Peter Ivers is included in the IRS Corner Website due to his lone musical contribution to the cult David Lynch film ERASERHEAD, the tune "In Heaven.
Peter is probably most famous for being the host of the USA Channel's New Wave Theatre segment of the early 80s Friday evening staple Night Flight. But Ivers has a longer musical history than that. He played harmonica for the Beacon Street Union, a well-known and moderately successful local West Roxbury group in the late 1960's. He was a Political Science major at Harvard (where he got his degree).
Despite his degree in Political Science, he never worked in that filed, choosing instead to pursue a career in music. He recorded four albums for Warner Brothers and Epic, working with such luminaries as Eliot Ingber, John Cale, Gary Wright, Rod Taylor, Van Dyke Parks and Richard Greene. In 1976 a mutual friend introduced him to David Lynch who was working on a quirky American Film Institute project called Eraserhead. (Peter's only prior film experience was scoring Ron Howard's directorial debut Grand Theft Auto.) Peter composed the song on a small Casio style keyboard and filtered his voice to give it a spooky, ethereal, little-girl quality. In 1980 he returned to Harvard to work on as an "artist in residence" to score a musical written by an old friend of his. This in turn, led to his gig as host of New Wave Theatre.
In 1983. Peter Ivers was murdered in his Los Angeles apartment. The motive apparently was robbery and the crime remains one of the many unsolved celebrity murders on the Los Angeles Police Department's history to this day.
ERASERHEAD (IRS SP-70027)
For a man so importnat to the punk and new wave scene on our shores, there's surprisingly little on the WWW for Peter Ivers: