Peter and the Acid King: Long Live Peter Ivers

The content in this episode might be disturbing for some listeners. Listen to discretion is advised.

It's early nineteen eighty four in a bustling television studio in LA. There's an audience of punks, just like New Wave Theater. But unlike New Wave Theater, this ain't hokey anymore. It's a big crew, a control booth. It's a real production coming to you from KTLA. New Wave Theater's gone corporate thanks to Harold Ramus. After Peter's death, Harold introduced David Joe to a TV exec named Bill Cameron. Here's Bill.

So David came in and I found him to be enchanting.

The devil is a brilliant prankster, but the greatest trick he ever pulled was making David Jove enchanting to some people. Definitely not to me, but I guess some people found him endearing anyway. David pitches Bill a TV show idea. It's a spin on the New Wave theater formula.

What he was doing was something called the Top and it was an entertainment variety.

Our Bill's interested, so he sets up a meeting for them at MGM. In the meeting, the Suits have a question for David.

What's going to make your show different?

Tell me what happens when the lights go up and the camera goes on. What do I see?

Joe?

And we hadn't rehearsed this, had and talked about it. David said, you see seventeen little ducklings and a lama on the set and they're running around and it's a set like Johnny Carson has on Tonight's show, but they're ducklings and a lama on there, and that's what you see. And it sold the show because it was so It's clever, it was clever, it was different.

The Suit's green light a pilot. It's a huge break for David. Despite its roots in public access, new Wave Theater had been a real TV show on national cable TV. But the Top was going to be on a whole nother level.

This was going up, upscaled quite a bit.

This was going to be How big a budget was this going to be?

This in those days? I think we were talking three hundred thousand.

In other words, a good chunk of change, which brings us back to that TV studio in La David and Harold are filming the pilot for the Top and the pressure is on. Jove skulks around, creating tension, but Harold tries to bring a sense of calm. It's thanks to him that there's a level of professionalism on the set.

So Harold raymis enters the scene. It's like, okay, this is going to be a real TV production.

That's Michael Dare, a film critic for LA Weekly.

This is no longer your underground new ad theater that's shown as part of Night Flight on the USA network. This is going to be on an actual television network that's going to have commercials, and you're going to be the director in the booth, and there's going to have to be a script that everybody's going to have to follow. You're going to hire a writer, and David says, well, I don't need a script, and Harold Reimer says to him,

Be the writer, the head writer of the Top.

And I said, well, sure, what do you want me to do and he says nothing, You're not going to write a single word. I'm going to write every single word that everybody says on the show. And I'm only hiring you because Harold Raimas says that I have to hire a writer.

Now that he's got a writer. All Jovenies is a celebrity host. So Harold Ramis picks up the phone and calls it a favor from one of the biggest comedians in town, a guy looking to get back to his TV roots, a guy named Cornelius.

Everybody knows Chevy Chase is one of the biggest assholes on Earth. You can't read anything about him without someone telling a story about what a fucking asshole he is.

Nobody likes it except me.

I had the best meeting I've ever had with Chevy Chase because Harold Ramos was in the room. Harold Ramis calls a meeting. He says, Okay, David, bring your writer, I'll bring Chevy Chase. We're going to sit together and figure out what this show is.

So Michael's in the room of Chevy Chase, Harold Ramis and David Jove. Chevy stands up and starts talking, and it.

Was hilarious and brilliant, and I was like, oh my god, I'm going to be the head writer of the Chevy j Show.

Except that's not what happens. Jove puts the kabash on every single one of Chevy's ideas.

No we're not going to do that. Oh I don't want to do that. No we're not going to do that. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna keep cutting back to the sound booth, and all the technicians are gonna be animals. And when we cut to the audience, it's going to cut to a bunch of baby ducks.

Oh no, not more baby ducks.

So we kept having meetings and meetings and meetings at which nothing was decided except that nobody was allowed to do anything if David Joe didn't tell him to do it. I wrote a monologue for Chevy, he turned it down. Chevy wrote a monologue for himself, he turned it down. Nothing happened, Nothing happened. It was all getting up to the first day of you know, the production, the live show, and not one word had been written for Chevy Chase, not one word. He didn't know what to do.

