Peter and the Acid King: New Wave Theater

Published Oct 16, 2023, 7:01 AM

When an opportunity that combines Peter’s love of music, performance, and LA’s underground comes his way, he feels like it might be a new beginning. But Peter has no idea what—or who—he’s dealing with. 

This episode features information and audio from the following sources:

New Wave Theater

“How Punk is This?” Ask Me Another, NPR. 

Punk and Tomatoes 

Starting from the Zero

Inside John Belushi’s Long Lost Punk Song With Fear

Over the edge: The incredible life and mysterious death of Peter Ivers

Unraveling the Mystery of Peter Ivers

Rediscovering Peter Ivers, a punk-rock Zelig with a glittering résumé and mysterious demise

Hey, it's Alan Sachs back with another reminder. This show has explicit content. Don't do drugs and don't dress silly, and also limit your use of black clothing. Listen to discretion is advised.

It's Halloween Night, nineteen eighty one. All across America, little kids are crawling the streets trigger treating. The popular costume that year is Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, in New York, crowds of comedy fans have gathered at a studio in Rockefeller Center. They've come for a special spectacular paping of Saturday Night Live. At around midnight. The host, actor Donald Pleasance, takes the stage to introduce the musical guest. He doesn't know it, but he's about to witness television history.

I love very frightening, but they're really good nights our Halloween, my guess. By the way, tonight, look out for surprises.

Ladies and gentlemen, fear.

Bebes to talk about low downs.

They're on the SNL stage are a gnarly bunch of punks from southern California. Fear. They launch into their first song, beef Boloney.

Bloons, Bloons.

The audience is full of tourists and regular folks, but mixed in with them tonight are a handful of punks. One of them is Ian McKay, the lead singer of Minor Threat. Ian had been invited to the show that night by SNL's creator, Lauren Michaels.

I got a caller on T in the morning, and then this voice can say, Hey, this is Lorna Michael's Sad Night Live.

Here's Ian in an interview he gave to NPR. According to him, Lauren wanted some authentic punks in the crowd.

What you know, God had been asleep eyes. I don't understand. He goes hold on a second.

Lauren hands the phone to John Belushi, and Belushi explains.

Listen, I'm buddies with the guys from Fear. I'm doing a cameo on the show, but I want to bring some punks up. And I had heard from my friend penelbe Spears. She did this movie called Declined the Western Civilization. She tells me the kids in DC are really cool. She gave me your number.

Okay, fine, Ian, I guess so, I don't remember it, but whatever. Anyway, at Lauren's invitation, Ian and a few other punks are in the crowd, which turns out to be a big mistake because as soon as Fear starts playing, the punk starts slam dancing. Within seconds, the scene is pure chaos. A mike falls into the audience, Ian grabs it and yells that's New York sucks. In case you didn't catch it. Later, some whack punk on stage holds a pumpkin in the air as an offscreen voice shouts, Billy, get the pumpkin, and just before the guy hurls the pumpkin at SNL stage manager, the producers cut the feed.

Cot Cod tell them to Cutcat I go to stockguns.

Hurry up, cut Dot cut. They'll never be showing us Saturday Night Live again. That's leaving notorious lead singer of Fear talking about what happened next the clips from an interview he did with the Lip TV from twenty fifteen. You can still fine clips of that interview on Bill McKenzie's YouTube channel. Punk and Tomatoes, Fear and their fans ended up causing over twenty thousand dollars of damage in the student and they left Punk and guts all over the place. For that, Fear earned themselves a lifetime ban from Saturday Night Live. Good going, dudes.

I can only imagine that the producers must have been pissed after that, like, why the fuck did you book Fear? Who is this band?

That's journalist Stephanie Mendez. She says Fear's performance brought hardcore to a whole new audience.

For kids in places like Kansas or Arkansas or Texas where there really isn't a punk scene and they see this crazy band and they go, WHOA, what the hell is that? I mean, that's essentially what happened in La, right. People in LA were hearing about the sex pistols in the UK and that inspired them to create this whole scene. So seeing a band like Fear on a national show like Saturday Night Live, that must have changed lives for people in the Midwest or elsewhere in the US where they don't have an active punk scene and they're now suddenly introduced to this brand new world, in this brand new music.

