DAVID PEEL,
1943-2017

David Peel, the New York counter-culture musician who worked marijuana advocacy into his music beginning in the mid-‘60s, died Thursday at a VA hospital in Manhattan after suffering a series of heart attacks. He was 73.

After recording Have a Marijuana and The American Revolution for Elektra with his band The Lower East Side, Peel befriended John Lennon, who would produce his next album, The Pope Smokes Dope for Apple Records. The two performed together at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1971 and on an episode of The Dick Cavett Show where Lennon and Yoko Ono revealed a new radicalism within their new music that resulted in the album Sometime in New York City.

While the Lennon association was short-lived—as were his Elektra and Apple deals—Peel used it as a badge of honor for years, titling albums on his Orange label Bring Back the Beatles (1977), John Lennon for President (1980) and John Lennon Forever (1987) and writing songs such as “Keep John Lennon in America.”

Peel would record more than two dozen albums and his songs largely concerned issues important to his early hippie followers: “Show Me the Way to Get Stoned,” “Hey, Mr. Draft Board,” “The Chicago Conspiracy” and “The Birth Control Blues.” Yet he also influenced a future generation that had a disdain for ‘60s longhairs: While on Elektra, Peel was in the company of the MC5 and The Stooges who brought radical messages to rock music and his uncensored lyrics and DIY/street musician approach would affect numerous musicians in the punk movement in the mid- and late-‘70s. Sensing this, he titled his 1978 album King of Punk.

A presence at demonstrations in New York City for decades, Peel’s profile rose in 2012 when he was involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests, releasing his collection of protest songs, Up Against the Wall Street, in 2013.

He returned to pontificating about pot on his final album with another nod to Lennon, 2015’s Give Hemp a Chance.