We’re going to launch Purple Haze this afternoon,” says Peter Schroff over lunch at Lemonade, a comfort food cafeteria on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach. “You should join us.” Schroff is tall, slender, bald, and 60 years old. He wears scuffed brown boots, calf-length Adidas sweatpants, a black T-shirt that says “Superlove,” and a man purse decorated with a fluffy rabbit’s foot.
He wears a face of perpetual wonder. I get the sense that he does a lot of internal chuckling. “What’s Purple Haze?” I ask, speculating if it might be something he scored at the medical marijuana dispensary up the street.
“You’ll find out,” he answers.
In the 80s Schroff was an ace shaper and clothing designer. Later he designed retail stores, tradeshow booths, nightclubs, restaurants, and furniture. He made surfboard sculptures, among them The Pink Whale, a sexily spear-shaped board decked out with fins as feet, exhaust pipes, a guitar neck, and a beer tap.
“He’s a fricken’ artistic, creative genius,” says former Quiksilver Vice President Danny Kwock, who worked with Peter in the early 1990s. “He was way ahead of his time. He was almost too much for the surf industry to handle.”
“I first met Schroff at a party at his house in Venice,” remembers the surfer/clothing designer Trace Marshall. “I walk in and see this tall, bald guy talking with this crazy lisp. I couldn’t tell if he was gay or not. There was this Chihuahua sitting in one of those futuristic globe chairs hanging from a chain. I was like, ‘Who is this dude?’ We became good friends. He’s just so innovative. I think about what he was doing with board design and airbrushing and his Fuck You/New Wave attitude—it was just so beyond. It took surfing, what, almost a decade to catch on? That’s what he does, he stays ahead of the times. He’s still running around with disco balls on his head.”
It’s true that Schroff has a peculiar way of speaking, sort of a lisp, but also a rounding off of words, as if he’s deaf. In fact he is nearly deaf, which he attributes to a combination of surfer’s ear and all those years in the shaping room with a whining planer.
Over lunch I learn a few more things:
He bought a house in Venice in ’87, built a three-story loft in the back, and divided it up into a series of rental units. He still lives there in a space so tiny that he can reach into the kitchen and make coffee while sitting on the toilet.
He’s taken several “Doing-By-Doing” workshops with renowned performance artist Rachel Rosenthal. I also took the same workshop some years back and, in the depths of improvised scenes, clothes came off and students became fire-breathing dragons and sex-crazed oak trees.
He regards the Skil 100 planer as one of the greatest tools ever made.
He loves to “jammiepoo,” which means he and a couple friends get together and make music. Peter sings.
He’s had a whole bunch of girlfriends, but about a decade ago discovered dogs. “I’m a really good friend but I’m a really lousy partner, or slave.” He laughs. “When expectations are put upon me, and I have to live with expectations, my tendency is to fuck that up. I love dogs for their unconditional love.”
I first encountered Schroff as a shaper in the pages of the surf mags, circa early 80s. His ads were design-savvy and conceptual. The Schroff Surfboards logo was a checkered flag, albeit slanted, as if in rapid motion. In one ad he wears Bermuda shorts and a big straw hat. Under each arm are surfboards shaped into what resemble sexy swordfish—girlish curves, needle noses. In another, one of his performance artist pals looks on in astonishment as a spermatozoa-shaped board floats beside him.
Schroff hailed from Newport Beach, aka Echo Beach. During this era, a big flourishing off-the-top, where you fell but got photographed, carried far more weight than a big flourishing off-the-top that you made but didn’t get photographed—tree-falls-in-the-forest stuff, with an overtly narcissistic edge. It was a major departure from the subdued 70s. It was Warholian, a kind of surfing pop art.
For the beneficiaries of this movement, it was a way to be a pro surfer without having to surf contests—“photo sluts,” we called them. For Schroff, it was a contained little world that gave him a view into commercialized surfing— like looking into a snow globe or an aquarium.
He walks with me after lunch to my car so I can drop him off at his van and follow him to his partner’s house where, he tells me, Purple Haze is stashed.
“Ever been to Burning Man?” he asks. “I’ve been going for almost a couple decades. It’s great to experience this utopia. There’s no money there, everybody barters. You go up and say, ‘Is this space available,’ and you end up being neighbors. You have breakfast together. What it takes two years to do in a neighborhood in North America you do in like four hours at Burning Man. That kind of relationship grows very quickly there. When you don’t have the rules of society agitating the history of it, things actually work. People love to love each other and do things for people. If you have a Mercedes and own a mansion, at Burning Man it means jack shit. It’s an interesting erasing of who is king of the hill.”