And now they're out of time. The audience is in the studio waiting, and Chevy Chase has no script. Backstage, Jove walks up to Chevy to give his host some words of encouragement.

Jove went up to him right before the cameras went on and put a freightwig on his head and said, Okay, you're you're a You're a punk, You're a punk rocker. Just get out there and win.

The show starts. Chevy Chase comes on stage in a shitty punk rock wig.

Hollywood, California, the entertainment capital up the world.

We walk on your tower, surrounded by real punks. He looks ridiculous. What happens next makes the news.

Teddy Chase was taking a television show in Los Angeles last night before invited audience of punk rockers.

Things seemed to get out of hand, and here's what happened.

Chevy comes out on stage in his stupid wig and starts improvising. It's not too long before the punks in the crowd get restless. One of the people watching is my dear friend Dirf Scratch. DIRF played bass and Fear, the band that got kicked off of Saturday Night Live.

DIRF to me was the punk post boy that's Alan Sachs. Dirf was a hard Dirf looked like a preppy. He wore saddle shoes, but he was a hard corere punk.

I remember one time Dirf asked me to go to his apartment and he gave me some couple of lines of speed and it burned my nose so bad that I never did speed again. So God bless Irf and thank you man. Anyway, Dirf is in the crowd for the taping of the Top and he starts hackling Chevy.

Dirf was yelling you homo, you homo, and Chevy said, who said that? Come on up here? Tell that to me, and Dirf didn't wait a second and went running up to the stage. He ran up to the apron, pushed himself up on the riser, and ran over to Chevy and kicked him in the nuts.

Apparently Chevy had just had a asectomy, so this kick was particularly unwelcome. Other punks jump on stage two.

Pandemonium broke loose. I mean, I produced many television shows I've never been involved where a fight like that broke out in the audience.

And then Chevy Chase leaves and never comes back. Normal people would give up after a shit store like that, but not David Jove. He badgers Harold Ramis to help him make another pilot. Harold reluctantly agrees, but with a new host and some conditions.

And this time with Andy Kaufman instead of Chevy Chase, And this time Jove isn't allowed to write anything, isn't allowed to direct, it is allowed to do. I mean, Harold actually did handcuff him to a chair in the director's booth where he had to give directions to the cameraman to do what they were going to do.

Even with Joe physically restrained, things go off the rails, although this time it's not completely his fault.

Now, let me tell you a little about this video. It's called by Randy Newman, and it's called I Love La.

And now it.

Starts off with a bum. You see a bum, and it's all in black and white. So you think the whole thing's going to be black and white, right, But it turns out that then the for a few minutes of this, the thing turns to color. Okay, so that's a surprise. That's a surprise.

Now, Andy Kaufman is a comedic genius. Have you ever seen him do Elvis Presley? It's fucking hilarious. But on this taping of the Top he was not at his best. The audience might have assumed he was having an off night, but in reality, Kaufman was dying of cancer. Here's Ken Daw, a New Wave theater fan who was at the taping.

It was obvious he was so far I'm sick. He shouldn't have been there at all. I don't know why he's ready to do it, just because he wanted to do one last performance or something.

And you know, a week or two weeks later, he was gone.

He was dead.

It was Andy Kaufman's last ever TV appearance. He died in May of nineteen eighty four, and The Top, such as it was, ended with him a pilot that never went anywhere. By the time they started filming The Top, it had been almost a year since Peter Iver's murder. No arrest had been made, no one had been charged. Across the city and the scene, those who loved Peter began to move on, some reluctantly, some angrily. But one

He was obsessed with the murder.

He would answer the phone who killed Peter Ivers for at least a year after Peter's death, so it was like he was on this crusade to find out who killed him, and obviously that was the cover up.

He grabbed Peter's quilt out him. It was green and had bloodled it, and he kept it. He kept and he slept with it in his bedroom.

All of this fed into the gossip. Could David Jove have something to do with Peter's death? Today we try to answer that question head on and pay tribute to our friend Peter and the musical legacy he left behind. I'm Penelope Spheris and this is Peter and the Acid King. Sometime after Peter's death, David Jove invited Don Bulls over to his place. Don was the drummer in the Germs. Anyway,

So when I talk to Don Balls from the Germs, he told me a story about David Jove that I keep thinking about and seeing as clear as day.

