PETER LEWIS: THE REBEL HANGS TEN IN HOLLYWOOD
Part One of an exclusive Sundazed.Com Interview by JUD COST

You know Peter Lewis. He's that dapper guy in the upper lefthand corner of the first Moby Grape sleeve, set apart from the rest of the band by those Warren Beatty/Jan Berry/Mark Lindsay good looks Hollywood is always scrambling after. And before that he was the lanky, early-period Brian Wilson look-alike playing smoking lead guitar with the Cornells, a Hollywood surf band with a pedigree as long as a twelve foot board.

Raised in Beverly Hills by his mother, film goddess and Academy Award winner Loretta Young, and his dad, screenwriter Tom Lewis, Peter was joined in the Cornells by guitar player Bob Linkletter (son of TV legend Art Linkletter), tenor sax player Jim O'Keefe (son of actor Dennis O'Keefe), drummer Charlie Correll (son of Charles Correll, of the radio version of Amos 'n' Andy and bass player Tom Krumplar.

Lewis' silver spoon birthright, however, never stopped him from seeking his own path. It's not surprising that he wound up in what one would loosely refer to as the entertainment business. What's remarkable is that he would leave behind the relative safety of the Los Angeles music scene for the seething and uncharted waters of San Francisco to eventually make his mark in Moby Grape.

This is the first in a series of Q & A's with Sundazerd artists - later installments will feature Ron Elliott and Sal Valentino of the Beau Brummels, Sean Bonniwell of the Music Machine, Roy Loney of the Flamin' Groovies and Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean - the fascinating story of the birth of the Cornells and how Peter Lewis hung ten through troubled times in Hollywood to eventually shoot the pier with Moby Grape.

SUNDAZED: What was your childhood like, Peter, growing up as the son of a famous film star?
LEWIS: It was good until I was about eleven. It was like paradise. We lived in a place called Doheny Ranch, 365 acres in the middle of Beverly Hills before it was all developed.

Did you go down to the studio to watch your mom making movies?
Yeah, sure. But it took me a long time to figure out she was a movie star. When I was in military school, in the fourth grade (age nine) somebody asked me, "Is your mother Loretta Young?" and I said, "Yeah." Then they started treatin' you different, but before that kids don't care. We went to school with Michael Reagan (son of Ronald) and Mia Farrow's brother. It's funny, y'know. It's not like you did anything to deserve that. The way a kid interprets it, it's almost like there's something wrong with you. A lot of people say, "You had everything," and in a sense we did. But when I was eleven my parents got divorced, and my dad took my brother Chris and me to live in New York. We had been going to a military school that was too difficult for me. I was the kid who wanted to compete and be involved, but at that point we'd already been to nine different schools. And now there's this tremendous upheaveal in the family.

How did you cope with New York?
There were seven kids in my class in the school I was going to, and they'd been taking Latin and French since the first grade. And I had a panic response to it. Because I'd always been the new kid, I could hang in there. Academically I was pretty good. But here I had one hand tied behind my back. I didn't understand these foreign languages, so I started freaking out, and it built up inside me. The next day I went completely nuts and ran out of the classroom into the streets of New York City. I had a nervous breakdown, this really profound thing. I spent that night in Grand Central Station. The next morning I found my way back to my dad's apartment. They found me on the roof, trying to get up enough guts to jump off.

What did they do with you?
My dad didn't know what to do. He'd taken a job as a vice president of an advertising agency, so he was always busy. He turned me over to this behavioral psychologist who wanted to put me in a mental ward. He told me, "This is where you stay until you go to school." They didn't care if you were well. They just wanted you to behave. That's what it was like back then. If you let the ghouls through the gate, you had to be whipped back into shape. They tricked me into going to the psychiatric hospital by telling me I was getting a physical exam. And when I got there they shot me full of Thorazine and locked me up until I promised to go to school. I was completely screwed up. Every day you had to go to this place for work therapy, making little plastic ropes.

God, that sounds like something out of Dickens. How did you survive?
There was a guitar in there, and I grabbed that. And they had a TV in there too, and that's where I saw Ricky Nelson for the first time on the Ozzie and Harriet Show every week. I hooked onto Ricky Nelson. I hated this place, but I learned that if I just held onto the guitar people would stay away from me because I'd look occupied. In a weird way that whole experience was responsible for me starting to play the guitar. Ricky Nelson gave me this thing: "I want to be like that guy." And I latched onto it.

