40 years later (!) and Peter is still getting praised/trashed on. I remember talking with someone about a decade ago who had nothing but vitriol toward Peter. The deification fuels the backlash, as well as the Forced Exposure single being the only relatively affordable/available piece of his music for purchase -- I've only seen one copy of Take the Guitar Player for a Ride (from a Cleveland transplant) and that was WAY after I heard it through a burned copy. It's great, but not worth investing months of your life tracking down. Yeah, he wasn't Albert Ayler. No one was. But Peter accomplished a lot by the time he checked out at 24. He was a big influence on me when I was a kid in my early 20s. I was impressed by his ability to bring Television to Cleveland, write for Creem and play with Rocket/Pere Ubu (come to think of it, Ross Johnson did something similar in Memphis minus the Television bit). If you think you're gonna get a back catalog that's something of the magnitude of, say, Wire's 154 (or even Colin Newman's A-Z) in lo-fi form with Peter's work, you're gonna be pretty disappointed. I always understood him as a talented guy from Cleveland who rubbed a few people the wrong way during his brief life (although Crocus told me he was the most talented person he knew at the time), made friends with Lester Bangs (who eulogized him at likely a very fragile point in his own life) and left a bunch of reel-to-reel recordings and a couple studio tracks (with Ubu) behind. The record should be listened to with proper context and realistic expectations in mind. Certainly nothing here no one on Termbo doesn't know. I happen to appreciate much of what Peter did. He motivated me a lot. It probably helps that I didn't know him.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
Print
