A new book with the long-ass title In Heaven Everything Is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre by Josh Frank provides some insight into the early days of the Eraserhead cult. A musician and host of the underground cable show New Wave Theater, Ivers also wrote the song that supplies the first part of Frank’s book title. The Pixies have recorded it, Devo used to play it live, but it is best known as The Lady in the Radiator’s song from Eraserhead. (Ivers was murdered in 1983 – a case that remains unsolved.)
Eraserhead’s life as a midnight movie began in 1977 at the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica. In an excerpt from Frank’s book published in the LA Weekly, we learn that it was not an instant success. “The theater had picked up Eraserhead — the dark, surreal first film by a young David Lynch — for a Friday midnight slot. With the manic popularity of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the midnight-movie trend had blossomed into a full-fledged craze. In the year since it had reinvented itself as an art house, the Nuart Theatre had held down the Saturday midnight slot with Pink Flamingos, John Waters' cult raunchfest — including scenes of public urination, mother-son fellatio, consumption of dog feces, and the infamous ‘chicken fuck’ — whose success was measured by how many people threw up in the aisles of a given showing, and which, based on that measure, had been a consistent, raving success. Eraserhead,with its dark themes and obscure plot line, lacked the ready hooks of those films and was going to be a gamble for the theater.”
Nuart projectionist Steve Martin – not that one – was hooked immediately. “The movie haunted him. Its strange musical set piece was particularly evocative: A character known only as ‘The Lady in the Radiator’ — a platinum blonde in a shiny '50s-era dress, with strange, mufflery protrusions emanating from her cheeks — sings a song consisting mainly of five words repeated slowly and sweetly, to beautiful and incredibly unsettling effect.”
Martin was not the only one affected by Ivers’ song. “Devo arrived at Bob's Big Boy, and with everyone assembled, synapses began to fire. Peter and Lynch were clearly excited (and more than a little surprised) at the groundswell of interest Eraserhead had begun to generate in L.A. In Devo they recognized fellow travelers and were flattered by the band's request.” You can check out the rest of the story here, but meanwhile here’s The Lady in the Radiator:
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