with a
Speaker 3: beautiful tonality, and she sang the Streets of Laredo as.
Speaker 4: Ah walked down on the streets of Laredo.
Speaker 5: The Streets of Laredo was a song that I had
Speaker 5: learned at school, which is a very depressing song about
Speaker 5: a cowboy that dies aspared.
Speaker 4: A young cowboy, wrapped all and wad.
Speaker 2: The song feels right to violate. She knows something bad
Speaker 2: has happened, even if she doesn't know exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: To her. The song is about Peter.
Speaker 5: He was our cowboy, you know, like we all loved
Speaker 5: our cowboy, so brave, young and handsome. That was the lyric.
Speaker 5: And he was that like he was everybody's hero.
Speaker 3: And I had never really listened to the words the
Speaker 3: Streets of Laredo. You know, I spied a young cowboy
Speaker 3: dressed in white linen, dressed in white linen, and cold
Speaker 3: is the clay.
Speaker 4: Being the drum slowly and play the fire slowly, and
Speaker 4: play the death of March as you carry me along,
Speaker 4: take me to the valley and lay the sod or
Speaker 4: Ah a young cowboy and.
Speaker 3: No anyway, it was it was perfectly chosen songs like
Speaker 3: it was this intuitive insight.
Speaker 5: So we went up to the mountains somewhere I don't
Speaker 5: exactly remember where with Peter ashes, and it was a
Speaker 5: very solemn group of people and somebody was saying some words.
Speaker 6: And then the bag fell into the river.
Speaker 2: That's Anne Ramis.
Speaker 5: The idea was to scatter the ashes into the river,
Speaker 5: but my mom just sort of tossed her baggy into
Speaker 5: the water.
Speaker 1: And I felt terrible, you know, because there was ghosts
Speaker 1: floating this plastic bag which filled with his ashes down
Speaker 1: the river, and.
Speaker 5: There was the zip black bag floating down the river.
Speaker 5: And maybe that baggy is still somewhere.
Speaker 7: And Rod said Peter would have loved it.
Speaker 4: Ah, a young cowboy, no god.
Speaker 2: Looking back, Peter's death was one of the moments that
Speaker 2: signaled the end of an era in LA. The culture
Speaker 2: was ing.
Speaker 8: There were monumental changes that took place. The overall punk
Speaker 8: scene moves from this very niche, underground sound to a
Speaker 8: more kind of mainstream sound, especially through the sob genres
Speaker 8: that come up.
Speaker 2: Here's journalist Stephanie Mendez.
Speaker 8: Now you have thousands of people showing up and selling
Speaker 8: out these large venues to see big punk bands. So
Speaker 8: by the time Peter Ivers dies in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 8: the punk scene is dramatically different from the scene of
Speaker 8: nineteen seventy seven because punk becomes bigger in LA, there
Speaker 8: are bigger shows, there is a bigger scene.
Speaker 2: It's a familiar story. The underground gets cool, then goes
Speaker 2: super nova, and a new underground forms in its wake,
Speaker 2: a never ending cycle. And it wasn't just happening in
Speaker 2: the punk scene. Film was changing too, becoming more about
Speaker 2: blockbusters than art. The hip, edgy comedy of Saturday Night
Speaker 2: Live was going mainstream. The artsy culture of LA was
Speaker 2: becoming more and more about money che change. I remember
Speaker 2: driving on the Sunset Strip and I looked up at
Speaker 2: the Whiskey Marquee and it said the NAC and I said, oh,
Speaker 2: he god, we're screwed. That meant new wave was getting
Speaker 2: a foothold and probably going to push punk right out
Speaker 2: the window. It was all a little less cool and
Speaker 2: a lot less interesting, to be honest. But it wasn't
Speaker 2: just the music that was changing. Peter's death cast an
Speaker 2: ominous shadow over the scene for those of us who
Speaker 2: knew him or who gives a shit party. Days were over.