We get in my car and Peter directs me left here, right there. “I know I parked on one of these streets,” he says. “You can’t miss it. It’s a big white van.” Rounding a corner, we nearly run into a vibrant trans-woman crossing the street. She wears high heels, a bright floral dress, and a shiny yellow wig.
Peter rolls down the window. “Maia!” he says.
The trans-woman looks over. “Peter!”
He hops out and they hug and he introduces her. They make plans to hang out soon.
We continue down various streets with no luck. “My partner calls me Mr. Bean, like on that British comedy,” he says. “In the show everything goes wrong. That’s kind of how my life goes.”
He laughs at himself. “Oh, there it is, just there.”
I pull up to Peter’s tall Mercedes Sprinter. He hops out, opens the door, and runs back to me on my side of the car. He holds out a key. “See that,” he says. “That’s a $700 key. I keep it on this thick chain. Know how many I’ve lost? Four!”
He hops into his Sprinter and I follow him a few blocks to a one-story home with a detached garage. Inside, a big screen-printing press sits beside stacks of paints. A Clockwork Orange poster hangs on the wall. In the corner are boxes, all of which have been custom printed in various fluoro colors. A flaxen-haired, suntanned bloke rolls up on a bike.
“How’s your chain, Titty?” says Peter, referring to the hip-hop chain around the man’s neck.
“What about your sissy handbag?” Titty retorts, referring to Peter’s man purse.
“This is Tony, my partner,” Peter says, “but I don’t think he looks like a Tony so I call him Titty.”
Tony and I shake hands. He brings us into the house and shows me the office where he and Peter run their business. We watch a stop-motion animation video they made that pokes fun at the surf world. Then we walk into the front yard and Peter and Tony disappear behind the side of the house. They emerge a few seconds later carrying a massive purple surfboard, holding it from opposite ends.
“Here’s Purple Haze,” says Peter. “It’s eighteen-feet long, twenty-nine inches wide, and nine inches thick. It has thirty-six inches of nose rocker. I wanted to do something more wicked than The Pink Whale. It’s like an Aladdin shoe. Normally it has a big Buddha statue on it and about 300 pounds of brass animals. It’s like Buddha’s kingdom.”
Peter explains that he’d shaped it in 1988 for a Gotcha ad and that it has been lying dormant since. After a Laurel-and-Hardy-like comedy of trying to fit Purple Haze into Peter’s Sprinter, we head down to a sandy beach in Marina Del Rey. The sun is blazing and the water is calm. A thousand moored sailboats fill our view.
“Ah fuck, we forgot the paddle,” says Peter.
He and Tony argue over whose job is was to remember the item. Peter looks up to the palm trees. “Let’s see if we can find a palm frond and use that,” he suggests.
After much searching they discover nothing of use. Across the way is an SUP rental place and Tony goes over and rents a paddle. Peter suits up—an olive green Aleeda long john. He screws a keel into the base of his board in order to make it less tippy.
As he and Tony carry Purple Haze to the water, there are double takes from dog walkers and sunbathers. They walk it out into knee-deep water and Peter climbs on. At first he’s awkward and unbalanced but after a few strokes he stands tall, proud, weaving this strange Aladdin’s shoe through the glassy water.
I met Peter again a few days later at a strip mall in Malibu. While waiting for him to arrive, I ran into surf writer/director Sam George, who was getting dessert for his family at a Pavilions supermarket frequented by paparazzi-stalked movie stars and beach bums alike. When I told him who I was waiting for he decided to stick around.
“Peter Schroff,” he said excitedly. “I haven’t seen him in twenty years!”
A couple minutes later Peter pulled into the parking lot in his unmistakable white Sprinter, a beatific smile on his face like some loopy ice cream man out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Sam and I went to greet him and he handed us stickers. One was a rectangle of orange stripes, a Schroff logo at the bottom. The other depicted a pastoral scene of pine trees, a ranch house, a horse, an elk, and an African-American couple smiling happily amid flowers and crates of apples and pumpkins. “All suffering SOON TO END!” read the text “SCHROFF IS BACK…” (Later Peter would explain that it was a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet that he had doctored.)
After Sam went on his way, Peter and I found oversized chairs in a courtyard and took a seat. In black boots, bell-bottom jeans, and black tee, Peter told me that he’d had an impromptu late night with Tony. “I stayed up singing right through to the morning.”
“You do covers or originals?” I asked.