At NBC. Fear's performance raised one big question, how the fuck did this happen? For that, we can thank John Belushi and a little public access show from Los Angeles called New Wave Theater. In nineteen eighty Belushi saw Fear perform on the show, he tracked down leaving and they became drinking buddies cheers for beers. So eventually John convinced the SNL bookers to bring the band on as a musical guest, and the rest is history. New Wave Theater started with just David Jove and a video camera shooting local bands. No one expected that it would make it very far, and yet it ended up on broadcast through the USA Network and exposing acts like fear to the mainstream. Today, we're going to talk about how that happened, How David Jove and Peter Ivers built New Wave Theater into a twappy curiosity with surprising influence, and how just as it was about to hit the big time, Peter Ivers turned up dead. I'm Penelope Spheeris, and this is Peter and the Acid King. When music journalist Ed Oakes gave David the idea for New Wave Theater, he'd mostly done it to get David off his back.

I thought I got rid of him. I was so proud and he was gone, and I didn't hear from him again for a month.

He definitely didn't expect Jove to actually pursue the idea.

And then the next time I heard from him, a month or two later, he was just embulent. He was effusive, he was bubbling over with joy. He said, come on over. I have all this footager groups. I want you to see it.

Going to David Jove's place is an experience.

His place. He can't call it an apartment, can't call it a house. It wasn't a loft. It was a storefront. He lived in a storefront. All the windows were painted black. You couldn't see in, you couldn't see.

At Everyone called it the cave. I never went there, but I heard about it, and it sounded too creepy for my taste. But some people loved the cave. It was their landing place when everything else closed down. Alan Sachs was a regular cave dweller.

And I would after two o'clock in the morning, I'm still up, I'm still wired, i still want to do something, as do a lot of people. I would call him and he would say, come on over.

You had to go down this little alley to the back door.

And you'd hid chains. He'd open up the door and say come in quick, don't let the flies out, and you could go in and slam the door, and now he would lock it, and he would lock it.

With a vault.

It's chains, and you knew you were locked inside David Job's place. David had these speakers in the cave that he played insect noises from crickets, bird chirps, and oh my god, he he had like incense or fresh eucalyptus. It always smelled like eucalyptus, like you were at the baths, which obviously didn't match the vibe of the rest of the play. He had crickets on tape chirping all the time. Wind it was like really fucking weird, and it was dark. The walls were painted red, deep red. His pad was set up with all of these little satanic icons all.

Over the place, pentagrams and creepy doll heads hanging around bullet holes in the ceiling.

And yet, I mean, I would take a date there. I thought it was relaxing, except of course, for the cocaine and the guns and all the crazy people running all over the place.

The common thread of attraction was big surprise. Drugs.

Would walk in and there would be maybe half a dozen people all sitting there but not talking, just all kind of bleary eyed all coke dot.

Do you use this man?

Have you ever tried it?

Would you like to give it a shot of.

Be a pile of blow? That'd be a gun on the table, and you never know who was gonna be in there.

He'd go over to his place and he'd be waving a forty five round and offering you a tiny spoonful of coke.

Basically, Jove himself was a real piece of work. He vibrated on this higher frequency and some people really dug it. Ken Yaz worked at Sony at the time.

David.

It was a master conductor, and he knew when to give you a little more, and he knew when to back off.

And you never asked, You just waited until it was there.

Jove loved chaos, and chaos is fun. Permissive. You got the sense he was always in control of these out of control situations.

He gave me this little twenty two deringer twenty two long and said shoot it.

Shoot it at the ceiling.

I did huge mudgle flash.

Couldn't hear for about a week. I said, David, there's plenty of bullet holes up there.

I said, that's right, David, there's a whole second floor on this place.

Does anybody live there?

Turned to me wipe some gold schlagger off his lips and says, I don't know.

