Peter and the Acid King: The Party’s Over

Before we get started, you should know this show has some explicit content not for the faint to thought, so don't say you haven't been warned.

It's a spring day in nineteen eighty three. A car joins the crash of traffic on the one oh one heading west. The passengers sit silent. They have a solemn job ahead of them. In the passenger seat is Anne Ramis, clutching a small plastic bag. In the back seat is Anne's young daughter Violet. Behind the wheel is screenwriter Rod Falconer.

So all the way out to Malibu, we went out. We're driving out the one on one, and Violet, who didn't know what was going on. Of course she knew Peter was dead, possibly, but she didn't really know we were carrying ashes or anything like that.

The plastic bag contains some of Peter's ashes. Lucy Fisher has some too, as does Peter's mother, Merle. The silence in the car is deafening. Violet Raymons is seven years old at this point, in that way that kids sometimes do, she senses the heaviness of the moment.

She starts singing, just really spontaneously and very with a beautiful tonality, and she sang the Streets of Laredo as.

Ah walked down on the streets of Laredo.

The Streets of Laredo was a song that I had learned at school, which is a very depressing song about a cowboy that dies aspared.

A young cowboy, wrapped all and wad.

The song feels right to violate. She knows something bad has happened, even if she doesn't know exactly what it is. To her. The song is about Peter.

He was our cowboy, you know, like we all loved our cowboy, so brave, young and handsome. That was the lyric. And he was that like he was everybody's hero.

And I had never really listened to the words the Streets of Laredo. You know, I spied a young cowboy dressed in white linen, dressed in white linen, and cold is the clay.

Being the drum slowly and play the fire slowly, and play the death of March as you carry me along, take me to the valley and lay the sod or Ah a young cowboy and.

No anyway, it was it was perfectly chosen songs like it was this intuitive insight.

So we went up to the mountains somewhere I don't exactly remember where with Peter ashes, and it was a very solemn group of people and somebody was saying some words.

And then the bag fell into the river.

That's Anne Ramis.

The idea was to scatter the ashes into the river, but my mom just sort of tossed her baggy into the water.

And I felt terrible, you know, because there was ghosts floating this plastic bag which filled with his ashes down the river, and.

There was the zip black bag floating down the river. And maybe that baggy is still somewhere.

And Rod said Peter would have loved it.

Ah, a young cowboy, no god.

Looking back, Peter's death was one of the moments that signaled the end of an era in LA. The culture was ing.

There were monumental changes that took place. The overall punk scene moves from this very niche, underground sound to a more kind of mainstream sound, especially through the sob genres that come up.

Here's journalist Stephanie Mendez.

Now you have thousands of people showing up and selling out these large venues to see big punk bands. So by the time Peter Ivers dies in nineteen eighty three, the punk scene is dramatically different from the scene of nineteen seventy seven because punk becomes bigger in LA, there are bigger shows, there is a bigger scene.

It's a familiar story. The underground gets cool, then goes super nova, and a new underground forms in its wake, a never ending cycle. And it wasn't just happening in the punk scene. Film was changing too, becoming more about blockbusters than art. The hip, edgy comedy of Saturday Night Live was going mainstream. The artsy culture of LA was

My best friend was dead. I had no one to count on.

After that, it felt like a black cloud had shuttled down.

The impact of Peter's death rippled through the scene in numerous ways. The final episode of New Wave Theater was left unfinished. Friends, lovers, and collaborators confronted a huge void in their lives, and worst of all, we carried with us the unsettling suspicion that the person responsible for his death might be someone we knew and trusted. I'm Penelope Spherus and this is Peter and the Acid King. Peter

There are many legitimately considered Peter their best friend and found felt bound to him forever.

John Leone was one of Peter's oldest friends. He's the guy who stumbled on Peter playing harmonica in the tunnels under Harvard. He's also a writer, so when La Weekly asked John to write a tribute to Peter, he was honored. We asked John to read some of that tribute for us.

The early symptoms of group shock have set in the world is more intense, colors, brighter objects, loom and pass. There were many golden hours with me and dozens of others passed contentedly in Peter's presence in Cambridge and Berkeley, in New York or Boston. In the seventeen years I knew him. We sang at the piano, smoked dope, worked on songs, lyrics, music. We philosophized, exchange, show business, cord gossip, framed our problems as jokes, encouraged and laughed at each other.