“It’s all improvised. I just make up lyrics.”
I told him that I wanted to hear his story—how he got into surfing, shaping, and art. Without pause he started in.
“I was born May 16, 1954 in Newport Beach, at Hoag Hospital. Both my parents were from the beat generation, did lots of drugs, got strung out on heroin, making weekly trips to Tijuana. I didn’t know what was going on, being a little tot, but being from parents like that, you moved around a lot. I never stayed in a school for over a year until high school, and so speaking funny like I do, and having a name like Peter, ‘Peter Peter pumpkin eater,’ and being a new kid at school, I was an easy target, so you become very tough and learn to find the right crowd, the twisted crowd, which are usually the hip people.
“In high school I got into music and surfing. Somebody gave my dad this stolen Hobie that was painted purple with a spray can and that shifted my whole life. It gave me a direction to follow. I was obsessed with surfing.”
Around this time, Peter’s father went to prison “for stealing a car and for growing six-foot plants in his backyard.” When he got out, Peter’s grandparents bought the family a house in Santa Ana. “It was on this dirt road, a Mexican area, the white kids had rock fights with the Mexican kids. Anyway, I ended up being taken in by this Mexican family, the ones I’d have rock fights with. I ended up living with them practically. They took me in like family. That was my first sense of friends that you trust.”
At home, Peter’s parents’ marriage began dissolving and they soon separated. Peter moved with his father to Newport Beach and enrolled at Newport Harbor High, where he fell in with a crew of surf rats. They surfed before and after school and, when the waves were shitty, they hung out at the local surf shop.
Peter’s father opened an auto body repair shop and taught his son how to sand and mask cars. “That was a blessing,” said Peter. “I learned how to work with my hands, I learned how to spray, learned how to tape off—all things that are required for shaping and glassing a surfboard.”
In his spare time Peter made skateboards. “I’d dish out the deck and give them an awesome paint job.” His father had a connection with Hobie and managed to wrangle Peter a good board. At age 13 Peter shaped his first board, a longboard he stripped of its fiberglass and reshaped on the kitchen table, then glassed on the back patio. One led to another. “Mitch’s in La Jolla sold second blanks for $14. My dad and I would go down, pick up a carload of blanks, and I’d shape them.”
In 1969, when he was 14, Peter and his father moved to Maui. Peter got tons of surf, but mixing with the locals was not easy. “School was rough. The mokes would tell you you couldn’t wear things. They’d beat the shit out of you.”
After two months of high school Peter moved back to California. The best thing to come out of Maui was a driver’s license. Back then you could get one at age 14-and-a-half. Peter moved in with a friend, the hot Newport surfer Lenny Foster, and his family. He bought a ’58 VW Bug and hit Rincon, Blacks, and everywhere in between. He kept shaping.
By this time his father had moved back to Newport and Peter had built a shaping and glassing room in their home. “Next thing I knew,” said Peter, “that became my business.”
Along with building things, Peter had a big interest in art. In ’75 he got a scholarship to go to CalArts, the renowned visual and performing arts university founded by Walt Disney. At CalArts Peter studied conceptual, video, and performance art. He had great teachers: John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, Mike Asher. But it was a long haul from Newport Beach to Valencia and Peter could barely afford the gas. On top of this his parents weren’t supportive—they saw no viable career path in making art. After a year he took a leave of absence and never went back.
He moved into a house in Costa Mesa and built a shaping room. “I had a technique for building them. You build the exterior, then you put horizontal drywall inside, you fill it up with foam dust, do the inside of the ceiling, fill the top with foam dust, and put the roof on, build a door, and fill it with foam dust, and you can literally stand outside the shaping room and not hear it. I mean, the fire department probably wouldn’t be too happy about it.”
He converted the garage into a laminating room and the guest room into a sanding and polishing room. His home was a veritable surfboard factory. “We were doing like 25 boards a week. I had a whole crew coming in to work there. I had a duct going from the laminating room to the alley that sucked the fumes out and pumped them into the alley.”
Peter’s first board label was Underdog. Later he changed the name to Cheetah Designs. “My mom frequented a club in Venice at the P.O.P. Pier called The Cheetah.” His surfboards sold in local shops. This was the mid-to-late 70s when there was a big Australian presence in Newport. Quiksilver was there, along with McCoy Surfboards. Rabbit Bartholomew and Cheyne Horan surfed 54th Street whenever they were in California and Peter was inspired. He met with Geoff McCoy about working under him. McCoy offered him a deal but when Peter told a local shop owner (who was the primary dealer of Cheetah Designs) about his decision he “flipped out.” The shop owner responded by encouraging Peter to step it up in his shaping and in the promotion and marketing of his boards. “That was the beginning of the Schroff label,” said Peter.