But it wasn't just coke and guns and a sense of absolute mania that kept people coming back to the cave. The Cave was also where new Wave Theater came together, and it all started that day when Ed Oaks came over to watch the footage. Jove had been filming at local punk shows.

And he had a unique style, which was the handheld camera moving in and out.

Unique as an understatement. Jove was constantly in motion, mirroring the energy of the band's performances. Jove and Oaks start editing the footage into an actual show. They scribble monologues to open and close each episode, and pretty soon they realize they need a host.

He made me be the original host of the show. I was for pilot purposes, I guess, just to make a pilot and I don't have that personality. I'm not an outfront guy. I'm behind the scenes. And then he was directing me and making me nuts, telling me what to do and how to do it, and I said, you better get yourself a real host.

Enter Peter Ivers According to Alan Sachs, David Jove and Peter Ivers met at a party. They were introduced by David's wife, and apparently David asked Peter to host New Wave Theater the day before the first take OH.

Live and direct from Paradise Studios in Burbank, California.

All World Stage is.

Broad to pretend New Wave Theater in early nineteen eighty, David and ed by the ten pm Sunday night slot on the local public Access network. It cost them fifteen bucks.

With your darming and delightful hosts, Peter Ivers and I host and crew, we welcome you to.

New Way Theater and the show, well, the show was something else.

Guess who's minding the store, folks.

Nobody in lieu.

Of honest, responsible leadership, the lack of which so few Gurkins are aware of.

In the early episodes of New Wave Theater, the lighting was so bad that you could barely even see Peter.

No one was at that shooting. If I had been at that shooting, I would have pulled out a flashlight and aimed it at the band.

I mean, how could he shoot something without lights?

That's crazy.

That's Michael Dare. He was a film critic for the LA Weekly back in the day, and he attended a lot of new wave theater tapings. That first season of the show was very much a public access production. As an opener, Peter would give one of his nonsensical monologues.

The entertainment medium is the last bastion of freedom left upon which that is, designers of tomorrow's entertainment can stand up and be counted. Are you one of them or not?

Then he would intro some random band, We're.

Lucky to be here again with one of the hottest, strongest bands in LA.

You've seen them before, You're gonna be with them?

Some bread By.

The band would play, and then Peter would show up in a wild new outfit to interview them.

Every time the camera was on him, he was wearing something else, and he was just constantly changing and changing and changing and wearing the most ridiculous and fun outfits just to the fuck with everyone's minds.

Here's Peter interviewing Dinah Cancer, the singer of forty five Grave.

Dinah, I want to ask.

You to rate a few powers. How do you rate love as a power.

Do you think it's stronger than hate?

Yes?

And do you think that hates binds two people together even more than love.

You can't forget them. You're obsessed by the one you hate.

Yeah, pick it up?

Is it more?

Even more fun? What's fun about that hate?

What is evil?

Why it gets being up?

You want to hurt others?

Sometimes forty grave.

Sometimes is now.

The whole show had this Diy flare to it, but in its own way, I guess it worked.

It was a fascinating thing to watch and for me, just the best musical education.

After the first season, David starts pitching the show around, thinking maybe he can get paid. He sends it to Stuart Shapiro, a buyer at USA Network.

I believe that David had sent us some tapes before he came to New York, but I have this kind of blurry vision of David coming into the office for the first time. David had this sort of you know how stars have an entourage, David had a personal entourage that was a psychic entourage. He would come into a room and there would be a whirlwind of psychic energy. He came in and said that he wanted to produce bring big, get better quality, and we committed immediately to like first two seasons, or at least in the next season, which we were going to finance. We did finance as Night Flight.

On New Year's Day nineteen eighty two, New Wave Theater goes legit, joining the ninth Flight lineup on USA Network.

The idea of finding all the best local public access shows and putting them together into one show that would go national.

Wow, what a brave move.

I'm so glad USA Network decided to do that. It was called night Flight, and one of them was New Wave Theater.