Speaker 9: My best friend was dead. I had no one to
Speaker 9: count on.
Speaker 1: After that, it felt like a black cloud had shuttled down.
Speaker 2: The impact of Peter's death rippled through the scene in
Speaker 2: numerous ways. The final episode of New Wave Theater was
Speaker 2: left unfinished. Friends, lovers, and collaborators confronted a huge void
Speaker 2: in their lives, and worst of all, we carried with
Speaker 2: us the unsettling suspicion that the person responsible for his
Speaker 2: death might be someone we knew and trusted. I'm Penelope
Speaker 2: Spherus and this is Peter and the Acid King. Peter
Speaker 2: had a tendency to draw people into his orbit. Maybe
Speaker 2: that's why so many of his friends went to his
Speaker 2: loft the day he died. They were following Peter's gravitational pull.
Speaker 7: There are many legitimately considered Peter their best friend and
Speaker 7: found felt bound to him forever.
Speaker 2: John Leone was one of Peter's oldest friends. He's the
Speaker 2: guy who stumbled on Peter playing harmonica in the tunnels
Speaker 2: under Harvard. He's also a writer, so when La Weekly
Speaker 2: asked John to write a tribute to Peter, he was honored.
Speaker 2: We asked John to read some of that tribute for us.
Speaker 7: The early symptoms of group shock have set in the
Speaker 7: world is more intense, colors, brighter objects, loom and pass.
Speaker 7: There were many golden hours with me and dozens of
Speaker 7: others passed contentedly in Peter's presence in Cambridge and Berkeley,
Speaker 7: in New York or Boston. In the seventeen years I
Speaker 7: knew him. We sang at the piano, smoked dope, worked
Speaker 7: on songs, lyrics, music. We philosophized, exchange, show business, cord gossip,
Speaker 7: framed our problems as jokes, encouraged and laughed at each other.
Speaker 7: Peter said he hung out for a living. From these
Speaker 7: good hours came music for fourteen plays at Harvard, a
Speaker 7: degree in classics, virtuosity on the harmonica, three albums, several
Speaker 7: hundred songs, soundtracks for a television show, in two movies,
Speaker 7: an underground television celebrity, and modern pop icon status.
Speaker 2: Pop icon might be a stretch, but we love Peter
Speaker 2: so much that we'll give it to him. In the
Speaker 2: moments after Peter's death, shock rolled through everyone in his circle,
Speaker 2: one by one, and.
Speaker 7: Then the fact swoops by. Chills pass down the spine,
Speaker 7: the body moves, the head rises, the tears swell. Frims,
Speaker 7: touched blindly by telephone, go to bars, silent before the unspeakable.
Speaker 2: I had to say Dame lastnight. Peter's memorial was held
Speaker 2: the Sunday after he died at the Leo Beck Temple
Speaker 2: in West LA. Three hundred people attended. The La Times
Speaker 2: ran an obituary titled a death of Innocence. It read quote,
Speaker 2: Los Angeles lost one of the few links between its
Speaker 2: underground art community and the above ground entertainment establishment. It
Speaker 2: also lost one of its most colorful characters. End quote.
Speaker 2: All kinds of people showed up to pay their respects.
Speaker 2: Here's Stuart Cornfield, a film producer and a mutual friend
Speaker 2: of ours.
Speaker 10: I was an usher at the memorial supervis in LA
Speaker 10: and I'll just tell you I'm like in back with
Speaker 10: the other ushers and Mark Canton, who was like head
Speaker 10: of production at Warner Brothers. And Mark is like telling everybody, Okay,
Speaker 10: you do this, and you take that door and you
Speaker 10: walk into the display and Harold Ramis's who died and
Speaker 10: left you in charge.
Speaker 2: Filmmaker Malcolm Leo must not have heard Ramus's joke because
Speaker 2: he thought the whole thing was too somber, not light
Speaker 2: and sweet like Peter was.