He moved from his home shaping room to a new space adjacent to his father’s body shop. Demand for Schroff Surfboards grew. In ’81 he opened up a surf shop in Newport. He rented a van, filled it with 70 boards, and sent team rider Dan Flecky on an East Coast tour. Schroff Surfboards were flavorful. The noses were narrow, the wide points typically behind center, the tails plump and ass-like. Air sprays boldly reflected the New Wave music scene. They were a hit on the East Coast and Peter’s dealer roster grew. He opened his first proper factory soon after and was doing about 150 boards a month.
“In ’81 I went to Surf Expo for the first time. I did a line of five T-shirts, and that just skyrocketed. That was the beginning of the clothing label.”
Peter scanned the immaculately clean courtyard. “Cool to smoke here?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
He pulled out an American Spirit, lit it, and took a long drag. Then he exhaled with a sigh.
“So the T-shirts expanded to cut-and-sew. I became a fashion victim. I had all these designer clothes, about 50 pairs of shoes. I took classes in fashion, at Saddleback College. I learned how to sew. But about a year into it I started spitting up blood. What happened was we grew too fast. That was my biggest mistake—because it wasn’t something I was trained in managing. I knew nothing about sewing. I couldn’t manage both the boards and clothes. The stress was overwhelming. It was like I was getting an ulcer. I thought, ‘This isn’t worth killing myself over.’”
After a brief but successful run, Peter licensed out his company and walked away. Gotcha quickly scooped him up as a creative director and clothing designer. But his forte, it turned out, was designing window displays and trade show booths. “I liked that,” said Peter. “Every project was different.”
His trade show booths were like no other. “I have an obsession for cones. In my Venice house I had about 300, it was like being inside a cave. I go to the flea market and if I see a cone it’s in my box! So I built a booth for Gotcha made out of these modular panels and these 12-foot high cones, and they were sprayed from yellow to orange to hot pink, so it looked like the thing was on fire!”
Peter grew excited talking about these memories. He told me that he started collecting various tchotchkes. “I’ve got a thing for disco balls. I’ve got a whole collection of them.” His obsessions found their way into his work and his tradeshow booths became an ASR (Action Sports Retailer) high point: ‘What would Schroff come up with next?’ His references and influences were much broader than the surf world.
In 1985 he moved to downtown LA. “My whole life was performance art. There was a community downtown, must have been a couple hundred of us, we all did performance art. My girlfriend and I would have performance evenings twice a month where we’d invite our friends.”
Peter described one of his pieces: At the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, he covered the grand staircase in white fabric on which he projected images of an ultramarine swimming pool and a chair floating surreally atop the surface. Through these images Peter walked slowly down the staircase, naked. “The work was referred to as very German Expressionist. Very deep. Very heavy. Very thick.”
In ’91 Peter started working for Quiksilver. They gave him a big budget and let him run wild. “I was just starting to get into flea markets a lot, and when I got into flea markets it’d be like eight hour Sundays, getting there at six or seven in the morning. And I had a system with this heavy-duty cart. I’d take garment boxes and fill them and stack about four of them on it. So on an average weekend I’d be dumping two or three grand at the Rose Bowl, PCC, the Veteran in Long Beach, or the Santa Monica flea market. It was an obsession. I was like an orphanage for all this weird shit.”
During one of his Rose Bowl visits Peter found a three-foot-high, gold leaf antique Buddha. It would be the inspiration for Purple Haze. “I got a Styrofoam blank made, drew up a foil for it, taped out the template at my house in Venice. Then I started collecting all the brass animals to fill the space.”
In 1992 Quiksilver opened its first Boardriders Club in Waikiki. Peter played a big role in what would grow into a slew of stores. I remember my first visit to a Boardriders Club, the shrine-like collages, installations, and assemblages, the gleaming yellow boards that pointed skyward. They were not so much functional surfboards as the surfboards of dreams: super narrow, exaggerated rocker, noses resembling, as Peter put it, “an Aladdin shoe,” suggesting magic carpets.
“He could interpret whatever was going on in fashion, music, art, surf, food, language, and give it that twist,” former Quiksilver CEO Bob McKnight told me. “It was always just that far to the left of center. He was offbeat and sort of game-changing for our industry at the time.”