Looking back, Shapiro's decision to put New Wave Theater on Night Flight was a pretty bold choice. The content was weird and the production values were non existent. Even he had second thoughts.

What I do remember was how rough it was, and the USA Network demanded that we put New Wave Theater at the very end of the show so that would go on late at night, never really quite thinking that. Four hours later, you know it was actually not so late in LA, so it actually became really popular in LA on that time.

LA's new music new wave scene is expanding faster than anyone imagined, with new wave radio networks springing up in LA's new music bands playing all the new national variety TV shows the new music scene slowly moves in on a sleep in America.

The first season shows is just a camera aimed at a bunch of bands with a host who interviews them. The second season took place in another universe.

Jove cuts the performances with footage of space launches, atomic bombs, swimming ducks, any random images he could find.

For the second season, he learned that editing solved everything, that he could just shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot, and go back to his cave and create something brand new.

In a one hour new wave theater.

I would bet it had a thousand cuts. There are all kinds of subliminal things happening in season two that nobody has ever seen until they start going through it frame by frame. Believe me, once he realized he could get away with shit, I saw him cut things into there that were completely against any rules.

The show also features a series of ghost hosts. They do fake product ads and takeover host duties sometimes. Here's actor Tim Matheson, who played Eric Otter Stratton in Animal House.

I'm here with ghost host Tim, who of course led Animal Houses raging battle against the authorities.

Hey, Tim, Audia, act there's no time to create. You just have to go.

When you watch New Wave Theater, it feels like you're watching one giant psycho party.

The shootings were this giant party. We were there to hear these bands play and to dance to them because it was a party.

Here's Iris Berry talking to Alan Sachs.

That was a great show.

Yeah, it was fun.

I was at every filming. Were you no few? Why were you there?

Because that's what we did. It was a thing to do our friends.

Bands were playing and you know, they needed crowd and we wanted to hang out.

Even though it called itself new Wave, the show put a spotlight on a lot of really cool La punk bands.

We shot, you know, all the local bands at forty five Grave X, Fibonacci's, Suburban Lines, Circle Uh Blasters, the Plugs, on and on, and it was a wonderful era in music in La because it was all undiscovered by the record labels.

That's Peter's musical collaborator Russell Buddy Helm. It was often the first time and sometimes the only time any of us saw these bands on TV. But for some of us it felt like they were exploiting the scene, not supporting it.

And then New Wave Theater. For me, it was a misfire from the get go.

That's Germs manager Nicole Panter. She thought Peter was part of the problem. That was the other thing.

For me.

It's like, this guy's a Harvard graduate. He is fucking slumming. Do not sell yourself to me as a cultural arbiter.

I thought his on stage buffoon re was kind of detrimental to the show.

I mean, most people in the hardcore scene kind of dismissed him as this goofy host they had to put up with. Got a new wave theater.

But whether you liked the show or not, New wave theaters band segments were capturing something raw and real.

David and Tequila Mockingbird, who of course was booking the show.

They had really great taste in music.

Tequila Mockingbird, she's the booker for NewWave Theater and one of the grond domes of the scene. Tequila is such a trip.

That show could not have happened without her. Oh my god, she was really She was the one who ran around to every club and actually saw these bands. No one had their finger on the pulse of the LA music scene more than hers.

I had all the rock and roll friends.

That's Tequila.

I was the one that was friends with X and Black Flag and Circle Jerks. We went to three nightclubs at night to see bands to recruit them for New Wave Theater.

For years.

She was so ahead of her time. She had every color of hair different every week. She had the most outrageous wardrobe. She had piercings all over the place, and she was gorgeous. And she's like probably one of two or three black checks in the scene. Tequila was ageless. I mean, she's still in her early twenties, you know what I mean.

I was always a rock and roller.

I was hanging out with the New York Dolls in seventy four, and before that, I hung out, you know, I always hung out backstage. I lived backstage somehow. I don't know how I'd only be the only black kid back there, but I was always backstage because I knew that's where the booze was.