He invited me to come over and he played me these cassettes and micro cassettes of psychics who to whom he had sent Peter's watch, the one that Peter had been wearing at the time of the murders.

Apparently, along with the bloody blanket and sequin jacket, Jove also took a watch that belonged to Peter. So Donna is sitting there across from David Jove. I could see that so clearly. Jove talking to Don showing him the watch.

And he kept looking at me, just like really staring into my face.

I see his face.

He's like yeah, he was like, you know, vains are coming out. You know, the coke had obviously gone in, and he's going, you know, and well, what do you think?

So David wants Don to listen to the tape with him. Donn's like, okay, put a little creep down, you know what I mean.

There was this one where the guy sounded like Peter, and he's like living a moment in time when this watch was last worn by the person, when they were alive. He's like in a chance, right, and he's channeling this. He's like, oh, hey, how you doing? What's what? What what are you doing?

Oh?

Hey, oh my god?

No, oh no god, are you killing me?

It was the most horrifying death shrieks of a person being killed that I have ever in my life heard. And it sounded like Peter. And David didn't tell these people whose watch it was or anything, or that there was a murder world or anything. Right, it sounded like Peter. This person didn't know who Peter was. This was like, it was the most blood curdling stuff you could even

This is shocking and freaking weird. But Don told me that David was totally calm.

Think about that.

The tape of pits to capture the moment his friend was killed seemingly by someone he knew, and Jove seems fine with it.

There was nothing incriminating about Jove's behavior that day with Don Bowles. To some extent, it was just Jove being Jove, an average day in the life of an occult obsessed drug but it definitely wasn't normal. And it's the kindest story that explains why some of us suspected Jove from the very beginning.

David Jove had motive, means, an opportunity. He was angry Peter quit a new wave theater. He was already known to have been violent and an unpredictable cat, and he knew whe Peter was going when he left the cave that night. He was also the guy who many say was first at the crime scene. He chimed his way past the cops, and he was the guy that took a bloody blanket, a watch, and a peak Sinkuin jacket as though they were trophies.

Given all of this, you'd think the cops would have picked David up and questioned him, but actually they didn't have to. Here's that Oaks.

David walked into the police station, you know, the next day voluntarily. He asked to meet with a detective on the case. He told the detective that he was in the country illegally, and he told the cops that he didn't do it.

The cops took.

Down his statement and they, for whatever reason, they discounted David as a as a person of interest.

On the day after Peter's death, David Jove, who was apparently a fugitive from Canada living under a pseudonym, walked into a police station to chat with the cops. He told them he had nothing to do with Peter's murder, and they sent him on his way. It's so ridiculous to those who knew Peter and David that it's laughable. Literally, here's Alan talking to former rocker and current addiction counselor Bob Forrest.

I've spoken to the cold case cops.

It's not in the kitchen, not in the.

Casebook that they spoke to David.

They didn't interview, they didn't He was never of suspicion.

That is even more faith in cops, doesn't it. Some people say that the cops did question Jove and that he was later dropped as a suspect, But Alan asked the LAPD directly and they said they never took a serious look at Jove.

The real mystery to me isn't why the cops dropped Jove as a suspect. It's why Jove went to the cops in the first place. He had spent decades being paranoid about people finding out who he was. Then all of a sudden, Pete is dead and he feels the need to reach out and tell the authorities his secrets. Why is that. Maybe he was worried about his dead friend and wanted to help with the investigation. Or maybe he wanted to stay close to the cops so he could stay one step ahead of him.

That's one possibility. Or maybe Jove was trying to get ahead of any questions by acting like he had nothing to hide. Whatever the reason, it was an odd thing for him to do, but was capable of murdering someone. According to some people, maybe he was rumored to have a very violent past.

He'd also in the past when he was raving back in the Cave days, he used to hint that he'd somehow accidentally killed somebody.

That's Maggie Abbott, the agent who brought Mary Anne Faithful to the cave. She was Jove's friend. According to her, Jove told her straight up, I killed a guy. No, not Peter, a different guy before that.

It was tied in with the fact that he'd taken a huge overdose of LSD because he had it in the fridge and the bottle tipped over and it dribbled down into a cake, and he hit the cake, chocolate keate at the cake.

And when the cops apparently questioned him about the crime, he had been too high to answer.