How long did you spend in that place?
I managed to talk my way out of it after a while. Two years later my mom came through New York - I was thirteen now - and asked my brother and me if we wanted to go to Hawaii with her for a vacation. My parents were fighting over us. I went with her, and my brother didn't. When we got to Hawaii, Ricky Nelson was there to do a show. My mom knew that the Nelsons were staying in the same hotel as us. So that night I got to sit between Ozzie and Harriet to watch Ricky play. Two years earlier I'd been watching the guy in a mental ward, and now I'd met him.

Did you see him much during his Stone Canyon Band days in the 1970's? I thought they were great live.
I went to see him again, after Moby Grape, at the Palamino (a mostly C&W club in LA's San Fernando Valley). His roadie saw me wandering around and said, "Peter, does Ricky know you're here?" And I said, "No, I didn't even know if he'd remember me." So I went backstage, and it was cool because he knew about Moby Grape and really liked the band. He knew I was a really big fan, and then he liked what I did - a real cool thing. I heard stuff later, because I used to go out with Kris Harmon, his wife, before she married him. After he died she told me they had problems with drugs, but everybody did back then.

Even though he wasn't much older than the guys in Moby Grape, Ricky seemed to come from a different era.
Yeah, he was a product of the 50's. The 60's was more like when the musicians themselves, not the stars, took over, and they were street people with a different mentality. They were tougher, in a sense. The thought that Ricky really liked the 60's stuff and really wanted to write again, and that he thought that drugs were a necessary part of it was sad. That's what got him. He had everything.

So, what happened to you after your mom brought you back from Hawaii?
I stayed with her in Los Angeles. The New York thing was always too highbrow for me. For some reason my brother was always better at that sort of thing. I had my own thing in California, and there had always been a lot of sibling rivalry with Chris who's eleven months older than me. My first year at Loyola high school I met up with the son of one of the guys from the original, radio version of Amos 'n' Andy, Charlie Correll - same name as his dad. He lived in Beverly Hills. I was a sort of semi-juvenile delinquent type guy. I ran away. They caught me in Las Vegas once at age thirteen. I was disturbed. Before New York I'd been into sports, a real straight shooter. But that thing about my mom doing the TV show every week with my dad - it was just too much incoming energy, and it just blew the thing apart. Although I talked my way out of it, I never really recovered from that New York place. The kids ridiculed you back in school, just like before, but now you're more afraid to do anything that'll get you put back in the mental ward.

Had you seen the film Rebel Without A Cause at the time? It sounds similar to the plight of James Dean.
Yeah, I guess I just needed attention, so I did things like run away. The cops would throw me in juvenile hall, and my mom would leave me there for a couple of weeks. So, when I met Charlie Correll, my first year at Loyola, he took me over on a Saturday night to where he was playing with (televison game host) Art Linkletter's son, Bob. And it was Bob who got me into the electric guitar. Bob died later in a car accident.

This was the birth of the Cornells, your surf band?
Yeah, but we didn't call it that at first. We started off as the Tornados, but then we heard about those guys who'd done "Telstar." We were doing Duane Eddy and Johnny & the Hurricanes material. I was just learning how to play the guitar, and Link (Bob) showed me some stuff. He had built his own electric guitar. He was very inventive. It had a shitty action, but he let me play it. Then we got some of their friends - guys who also went to Black Fox Military Academy - Jim O'Keefe on tenor sax and Tom Crumplar on bass, and we had a band. Somehow we learned enough stuff so we could go play, like at schools. We must have played every weekend for four years. Back then you could do that if you wanted. Our first gig was at the Westlake School For Girls, which I though was pretty cool, because that's where Candy Bergen went. I'd met her that summer in Hawaii and been dating her off and on. She was only thirteen, but even then she was so beautiful.

You actually cut an album in 1963 for Garex Records. How did that come about?
We had a manager, Steve Jahns, and he took care of that deal. He was also the one who came up with the name, the Cornells. We'd always make fun of ourselves, and we wanted a corny name. We made up those song titles on the album as we went (laughs) -"Stompin' After Five." Nobody paid any attention to that. When it was time to do the next song, we'd just think it up right there and do it. It was all done in three days. Nobody sang. There were lots of bands in those days where nobody sang. When the British Invasion stuff hit the next year, it was like going from silent movies to talkies. My mom did that, and so did I. She started (in films) when she was five - Laugh, Clown, Laugh with Lon Chaney.

