‘Peter and the Acid King’ looks at the life and legend of talented friend Peter Ivers whose murder has never been solved.
Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris is host of the new podcast “Peter and the Acid King,” the true story about singer-songwriter Peter Ivers, whose work showed great promise in the ’70s and early ’80s before he was murdered, in a case that has never been solved, in 1983. There’s the time in 1968 when blues legend Muddy Waters declared Ivers – who sat in and played with Waters while still a student at Harvard University – to be the greatest living harmonica player.
“I mean, all of us thought Peter Ivers was going to go to the top of the charts, and then everything flopped,” says, a friend of Ivers through the punk rock scene she chronicled in the 1981 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization.”However, given all the mystery and menace that still swirls around the circumstances of his death, at first she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved.TV producer Alan Sachs, the co-creator of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” was a close friend of Ivers.
“A couple of years later – that’s how long Alan’s been working on this – I get a call,” Spheeris says. “And he said, ‘Can you maybe think about being the host for a podcast based on Peter’s life and that period of time?’Eventually, and only after she was comfortable the podcast wouldn’t focus too much on the grim, grisly details of Ivers’s death, Spheeris was in.
Ivers, who was born in 1946, was a decade or so older than most of the kids in the punk scene spun out of the Masque in Hollywood into clubs from the San Fernando Valley to Chinatown and the South Bay. “It was actually brutal to watch,” Spheeris says. “Because it was so bad – in my opinion. I’m sorry. I don’t want that to be a negative reflection on Peter, but it was really bad.
“I remember the fear of thinking that there was somebody that we all knew that probably did it,” she says. “I remember being afraid. And even though there were other serial killers and all that around that time, to have someone so close get murdered was really shocking.
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