Pop icon might be a stretch, but we love Peter so much that we'll give it to him. In the moments after Peter's death, shock rolled through everyone in his circle, one by one, and.

Then the fact swoops by. Chills pass down the spine, the body moves, the head rises, the tears swell. Frims, touched blindly by telephone, go to bars, silent before the unspeakable.

I had to say Dame lastnight. Peter's memorial was held the Sunday after he died at the Leo Beck Temple in West LA. Three hundred people attended. The La Times ran an obituary titled a death of Innocence. It read quote, Los Angeles lost one of the few links between its underground art community and the above ground entertainment establishment. It also lost one of its most colorful characters. End quote. All kinds of people showed up to pay their respects.

I was an usher at the memorial supervis in LA and I'll just tell you I'm like in back with the other ushers and Mark Canton, who was like head of production at Warner Brothers. And Mark is like telling everybody, Okay, you do this, and you take that door and you walk into the display and Harold Ramis's who died and left you in charge.

Filmmaker Malcolm Leo must not have heard Ramus's joke because he thought the whole thing was too somber, not light and sweet like Peter was.

It was almost a bit too religious.

And John Leone could have done without the Hollywood types, which I can definitely relate to.

I went too, only for a few minutes, because what I really resented what happened for Peter's memorial. It was a bunch of people who didn't know very well. It was mostly holling with people.

What brought these people together was their love for Peter, and each of them paid tribute in their own way. Franny Guldi, Peter's songwriting partner, played music at the service.

We put together a band like a band, and I played keyboards and everybody participated.

They performed Writing on the Wings of Love, a song that she and Peter wrote together.

I think it spoke to the moment, but it was writing on the wings of love, writing on the wings of desire, writing on the wings of love, writing on the wings of fire. Sweet mystery came into me. Yeah, it was a really good lyric and I think it spoke to the moment.

Johannah Went attended the memorial as well.

I mean, when I think about it now, I could almost cry, you know. I went with Shirley Clark, and Shirley didn't know Peter really well, but she had met him and talked to him about new way theater because I'd been working with Shirley, and Peter was interested in Shirley.

Frannie's band starts to play, and.

When they played that song, she just wept, just could not stop weeping. She really wept out loud, you know, and people looked at her and she just said, you know, people they don't know how to show their grief. She said, what's wrong with these people? How can they just sit there? That's what she said to me. Afterwards, she goes, how can they just sit there?

Some people were there that day to grieve. Others were seeking solace, but those feelings were tangled up with something else, suspicion. Here's Stuart Cornfeld again.

Everybody was looking for answers, and what was weird was everybody was pointing fingers in the other direction. The movie people thought the punks did it. The punk thought that the movie people did it.

You know.

It was just fucking crazy.

The way it turns out is you're sitting there going like, who killed my best friend?

Yeah?

And you're doing that like for years.

That's tequila Mockingbird Punk scenes to extraordinary.

Thirty years of me going was it this person or could it be that person? Or you never knew, you didn't know who your friends really were.

Point is, the whole scene was on high alert. Fear was running rampant. Everyone was a suspect.

It's very hard to describe how it put a cloud of negativity and paranoia and distrust.

People started suddenly looking around over their shoulder a lot more, and it kind of brought the party to an end.

I didn't want to see any of these people.

I think one other person at that point who had been actually murdered in the punk scene, and it was Jane, who was Rick Wilder's girlfriend that had been killed by the Hillsides Jengler.

That's pleasant gayman. She knew Peter from the punk scene.

I mean, people had died in car accidents or there was a few od's, but I think the only other murder was that. But that was also by a known serial killer. So this was just kind of different, you know, because it was just like who who would murder him? He was so sort of innocuous.

We had lost people close to us before, Belushi, Doug, Kenny, Darby, Crash, drugs destroyed some of the best minds of my generation. But a murder was way different. It was violence on top of tragedy. Here's musician Russell Buddy Helm talking about it. He's playing the drums while he talks.

I've gone through a lot of deaths, a lot of violent deaths and music and film business. You know, when Dwayne died, that was rough.

He's referring to Dwayne Almond from the Almond Brothers. He died in a motorcycle accident in nineteen seventy one.

