Probably the most important thing about my friendship with Pete was that most of the world had long since dismissed him as a waste of skin. He had been adopted as a baby, and for whatever reason never did fit in with anybody. He was smoking cigarettes by age 8, and while I had been on a one-child campaign to wipe out smoking in our lifetime (starting with my parents) and basically wanted nothing to with anyone who smoked, I still hung around with Pete.
He failed a couple of grades -- something he wore almost as a badge of honor -- and, since being a misfit was his main claim to fame, cultivated that sort-of outlaw image. Pete's salvation, it turned out, was Salvation. Around 7th grade, he dropped out of sight, and re-emerged around 9th or 10th grade as a completely different person. He had gone to some kind of juvenile rehab camp and then, he told me, "I woke up one morning and said, 'Pete, you are one f**ked-up kid!'". He immersed himself in two things: the Bible and his guitar.
Musical talent was something he had going for him. He quickly outgrew his local guitar teachers, and having spent some time driving cab and working in the bush ("ya gotta come loggin', Drew! Money's good, and you can buy an electric piano so we can play gigs together!"), he headed off to California to study guitar with the legendary Vicente Gomez.
"I walk in there, and the first thing I say is, 'hiya, Vince!'. Jeez! He nearly threw me out right there! From then on, it was 'Professor Gomez'!"
I noted that it was one of the first times I'd ever seen him show respect to anyone.
We had this cool idea. We'd come out for a show. I'd sit at the piano, and then he'd come out in his plaid work shirt, battered jeans and cork boots, with his 1957 Fender Stratocaster ... then sit down and blast out this Bach sonatina on the guitar ... then rip into some Chuck Berry.
Of course, that never happened, but it was fun thinking about it. Indeed, we never did play a gig together: the only time I ever recorded anything of his was ...
just about 20 years ago ...
Our on-and-off friendship continued as we both wound up in Victoria in the late 80s, but between his business and my work, we hardly ever got together. Getting together to jam became one of those "one of these days" things. His business went under. He seemed to get his head together and find companionship with a motorcycle club that consisted mainly of older people who just wanted to head out on the highway. It looked like he was going to come through this crisis OK.
And then came the phone call.
"Drew, it's Shirley," his mom said. "Peter committed suicide last night."
I'll spare you the details.
Shirley paid for a recording session so I could lay down some of the songs Pete and I had written over the years. My friend Patrick sat in on bass and a session guy filled in on an electronic drum kit; significantly, there was no guitar track. I was able to find a tape Pete had recorded, and we mixed that in with one of his songs. We scattered his ashes around a Douglas fir in Mount Douglas Park and every so often I'd go back and visit the spot -- finding where some of his ashes were still visible.
Unlike George Harrison's rush to the studio after John Lennon was murdered, it took Elton John a few years to come up with "Empty Garden", which is one of my two favorite songs of EJ's ("I Feel Like A Bullet" is the other). Similarly, a "song for Pete" took the better part of two decades to come together.
It started with a riff ... and the lyrics at first sounded like another lost-love piece of tripe: "I can't say that's the way that I thought you would end it/But as they say, that's the way of the world".
Then the lyrics started morphing into something about suicide, and I realized that this was the "song for Pete" ... I titled it, "To Whom It May Concern ..." A little blue-eyed reggae, if you can imagine that ...
During Worship at Gospel Mission on Saturday night, I threw it in -- both as a message to others and a tribute to Peter. I told the guys it was a bit of "self-indulgence", but doggone it, some were reading the lyrics and trying to sing along, anyway ... and as it cross-faded into "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus", I heard the Lord say, "you can let him go now".
And a couple of songs later, I heard Him say something else. "Peter's life is not wasted. He encouraged you, influenced you -- and turned you onto Me as Salvation for anyone. This whole Worship service is his legacy."
At last, I've let him go ... not grieving any more, so much as revelling in the myriad ways we influence one another. As Shakespeare's Mark Antony said, "the good [men do] is oft interred with their bones". Pete's music was the exception to that rule; let's work to make sure that our lives are, too.
There's no way you can say it's what the Father intended
Life is His, all alone, to give and return
There's no way you can say that I thought you would end it
But as they say, that's the way of the world.
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