Speaker 7: It was almost a bit too religious.
Speaker 2: And John Leone could have done without the Hollywood types,
Speaker 2: which I can definitely relate to.
Speaker 7: I went too, only for a few minutes, because what
Speaker 7: I really resented what happened for Peter's memorial. It was
Speaker 7: a bunch of people who didn't know very well. It
Speaker 7: was mostly holling with people.
Speaker 2: What brought these people together was their love for Peter,
Speaker 2: and each of them paid tribute in their own way.
Speaker 2: Franny Guldi, Peter's songwriting partner, played music at the service.
Speaker 11: We put together a band like a band, and I
Speaker 11: played keyboards and everybody participated.
Speaker 2: They performed Writing on the Wings of Love, a song
Speaker 2: that she and Peter wrote together.
Speaker 11: I think it spoke to the moment, but it was
Speaker 11: writing on the wings of love, writing on the wings
Speaker 11: of desire, writing on the wings of love, writing on
Speaker 11: the wings of fire. Sweet mystery came into me. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it was a really good lyric and I think it
Speaker 11: spoke to the moment.
Speaker 2: Johannah Went attended the memorial as well.
Speaker 12: I mean, when I think about it now, I could
Speaker 12: almost cry, you know. I went with Shirley Clark, and
Speaker 12: Shirley didn't know Peter really well, but she had met
Speaker 12: him and talked to him about new way theater because
Speaker 12: I'd been working with Shirley, and Peter was interested in Shirley.
Speaker 2: Frannie's band starts to play, and.
Speaker 12: When they played that song, she just wept, just could
Speaker 12: not stop weeping. She really wept out loud, you know,
Speaker 12: and people looked at her and she just said, you know,
Speaker 12: people they don't know how to show their grief. She said,
Speaker 12: what's wrong with these people? How can they just sit there?
Speaker 12: That's what she said to me. Afterwards, she goes, how
Speaker 12: can they just sit there?
Speaker 2: Some people were there that day to grieve. Others were
Speaker 2: seeking solace, but those feelings were tangled up with something else, suspicion.
Speaker 2: Here's Stuart Cornfeld again.
Speaker 10: Everybody was looking for answers, and what was weird was
Speaker 10: everybody was pointing fingers in the other direction. The movie
Speaker 10: people thought the punks did it. The punk thought that
Speaker 10: the movie people did it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 10: It was just fucking crazy.
Speaker 9: The way it turns out is you're sitting there going like,
Speaker 9: who killed my best friend?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 9: And you're doing that like for years.
Speaker 2: That's tequila Mockingbird Punk scenes to extraordinary.
Speaker 9: Thirty years of me going was it this person or
Speaker 9: could it be that person? Or you never knew, you
Speaker 9: didn't know who your friends really were.
Speaker 2: Point is, the whole scene was on high alert. Fear
Speaker 2: was running rampant. Everyone was a suspect.
Speaker 6: It's very hard to describe how it put a cloud
Speaker 6: of negativity and paranoia and distrust.
Speaker 13: People started suddenly looking around over their shoulder a lot more,
Speaker 13: and it kind of brought the party to an end.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to see any of these people.
Speaker 14: I think one other person at that point who had
Speaker 14: been actually murdered in the punk scene, and it was Jane,
Speaker 14: who was Rick Wilder's girlfriend that had been killed by
Speaker 14: the Hillsides Jengler.
Speaker 2: That's pleasant gayman. She knew Peter from the punk scene.
Speaker 14: I mean, people had died in car accidents or there
Speaker 14: was a few od's, but I think the only other
Speaker 14: murder was that. But that was also by a known
Speaker 14: serial killer. So this was just kind of different, you know,
Speaker 14: because it was just like who who would murder him?
Speaker 14: He was so sort of innocuous.
Speaker 2: We had lost people close to us before, Belushi, Doug, Kenny, Darby, Crash,
Speaker 2: drugs destroyed some of the best minds of my generation.