He allowed the cigarette to burn down and burn his fingers. He sat there and it was burning his flesh and they were so it persuaded them, or convinced them that he was too high to make any sense.

Well, that's one way to get out of jail.

And that's how he got away with whatever it was he got away with.

The idea that Jove would have confessed something to Maggie is interesting because to confess implies that you think you've done something wrong, that you have a moral code. Here's Nicholas Shrek, a friend of Jove's. He and Jove both shared an interest in the teachings of Aleister Crowley, and according to Crowley, killing someone wasn't necessarily something to feel guilty about.

I also think, and this is more of an intuition that Jove, like Crowley, and other people of that elk would think that taking a life would be like a sacrifice, and in almost like an ancient Gemanic tribal way, that he would be taking power by taking a life.

Crowley taught that power was assumed through the exchange of energy, but he also taught that taking power wasn't immoral. In Crowley's view, there was no difference between consensual sex and sexual assault, or natural death and murder. In my view, Crowley had his head up his ass so far he was looking at brown wallpaper.

I think that this is the way Jove thought about things. I to think whatever it was, it probably wasn't strictly impulsive hatred or criminality. It struck me when the murder happened, that he would be more than capable of doing it, because I don't think he had any moral sense whatsoever.

On the night before his death, Peter Ivers quit New Wave Theater. It was a major blow for the show, but was bad enough to cause Jove to murder his friend. Maybe Jove was so spased out on drugs and Aleister Crowley that he wasn't thinking straight that he followed Peter back to his loft, broke in and killed Peter in his sleep. Then, in an effort to cover his tracks, Joe ran to the cops and offered to help find the killer. At the end of the day, it's just

Lez are still looking for Leeds and the murder of thirty six year old musician Peter Ivers. I'll go then, Amber talks about that case now and gives us this portrait of Ivors, who was a pretty interesting man. Peters was the irreverent, zany host of New Wave Theater.

On Cable.

US.

In that last episode of New Wave Theater after Peter died, Jove is fucking creepy. He's wearing this rubber mask, just staring into the camera. He cries, but the mask distorts his features. I don't know what he was thinking doing this. It's really disturbing to look at now. He wore the mask outside for like a week after that, but eventually the mask came and David went back to the cave. He never made another TV show after the Top. David Jove died in two thousand and four of cancer.

If there's any hard evidence that he killed Peter, it's lost to history or hidden inside the LAPD's case file. Today, many people who know Peter Ivers know him through New Wave Theater. There are hours of footage of Peter hosting the show, performing those weird monologues, interviewing the bands, but all the while he's playing a character, a version of himself filtered through David Jove. Peter's music, on the other hand,

I think he contributed to the part of music that was forming in our community in LA at that time. He was into pure art and pure ideas, and I think LA was lucky to have him when we did. He was very artistic and his ideas were very artistic, and you know, I think he wasn't like tied down by trying to make a hit record or trying to, you know, see if he could get on the radio.

Jello Biafa of the Dead Kennedys agrees a lot of that had to do with the uniqueness of Peter's voice.

As long as you're when the minute you open your mouth, people know who it is. And one way to do that is if your voice is incredibly and possibly even deliberately obnoxious. And it's not as though Peter's voice was that different from mine either, so I would say he was actually crept in there as one of the formative influences of my own voice.

My sentense in retrospect is that Peter represented something and kind of an intersection between popular entertainment, a new kind of creative energy. It wasn't copying things but was actually using the tools to make things that were fresh, yet not being a kind of snob about trying to reach an audience.

That's Ron Howard. Peter wrote the theme for Ron's first movie, Grand Theft Auto.

The mere fact that he was there kind of writing the theme on a harmonica just tells you that he had confidence that these things could be approached in a new way. There was a dimension to what he was offering popular culture that was suddenly a bit limited.

His music was hard to define, sitting somewhere between genres. It was cool and strange and experimental. During Peter's life, that limited his commercial appeal. But a funny thing happened between nineteen eighty three and now, the culture caught up with Peter. You can hear Peter's influence everywhere. That's partly because many of the people he touched went on to have towering creative careers of their own, and they have

Peter Ivers was an incredible creative influence on everybody he ever met when he moved out to La originally to score Tim Hunters AFI movies. Tim Hunter who was a writer director who would end up writing the great film Over the Edge and then directing River's Edge in the eighties. So these really iconic and important teen youth in Revolt

Peter's girlfriend, Lucy Fisher has played an important role in cultivating Peter's legacy.

