Originally published in The Shadow
David Peel was buried with full military honors on April 17th, 2017. For a peace activist, David was very proud of being a veteran. Though he never saw combat, David loved the experience of being a soldier. One of his favorite movies was Full Metal Jacket.
David attributed his self-discipline to being in the army. He told me that he would have a drill sergeant shouting at him in the back of his mind that would make him work a thousand times harder and push him a thousand times further. I had a hard time taking David seriously at times and was ever wary of a put on. David considered himself an absolute success. At times, I wasn’t sure how serious he was, but come to think of it, he did accomplish more than most people have done in their entire lifetime. And he wanted to teach others his secret.
He presented me with the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Max Maltz. David discovered this book when he was in the army and he told me that this book was the reason he got a record contract with Elektra, met and worked with John Lennon, and start his own independent record label. This book says that we all have an inner guidance system which will take us where we want to go if we give it the right program. At the time when he discovered this book, David was working with an old army computer that he fed punch hole programs into. So the analogy worked perfectly for him.
David said he was one of the original computer geeks. He loved everything about computers and one of his first jobs when he got out of the army was to work on a huge computer system in Wall Street. He also started hanging out in Greenwich Village. So he had one foot in the world of geeks and another foot in the counter culture.
Even though I knew David for many years, we only started collaborating on his projects around 1996. Before that, he could never get my name right and would mix me up with my brother. At the time, Technohead got a gold record with their song “I Wanna Be a Hippie.” The song sampled and ripped lyrics from David’s song “I Like Marijuana.” With the help of his lawyer Jeffrey Jacobson, David was able to share in the rewards of his first ever gold record.
David wanted to do a whole album of techno music and, with me and Karl Beck, he started the first sessions for a project called Peeltronica in 1996. We would work on and off on this project until the last years of his life. We also talked a lot about computers, technology, physics and science – I became the go to man for all those geeky things he wanted to talk about – and there were times when he would call every single day. He was fascinated by the melding of counter culture and geek culture with people like Steve Jobs and the whole cyberpunk movement of the 1990s.
Peel’s dream was to create an army of people just like him. If he saw potential in you, he wanted to be your drill sergeant and push you to the next level. He wanted to collect an army unit of students for his Rock n Roll University. Even though I graduated with a master’s degree, I could never take it seriously. But now I look at my Rock n Roll University diploma and feel a tremendous gratitude for the things I learned from David Peel and that he actually took the time from his abundant life to be my professor. He put a lot of work into it. He took it very seriously. He was extremely proud when he gave me this diploma and considered it one of his great achievements. That is one of the reasons why I miss him.
Koshek Swaminathan