Speaker 2: But a murder was way different. It was violence on
Speaker 2: top of tragedy. Here's musician Russell Buddy Helm talking about it.
Speaker 2: He's playing the drums while he talks.
Speaker 15: I've gone through a lot of deaths, a lot of
Speaker 15: violent deaths and music and film business. You know, when
Speaker 15: Dwayne died, that was rough.
Speaker 2: He's referring to Dwayne Almond from the Almond Brothers. He
Speaker 2: died in a motorcycle accident in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 15: And then when Tim Buckley was murdered that was also
Speaker 15: very rough. When Peter died just as bad, just as bad,
Speaker 15: because it was like, what am I doing? You know,
Speaker 15: all these people that I've worked with intensely creatively, you know,
Speaker 15: violent deaths, So I was like I couldn't figure out
Speaker 15: where I belonged, you know, because basically people were getting
Speaker 15: shot out from underneath me.
Speaker 2: Peter's death was like turning on the lights at the zero.
Speaker 2: Suddenly you saw everything you could ignore in the dark,
Speaker 2: including yourself.
Speaker 6: There was already a great idea of nihilism and a
Speaker 6: sense of everything's ending, and this is like the last party,
Speaker 6: feeling like this is like the celebration of the end
Speaker 6: of the world. Was the mood of that whole scene.
Speaker 2: That's Nicholas Shrek. You heard him talk about the occult
Speaker 2: a few episodes ago.
Speaker 6: It was about darkness, like tomorrow there'll be some catastrophe
Speaker 6: or inferno coming and live it up now. That was
Speaker 6: the sense of it, and the murder just made that
Speaker 6: not fun anymore. It made it very real and made
Speaker 6: it like somebody here is the killer.
Speaker 2: Bob Forrest agrees, it just was.
Speaker 16: Like a light and all of a sudden, and we'd
Speaker 16: already had a couple of people die of drugs, but
Speaker 16: to be murdered, it was like, holy fuck, there had
Speaker 16: to be somebody we know, somebody we know murdered. Peter Ivers.
Speaker 13: The one thing that I can attest to with complete
Speaker 13: a surety is what his murder did to the downtown
Speaker 13: arts scene, and that was cause it to come to
Speaker 13: a screeching halt. And realized that the innocence was over,
Speaker 13: that all of this fun that we were having and
Speaker 13: this I can live forever, and well, let's can go
Speaker 13: right through me and we can do anything. That stopped
Speaker 13: was a very sobering event.
Speaker 2: That last voice is Steven Semeyer. He's an artist.
Speaker 13: I mean, none of us had been murdered, none of
Speaker 13: us had had foul play like that. We'd had our
Speaker 13: cars broken into, our studios broken into, we might have
Speaker 13: been you know, harassed downtown by you know, various people,
Speaker 13: but nothing on the level of murder had happened. So
Speaker 13: it for a while there it was like everyone felt
Speaker 13: like he suddenly grew up and it kind of changed everything.
Speaker 13: It was kind of like a milestone.
Speaker 6: That was it.
Speaker 2: For Alan Sachs. Peter's death was a turning point.
Speaker 1: Peter's death was the signal for me to leave this scene.
Speaker 2: By day I was I was where.
Speaker 1: I was producing TV movies. By night, I was, you know,
Speaker 1: sitting in David Jove's cave.
Speaker 2: He went to the cave a few more times, but
Speaker 2: he found himself going there less and less. Eventually he
Speaker 2: stopped altogether.
Speaker 1: I stopped drinking, I stopped using any sort of drugs.
Speaker 1: That was a big change. I didn't want to be
Speaker 1: part of it anymore. And yet there was, you know,
Speaker 1: drugs and alcohol was very prevalent in there. That kind
Speaker 1: of signaled me that I had to go somewhere else.
Speaker 2: For him, that somewhere else was AA.
