By all accounts, Peter Ivers was an impish and whip-smart talent who was just starting to find his footing in the entertainment industrial complex of Los Angeles in the 1980s. Ivers, who’d attended Harvard with some of the founders of National Lampoon and had landed a record deal for his harmonica-forward music, found some success (if not a lot of money) hosting a Los Angeles cable access show devoted to punk music called New Wave Theater. Ivers was not a punk, but his show featured many of the best underground acts of his era. The show was even picked up by the USA Network, quite a jump for something produced on a budget of less than zero.
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Someone, however, had reason to kill Peter Ivers. He was found bludgeoned in his Skid Row loft in the early hours of March 3, 1983. The murder case remains unsolved 40 years later.
Several of Ivers’s friends, many well-known names in Hollywood, have committed to retelling his story in the ascendant format of the 2020s: a documentary podcast called Peter and the Acid King, a coproduction of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Imagine Audio that kicked off earlier this fall.
Alan Sacks, a cocreator of Welcome Back, Kotter and a fellow traveler in the early-1980s punk scene that Ivers highlighted on New Wave Theater, took it upon himself to interview mutual friends and dig into police reports and press from the time in order to possibly reopen the decades-old cold case. With a crew of writers and producers, including the team at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, he’s bringing the story of Ivers’s death and life to a new generation hooked on audio whodunits.
To tell the tale, Sacks, whose gravelly voice opens each episode with an explicit content warning, brought on filmmaker Penelope Spheeris to serve as narrator, an inspired choice in collaborator.
Spheeris made her name with the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, which captured live footage and interviews with Black Flag, Germs, X, and Alice Bag when those artists were mostly unknown outside a small, fiercely protective (and just plain fierce) punk scene. Spheeris, whose tough, no-BS interviewing style was on display in Decline’s sequels about L.A.’s hair-metal era and 1990s squatter-punk subculture, brings the same vim to her podcast narration.
The director also adds color and context to the intersecting scenes of Hollywood and punk rock, which she and Ivers both swam in, attending shows at clubs like the Masque and the Zero Club by night, lining up movie deals by day. (Spheeris went on to direct Wayne’s World and Black Sheep and chides herself in the first episode for selling out.) The podcast comes most alive when you can tell Spheeris is going off script, riffing about that impossible-to-imagine era when rent was $75 a month and no one had a cell phone. A keen chronicler of microscenes, Spheeris livens up what could be an anthropological take on the byzantine workings of early-’80s Los Angeles life, making it feel vibrant after all these years and so many deaths, including Lampoon cofounder Douglas Kenney and John Belushi, who are both name-checked along the way.
In many ways, Peter and the Acid King is a quintessentially L.A. story: a creative but damaged person trying to make it in Hollywood—Ivers composed the song “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine)” for David Lynch’s Eraserhead, which was later covered by Devo—who finds himself mixing with A-list actors, members of Fleetwood Mac, and some very sketchy people whose real names he may never have known. The sprawl of connections is reminiscent of other L.A. fictions, like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (based on Raymond Carver’s short stories), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and neo-noirs like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake. Randomness rides shotgun with malevolence; it always seems to be midnight, even during the day.
Tonally, Peter and the Acid King strikes a balance between super-self-referential nostalgia trip (I was reminded both of Patti Smith’s Just Kids audiobook and Lili Anolik’s Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College podcast) and the tropes of true-crime podcasting, a genre that has needed some updating since the 2014 debut of Serial. For Spheeris, a precondition of her involvement was the promise not to exploit the grisliness of Ivers’s murder. “When we make more violence on the screens, then there is more violence in the world,” Spheeris says. “It keeps perpetuating an endless cycle.”
As for Ivers’s unsolved murder, listeners will have to tune in to the final episodes and make up their minds if Spheeris, Sacks, and their fellow sleuths cracked the case. “I had a suspicion of who it was,” Spheeris tells me. “And now that’s kind of been blown out of the water.”•