Since practically nobody back then was a native Californian, where did your mom come from?
They came from Salt Lake City. They had some problem with their grandfather, Earl Young. Somehow he was an unfaithful guy, and he left. So my grandmother and her three daughters and one son, Jack Lindley, who's David Lindley's father, by the way - so David's my cousin - they all moved to LA and used the grandfather as this whipping boy, the reason to carry on, that they weren't going to be destroyed by this thing. My grandmother's brother was an accountant in a movie studio, and my mom and my aunts, because they didn't have any money, would go over to the film lot and just stand around as extras. There was a more important part available, so they called my older aunt. But my mom, who's real aggressive, answered the phone and said, "Let me do it." (Silent film leading lady) Mae Murray was in the scene, and my mom ingratiated herself with her. So my grandmother even let my mom go stay with Mae Murray - in those days rich people would do that, kind of like in the musical "Annie." My mom soaked it all up like a sponge. She saw what it was like to behave like a movie star and sort of put it on like a coat and wore it for the rest of her life.

And she always had the looks for the part.
Well, she made herself look like that. She had buck teeth, but she had this rational metaphsical thing. Nothing from the outside was gonna get my mom. She has this idea how things work and believes in it with a faith beyond reason. I see my mom all the time. Of course, now that my sister's book has come out, she's really pissed off about it. But secretly she's really enjoying it. She calls up and says, "It makes me sick." But she's really savouring the whole thing.

Where did the Cornells play after the Cotillion balls and sock hops?
We played a lot at Gazzari's, which was definitely the least cool of the Sunset Strip clubs. And we did I've Got A Secret (panel quiz network television show) wih Garry Moore back in New York. "What's your secret?" "We're all movie stars' sons." Then we did The Les Crane Show. By this time (1964) we were actually singing. I sang lead on "Sweets For My Sweet" and "Everytime You Walk In The Room." We had just got into the English thing. I was about to go to Purdue (University) because they had a professional pilots' program there. So Les Crane asked me after we did our songs, "Are you gonna do this for a living?" And I said, "No, I'm gonna go to school and be a pilot." Bob (Linkletter) got really pissed off at me for sayin' that. We were supposed to play Bob's dad's show the next week, The Art Linkletter Show, but after Bob got mad at me I don't know if they played it or not. He was really pissed off. I know that this book came out listing personnel for surf bands, and I'm not listed as one of those guys.

What was the music scene like in LA just before the Beatles hit? Did you ever go see Dick Dale play?
We saw Dick Dale at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa. And Dick was okay, but I always preferred Freddie King. To me, surf music was okay, but Freddie was funky. I used to hang around with Henry Vestine, who was in a blues band called Hial King and the Newports. I played lead with the Cornells, but I also hung around with these other musicians. There were two other surf bands in LA at that time that, along with the Cornells, were the top three: the Renegades and Mike Adams and the Red Jackets. But, really, surf music didn't impress me musically very much. I got some side gigs playing sessions for Jan and Dean at Gold Star Studios. They had some guys from the Guiloteens there too. Jan could never really sing all that well, but they didn't really give a shit. They were just these good looking guys more into, like, being the coolest guys on the beach. Their attitude was, "Can you believe we get paid for doing this?"

Did the Cornells re-tool the concept enough to suit the British Invasion crowds, or did you just fold up your tent?
Our peak shows were opening at the Hollywood Bowl for (comedian) Soupy Sales and playing the LA Sports Arena with Bobby Freeman, the Coasters and Wayne Newton. But the band never really did call it quits. When I'd come home from Purdue, I just didn't think of calling those same guys. I guess, by then, I was looking for something more long-hair. I liked the Beatles and the Stones okay, but I didn't think they were anything worth dedicating your life to. But the first time I saw the Byrds, at the Long Beach Arena, I couldn't stop focusing on the harmonies, the Dylan songs and that sound. I really liked surf music, but when I saw the Byrds, it was just like when Mr. Toad found the motor car."

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