Terminal Love

Murdered in his LA home at the age of 36, Peter Ivers was ahead of his time on multiple fronts. A Harvard classics graduate, songwriter and performance artist (he supported Fleetwood Mac dressed in a nappy and squirted New York Dolls audiences with a phallic water pistol filled with milk), Peter Ivers was also a pioneering, leftfield television host (he gave Black Flag and Dead Kennedy’s early screen time), and regularly partied with John Belushi and David Lynch, composing In Heaven (The Lady In The Radiator Song) for Lynch’s Eraserhead, later covered by Pixies. Though it bombed upon release in 1974, Iver’s second album, Terminal Love, sounds fresh as a daisy today, landing somewhere between Tiny Tim, Todd Rundgren, Jonathan Richman and a John Waters movie. Talking Heads, and even further down the line, Ween, would later tread similar ground to that which Ivers laid down here, and had he lived, he would have surely enjoyed life as a cult icon.