And then when Tim Buckley was murdered that was also very rough. When Peter died just as bad, just as bad, because it was like, what am I doing? You know, all these people that I've worked with intensely creatively, you know, violent deaths, So I was like I couldn't figure out where I belonged, you know, because basically people were getting shot out from underneath me.

Peter's death was like turning on the lights at the zero. Suddenly you saw everything you could ignore in the dark, including yourself.

There was already a great idea of nihilism and a sense of everything's ending, and this is like the last party, feeling like this is like the celebration of the end of the world. Was the mood of that whole scene.

That's Nicholas Shrek. You heard him talk about the occult a few episodes ago.

It was about darkness, like tomorrow there'll be some catastrophe or inferno coming and live it up now. That was the sense of it, and the murder just made that not fun anymore. It made it very real and made it like somebody here is the killer.

Bob Forrest agrees, it just was.

Like a light and all of a sudden, and we'd already had a couple of people die of drugs, but to be murdered, it was like, holy fuck, there had to be somebody we know, somebody we know murdered. Peter Ivers.

The one thing that I can attest to with complete a surety is what his murder did to the downtown arts scene, and that was cause it to come to a screeching halt. And realized that the innocence was over, that all of this fun that we were having and this I can live forever, and well, let's can go right through me and we can do anything. That stopped was a very sobering event.

That last voice is Steven Semeyer. He's an artist.

I mean, none of us had been murdered, none of us had had foul play like that. We'd had our cars broken into, our studios broken into, we might have been you know, harassed downtown by you know, various people, but nothing on the level of murder had happened. So it for a while there it was like everyone felt like he suddenly grew up and it kind of changed everything. It was kind of like a milestone.

That was it.

For Alan Sachs. Peter's death was a turning point.

Peter's death was the signal for me to leave this scene.

By day I was I was where.

I was producing TV movies. By night, I was, you know, sitting in David Jove's cave.

He went to the cave a few more times, but he found himself going there less and less. Eventually he stopped altogether.

I stopped drinking, I stopped using any sort of drugs. That was a big change. I didn't want to be part of it anymore. And yet there was, you know, drugs and alcohol was very prevalent in there. That kind of signaled me that I had to go somewhere else.

For him, that somewhere else was AA.

The reason that the Alcoholics Anonymous program works is because they say, you got to go to a meeting a day the first year, and if you surround yourself with other recovered alcoholics, then it's safe. But if they're still drinking, it's not.

Simple as that.

There was a meeting in AA on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and you would go there on a Friday night and there were like two hundred people sitting around, and several of them part of the cave scene. A lot of people went in that direction.

Bob Forrest went even further. He went from playing in bands like Felonious Monster and enjoying the drugs and parties that entailed to becoming a world renowned addiction counselor. And for that I take my hat off to him. One person who did not attend Peter's service was David Jove. Instead, Jove hosted his own thing for Peter. Ken Yaz was there.

David threw a memorial service for him in a room next to the whiskey on sunset.

David was appropriately upset, but there was clearly something going on.

There was something amiss about the whole thing.

Funerals are for the living. They're supposed to give us closure. But after the memorial, after Peter's ashes went floating down the river, and after we all went back to our everyday lives, there was still no closure. One person who wasn't willing to stand for that was Lucy Fisher. Although she and Peter were separated, they were still deeply connected, and so she decided to take things into her own hands.

Lucy and Mark Canton and I all put up It sounds like a small amount now, but we just put up ten thousand dollars reward at that time.

That's Rod Falconer again, Peter's screenwriting partner. By the way, ten thousand dollars back then is thirty thousand dollars in today's money.

And Lucy hired private detective. The cops never really I don't know, they never really came up with anything.

In the absence of any clear answers, people in the scenes start speculating, and it's not long before theories begin to emerge. Peter owed twenty five thousand to a Samoan drug gang based in Redwood City and that they were likely would have killed them for the debt.

Peter was messing around with many, many women in the Beverly Hills area.

I got a phone call saying, you're next, and I said, come on over. I'm waiting for.

You, but that's for the next episode. See you then. Peter and the Acid Case is based on interviews recorded and researched by Alan Sachs. It's produced by Imagine Audio, Alan Sachs Productions and Awfully Nice for iHeartMedia. I'm your Host Penelope Speerris. The series is written by Caitlin Fontana. Peter and the Acid King is produced by Amber von Schassen. The senior producer is Caitlin Fontana and the supervising producer