In Peter’s late 80s and early 90s work you could feel him both stretching the surf world way out of its comfort zone, and also wanting to break from it, which eventually he did. In ’97 Peter met a Brazilian model who lived in New York and fell in love. She moved in with Peter in Venice and they got engaged. Peter designed Club Love, a nightclub in São Paulo. “It was very psychedelic pop. I took a lot of vintage props and lamps and shipped them to São Paulo. We stayed there a month doing the installation. One wall was a big black Chanel logo. The other was Versace. There was a big black feather boa in the center of the room. In the men’s room there were three levels of urinals and a digital display that said Small, Medium, or Large.”
Not long after designing Club Love Peter and his fiancé broke up. A tough period followed and his relationship with Quiksilver dissolved. His sensibilities were attuned more to the larger art world than surfing. “I was trying to put the pieces back together,” he said. “I just got deep into design work.”
But the surf world drew him back in. In the late 90s O’Neill hired him to design their trade show booth. “It was very clean and futuristic. I was moving away from kitsch and moving toward minimal. There were projections of a lot of O’Neill stuff. I got to re-create, in a very surreal way, O’Neill’s history.”
His O’Neill booth was a hit, which then led to a long stint with OP. “I became known for coming in when a company was losing its edge. When they needed to have some new juice pumped into it, a new face lift, they’d bring me in to do it.”
Peter found a sweet niche. His rate was $250 an hour. He’d fly to Milan for the design shows, New York for art gallery and museum exhibitions. “I was following the design circuit, hanging out with design people.”
In 2008 he launched a company called Prototype. “I love creating with other people. Prototype was a structure that was put together so you could go anywhere in the world and collaborate with artists, a cross pollination of artists and designers. It was like creating a mirage. They were these big video projections, designed for companies like BMW to get into the art world.”
Prototype eventually collapsed when Peter fell out with his partner. “After that I started losing interest in almost everything. I wasn’t really motivated to do anything. I just wanted to simplify life. I got over the designer clothes, the looking good. I guess it was like a midlife crisis or something. I was wondering what came next.
Peter tapped out another cigarette and lit it. The sun was dropping, the bright courtyard was now cast in long shadows. We’d been talking for over an hour and we needed to eat. We went to Ollie’s Duck & Dive, a local gastro pub. A row of suntanned, salt-crusted surfers sat on bar stools, eyes glued to the surf videos onscreen. A hostess showed us to a table in the back. When our bubbly waitress turned to Peter he looked up at her and brought his hands politely together. “I’d like a martini, up, with a cherry.”
He smiled the most adorable smile, and for a glowing second he was a third-grade kid ordering a chocolate milkshake with extra whipped cream.
I couldn’t help myself.
“Peter, man, how do you do it?”
“What?”
“You’ve got this lightness about you. You’re like a 20 year old trapped in a sixty-year-old body.”
“A lot of people ask the same question. I think it’s just kind of where your heart is and the rest follows. Most of my friends and girlfriends are twenty, twenty-five years younger. And taking care of myself. Eat all organic. Go to yoga five, six days a week. I think a lot of it comes from just being in the art world and hanging around people whose minds are active and who don’t sit around watching TV. I stopped watching TV in ’81. And just getting out and doing things. You know the saying, ‘rust never sleeps.’”
We talked about surfing, how on one hand it keeps you young and vital, on the other it can lead to bitterness with the exploding crowds and the way athleticism diminishes with age. “That’s one of the reasons I do yoga and stay fit, ’cause I want to keep riding a shortboard. If I was going to ride a longboard or an SUP I’d just play golf.”
He chuckled.
“You stay healthy, but you’re not afraid to party,” I say.
“Oh, no! I think partying is the main factor of keeping you young. Look at Keith Richards and those people, they’re young in spirit.”
The drinks came and so did the burgers we’d ordered. We got back to his bio. In ’92 Peter met Tony and they became fast friends. Tony was a skater back in London and a fan of the Schroff label. They were neighbors in Venice and partied together and went to raves. In 2013 they re-launched the Schroff label. It’s a very different enterprise now compared to where it last left off. Peter shapes in a friend’s room in Costa Mesa. The screen-printing, the wacky ads and propaganda, their limited edition T-shirts, the stop-motion animation video—this stuff happens in Tony’s backyard.