Speaker 1: The reason that the Alcoholics Anonymous program works is because
Speaker 1: they say, you got to go to a meeting a
Speaker 1: day the first year, and if you surround yourself with
Speaker 1: other recovered alcoholics, then it's safe. But if they're still drinking,
Speaker 1: it's not.
Speaker 2: Simple as that.
Speaker 1: There was a meeting in AA on Rodeo Drive in
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills, and you would go there on a Friday
Speaker 1: night and there were like two hundred people sitting around,
Speaker 1: and several of them part of the cave scene. A
Speaker 1: lot of people went in that direction.
Speaker 2: Bob Forrest went even further. He went from playing in
Speaker 2: bands like Felonious Monster and enjoying the drugs and parties
Speaker 2: that entailed to becoming a world renowned addiction counselor. And
Speaker 2: for that I take my hat off to him. One
Speaker 2: person who did not attend Peter's service was David Jove. Instead,
Speaker 2: Jove hosted his own thing for Peter. Ken Yaz was there.
Speaker 1: David threw a memorial service for him in a room
Speaker 1: next to the whiskey on sunset.
Speaker 3: David was appropriately upset, but there was clearly something going on.
Speaker 12: There was something amiss about the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Funerals are for the living. They're supposed to give us closure.
Speaker 2: But after the memorial, after Peter's ashes went floating down
Speaker 2: the river, and after we all went back to our
Speaker 2: everyday lives, there was still no closure. One person who
Speaker 2: wasn't willing to stand for that was Lucy Fisher. Although
Speaker 2: she and Peter were separated, they were still deeply connected,
Speaker 2: and so she decided to take things into her own hands.
Speaker 3: Lucy and Mark Canton and I all put up It
Speaker 3: sounds like a small amount now, but we just put
Speaker 3: up ten thousand dollars reward at that time.
Speaker 2: That's Rod Falconer again, Peter's screenwriting partner. By the way,
Speaker 2: ten thousand dollars back then is thirty thousand dollars in
Speaker 2: today's money.
Speaker 3: And Lucy hired private detective. The cops never really I
Speaker 3: don't know, they never really came up with anything.
Speaker 2: In the absence of any clear answers, people in the
Speaker 2: scenes start speculating, and it's not long before theories begin
Speaker 2: to emerge. Peter owed twenty five thousand to a Samoan
Speaker 2: drug gang based in Redwood City and that they were
Speaker 2: likely would have killed them for the debt.
Speaker 1: Peter was messing around with many, many women in the
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills area.
Speaker 9: I got a phone call saying, you're next, and I said,
Speaker 9: come on over. I'm waiting for.
Speaker 2: You, but that's for the next episode. See you then.
Speaker 2: Peter and the Acid Case is based on interviews recorded
Speaker 2: and researched by Alan Sachs. It's produced by Imagine Audio,
Speaker 2: Alan Sachs Productions and Awfully Nice for iHeartMedia. I'm your
Speaker 2: Host Penelope Speerris. The series is written by Caitlin Fontana.
Speaker 2: Peter and the Acid King is produced by Amber von Schassen.
Speaker 2: The senior producer is Caitlin Fontana and the supervising producer
Speaker 2: is John Assanti. Our project manager is Katie Hodges. Our
Speaker 2: executive producers are Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Caarra Welker, Nathan Kloke,
Speaker 2: Alan Sachs, Jesse Burton, and Katie Hodges. The associate producers
Speaker 2: are Laura Schwartz, Dylan Cainrich and Chris Statue. Co producer
Speaker 2: on behalf of Shout Studios Bob Emmer, Sound design and
Speaker 2: mix by Evan Arnette, fact checking by Katherine Barner. Original
Speaker 2: music composed by Alloy Tracks, Music clearances by Barbara Hall,
Speaker 2: voiceover recording by Voicetracks, West, Show artwork by Michael Dare.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Annette van Durin, thank you for listening.