And as she progressed in her field, she started hiring all of Peter's friends. So basically, all these musical influences, all these filmic theater influences. Basically she has admitted this

A few years ago, the record label RVNG got the rights to Peter's music and released the compilation Becoming Peter Ivers. Here's Jello Biafra.

Now that I hear Becoming Peter Ivers, all those demos are much more smooth and honing his voice more to make it more accessible to a top, if not even middle of the road audience. I don't know. Which makes me wonder all the more why when he had his big chance to make a Warner Brothers album he made Terminal Love first instead of what became the second Warners album first.

All of it makes you wonder what could have been.

I also wonder what might have happened with him as far as people not just looking at him as this goofy guy they had to put up with for new wave theater, although a lot of people who tried to dial in on those wraps at the end realize, my god, this guy is a heavy dude, and he's more than

I was delighted that there was some things out there, but I wish that there were more. And I know that, you know, some people, including my mom, have these old VHS tapes and probably audio tapes and archives that they don't really know what to do with.

That's Violet remis Harold and Anne's daughter.

You know, I would love to see all of his archive out there and made public so people could not only you know, understand and experience his music, but just really see who he was as a person, because he was involved and interested in so many things, and he really you know, studied and just seemed passionate about, you know, everything he was doing.

If you're interested in exploring Peter's full artistic legacy to an extent, you can. Lucy Fisher donated Peter's personal archive to Harvard. It makes you wonder what would Peter think of all this? Here's Mark mothersbaught again.

I think if Peter was still here right now, you would be looking back at him and saying, my god, that guy blew don Hoe out of the water. He's the best performer we've ever had here in Las Vegas. And he would everything from circusole to the Prey.

This is right.

He would have.

Pulled in every piece of high end lower art and exhibited them and celebrated them.

Some of Peter's biggest commercial successes have happened after his death. Here's his songwriting partner, Franny Goldy.

Every song that we wrote, maybe minus one or something, something happened with it, whether it was recorded. I went to two major song festivals, one in Korea and one in Japan, and I won awards for both songs. I sang them live. One of them I sang with a fifty piece orchestra. He would have just been blown away to hear his song, his words, and every you know sung with this fifty piece orchestra in the Buddha Khan in Japan. I mean, he would have been over the moon,

You, Pete.

Here's the thing.

I spend forty years wondering who killed Pete Rivas? And I talked to everyone I could think of about it. I was hoping there was something someone would say that that would be the smoking gun. It's hard. David Jove was such a big character and Penelope and I would not have done this at all if he was still around. It's one of the first conversations we had about this show. You said to me, is David still alive? And I said no, And you said, do you remember what you said?

I probably said good.

You said, okay, I'll do it. Is that right, I'll do the show? If when you knew he wasn't alive. You said, you said, I'll do it. And do you remember what you what you said about him that I do.

I know what I think about David, but you go ahead and tell me what tell me you Tolmer, Well, you told.

Me he was one of the scarce.

First of all, you said, you know who I've met, who I've been around where I grew up, and that guy is one of the scariest fuckers I've ever met.

I'm gonna say the scariest, the scariest. Yeah, that's that's a good I'm scared.

That's what I say.

That's what I'm saying.

I know, yeah, yeah, no, And you were scared of him too, So it's pretty fucking crazy. I was too close to all of this. I really cared about Peter, and cared about Jove and about the scene. Maybe I was too close to see what really happened. And maybe I just like hanging out at the cave too much guvasia and blow. After all these years, this mystery remains. I think what this case needs is fresh eyes, fresh perspectives. Regardless, I think Peter would just want people to appreciate his art,

I mean, look, I'll just say it. For years, I've been absolutely certain that David Jove killed Peter Ivers. Now that I've learned all the availables, I'm not so sure anymore. But maybe there's someone out there listening who does know the truth. If you have information on Peter ivers homicide, please reach out to the LAPD. The tip hotline is one eight seven seven lawful. That's one eight seven seven five two nine three eight five five. This is Peter