Peter Malick

The first single Brookline, Massachusetts native Peter Malick ever bought was the Jerry Lee Lewis classic “Great Balls of Fire” when he was around eight and his first instrument was the clarinet. At age 12, after The Beatles and the Stones took the US by storm in 1964, he exchanged the clarinet for a guitar and his musical tastes switched from pop to soul and blues after he heard Lee Dorsey singing “Working in a Coal Mine” on Boston’s WILD.

But when he started performing in bands, the music fell squarely into the category of “psychedelic.” His first group was PPMWW – as the initials suggest, the members were Malick, Peter Ivers, Michael Tschudin, Walter Power and Willie Alexander – and the second was The Listening. The Listening recorded one album on Vanguard, did a number of shows at The Boston Tea Party and were regulars at Brandeis, where they opened for Cream, Jefferson Airplane and Sly & The Family Stone. Malick was under the spell of the blues, however, and wound up leaving the band to do a mix of tours and one-nighters with, among others, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann, Big Mama Thornton and Freddie King.

In the early 1970s, he took a gig playing in the Boston stage production of “Hair,” eventually becoming the musical director of the show’s national touring company. That was followed by a two-year stint with The James Montgomery Band and a couple of recordings on the Capricorn label, where he met producer Tom Dowd, which eventually led to his own career as a producer. There were several moves back and forth from Boston to Los Angeles in the ‘80s along with a few years in Las Vegas, where he stopped playing music and instead worked in the casino business. Malick remembers a Vegas moment in 1990, after sitting in with some musicians, when he said to himself, “Dude, what the hell are you doing here?”

A return to Boston a few years later had him forming the Peter Malick Band, playing a series of roadhouse gigs and starting to write original material. A self-produced record, Wrong Side of My Life, came out in 1998, followed by Sons of the Jet Age with soul singer Amil Justin, then a move to New York City, where he discovered and kick-started the career of Norah Jones. A move back to LA resulted in Malick and his wife Landry opening a production studio called Pie & Tart Shop and launching the label Luxury Wafers. He’s still writing his own music, producing and engineering other performers and, once in a while, strapping on a guitar to gig with drummer Butch Norton and bassist Jon Ossman.

(by Ed Symkus)