“We just get fucked up at night and think up quirky things. You know, like the Hang Five shoe. They come one shoe to a box—one side’s a goofy foot, the other regular. We’re into making things extra special…”
He sucked down the last of his martini. “We’re finding our place in the market. We spent a year giving blowjobs to all the surf shops and we found out that we don’t like to give them. Pretty soon you lose your identity…”
He finished the last of his hamburger, looked out across the restaurant, and laughed. “I’ve gone from directing people and living in a three-story glass penthouse to getting rid of everything, renting the house, living in a car park, buying a Sprinter, and building a camper to move into the Sprinter, just having nothing…
“You create what’s important in your life. There was a time when building surfboards and doing design work for corporations was important to me, so that’s what I created in my life. Right now what’s important to me is people and creativity. I think the funnest thing in my life right now is to get together with these guys and jam.”
Peter texts me at 11:29 p.m. on a Sunday night: Dude you still around we’re gonna jammiepoo. He follows with an address on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice. On a dodgy strip of massage parlors and medical marijuana dispensaries, I knock hard on the storefront door, as Peter had instructed. Peter opens up, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other. He wears brown scuffed boots, black calf-length Adidas sweatpants, a black V-neck tee. His smile is beatific and stony. He leads me into a brightly lit art studio. On the walls hang large-scale oil paintings-in-progress. “This is my friend Alex’s work,” he says. “He’s got a show coming up. Someone offered to buy all the work for 100 grand but he said no. He’s got integrity.”
Peter leads me through the back half of the studio, a cluttered storage of canvases, frames, skate decks, LPs, and books. We exit onto a patio where Tony chats with a dark-skinned guy with a Middle-Eastern beard. Tony greets me, introduces Alex, aka Da Shark. Alex, Tony explains, recently posted a photo of himself holding an AK-47 on Facebook. A few days later, he had the FBI knocking on his door.
Peter hands me a beer. He says that they have great parties back here, that Tony often DJs. “How about that lightning today,” says Tony, referring to a freak summer shower that blew through earlier in the day and delivered a single bolt of lightning to Venice beach, injuring thirteen and killing one.
“It sounded like a bomb went off, or a plane crash,” says Alex.
We sip beers and shoot the shit. A joint comes out. There is some dispute about their band name. Peter tells me it’s 20/20/20 “because Da Shark’s in his 20s, Titty’s in his 40s, and, well, I’m in my 60s.” Tony insists that they’re called The Baby Bumps, and that they’re a boy band.
“We need to give you a nickname,” Peter says to me. After a few choices he comes up with “Jamie Boy” and I feel like I’m being sworn in.
“Well, shall we get into this?” says Peter.
We head to the front studio. Tony plays his synth, Alex a sampler, Peter shimmies. They’re butted up against a large-scale canvas, a figurative oil painting of a female body sitting naked on a chair. The three of them stand with their backs to me. They play with sounds, a percussion beat that loops, a vacuum cleaner roar that perfectly fits the space. Peter, beer and cig in hand, finds his way into a subtle dance that is fluid, hip-swiveling, a dance that wants to be done shirtless in leather pants. I think of Jim Morrison, Bowie, Lux Interior of The Cramps, and all Peter’s years of doing performance art. And the same way his body wraps itself around the music in primal fashion, so do his vocals. He’s not so much singing words as doing a macabre scat, punctuated with primal roars and shouts. Open vowels pinch down into screeching consonants. It’s at once anguished and exultant.
I take pictures, write notes. I remember how a couple nights earlier I’d run into Peter at an art show in downtown LA. I was with a friend, a smart, successful writer. I introduced her to Peter. Peter pulled out a tampon from the man purse that forever hangs on his hip. It was streaked red and I wasn’t sure if it was a party trick or an actual soiled tampon he toted around with him. “You just never know what you’re going to find in my bag. Hi, nice to meet you,” he said and held out his hand.
“I’m not going to shake your hand when you were just holding a tampon,” my friend countered.
For an awkward moment I thought he’d put her off, but Peter smiled, made a witty remark and won her over in about thirty seconds. “Wow,” she said to me after he left, “That guy is incredible!”
Peter shakes a fist at the heavens and keels over as if about to vomit. He raises his arms rapturously overhead, all the while trilling some primordial language that somehow makes perfect sense. I watch for another half hour.
It’s impressive the way Tony and Alex riff off each other, the way Peter shuts his eyes and loses himself. He begins with the words “All fucked up,” then makes whining sounds, then croons, “You’re in for the long fuckin’ haullllllll,” which I take to mean they’re going to be jamming till the sun comes up.
Later, when I’m back home and asleep, I get a text from Peter. “You can surf without a board,” it says.
It’s 4:17 a.m. ◊