Personally, I was surprised that Tequila book New Wave Theater because she was one of the original real deal punks. Maybe it was because they had the best pot around, and Tequila would often smoke another one just like the other one.

As I recall, I saw an ad in the Music Connection that said putting together a public access TV show, I need bands, and I went in with my suitcase of all these hardcore bands that I had been booking at a place called King's Palace. I went to him and we arranged how we were going to do new Wave theater.

He'd had no idea what punk was.

She's talking about David Jove, by the way.

So when I said, oh, well, I'm going to go see pil and I'm going to talk to them and see if I can get them into new wave theater put them on, he was like, oh, look, they're nothing.

That's not real punk.

It wasn't the first or only disagreement between Tequila and David Jove.

It's just so horrible and so hard to get along with, and you never knew what he was going to do, and he was on bad blow, not even good blow. When the nuclear cocaine of John Belushi arrived, that's when everything went crazy with everybody. He would show up with like a rock like this big sitting on the table, pull a hammer out of his pocket, smash fucking blow everywhere. It was insane, and it was all this like really high grain before that David was doing like shit cocaine. When John Belushi's cocaine got into the picture, nobody could work with him anymore.

We just were mistreated.

As much as possible, Like you know, it's like working for a dictator.

David and Peter were opposites in almost every way, energy, ideas, art, relationships, and people noticed. People liked the performance artist.

Johannah went, Peter was a charming guy, and I liked Peter. I immediately didn't like David Jove. It was just this whole kind of you know, come on with David Jove, like how he was going to make me famous and I was going to be on television and blah blah blah.

To Johannah, the pairing of Peter and Jove was the oddest of couples.

I would talk to him about how come, like, what's the deal with you and David Joe, because you personalities just don't seem like it doesn't jive, but doesn't make any sense. It almost seemed like it was David talking through Peter. I always found it annoying, and I think that Peter thought that he was doing this, you know, this character, and I felt that who Peter was as a human being was way more interesting than any character that he could do.

Peter was smart, brave, exciting to be around. He had a lot going for him, but when he signed up for the show, he had been at a low point.

I think that Peter really believed in the concept of New Ave Theater, and I really think that there was also a little bit of a desperation for Peter with wanting to really make something happen.

But by nineteen eighty three, things were starting to turn around for Peter, maybe thanks partly to New Wave Theater. His star was rising. He was writing songs for people like Diana Ross, he sold a screenplay to Warner Brothers. An audience for New Wave Theater was growing.

At some point, the crowd started getting bigger and bigger, and then suddenly, you know, there was Beverly Dangelo, and there was Harold Remis, and there was John Belushi, and suddenly this very very hip underground was really paying attention to it.

Somehow, New Wave Theater had become a modest hit, but curiously, its success planted the seeds of its downfall. Peter's career was heating up, and given how hard it was to work with a coked up David Jove, Peter's interest in new wave theater began to peter out. Meanwhile, the show's visibility was creating problems for David Jove. The attention puts him in the spotlight, and the spotlight puts him in danger. Here's his friend, Ed Oaks.

It was doomed to failure because as soon as he got close to success, he had to destroy it because ultimately he was afraid that if he stuck up his head, whether he appeared on TV or there was a concert, someone would recognize him and he'd wind up maybe going to jail.

As it turned out, there was a lot more to David Jove than met the eye. For starters, David Jove wasn't even his real name. He went by several napes, and in some circles he was better known as the Acid King. But we'll get into that next time. See you later, fuckers. Peter and the Acid King 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 is John Assanti. Our project manager is Katie Hodges. Our executive producers are Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Caar Welker, Nathan Kloke, Alan Sachs, Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges. The associate producers are Laura Schwartz, Dylan Cainrich and Chris Statue. Co producer on behalf of Shout Studios Bob Emmer. Sound design and mix by Evan Arnette, fact checking by Katherine Barner. Original music composed by Alloy Tracks, Music clearances by Barbara Hall. Voiceover recording by Voice Tracks. West Show artwork by Michael Dare. Special thanks to Annette van Duren. Thank you for listening.

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