Peter Ivers: ave atque vale

Dennis Perrin takes a break from the troubles of the world, here. In reading Dennis' post, I was moved to find out a little more about someone he mentioned: Peter Ivers, the brilliant but ultimately somewhat troubled songwriter/performer/New Wave impresario.

Ivers belonged to the coterie of folks who haunted Harvard in the late 60s, who believed that they were destined to conquer/transform the creative world. This is a classic undergraduate fantasy--"our group is SPECIAL"--but given where they were and when, it must've been even more seductive. Some did prevail, albeit only temporarily: National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, for example. But for the others, the dream ended as it always does, smashed against the rocks of adulthood, biology, commerce, happenstance. The one thing you can't see from college is the role of seredipity; the world is not one big campus, to be grabbed and bent to your will. It's much, much bigger than that, and has its own imperatives to achieve. That's both great and terrible, but some people who cut a figure at a high-falutin' school never get over the big drop into the soup. God knows it took me a bit--assuming that I have!

Unlike Kenney, Ivers never found (or refused to seek) mainstream success; he scuffled along doing interesting, but difficult, projects until his murder in 1983. Like Kenney, he seemed totally committed to inhabiting a personal myth. And like Kenney, this strategy worked splendidly in college, but less and less so as he got older. Here's an interesting (though hard to read!) obituary/appreciation clipped from New York magazine. There's also a nice song Ivers wrote at the bottom of the page. Hail and farewell to another interesting person that I never met.