Peter McIan
Peter McIan
I just found out that someone that I worked with on the first Big Deal major label thing I ever did (The City – Chrysalis 1986), has passed. Peter was the producer on the first two big “Men At Work” records, and was part of many different projects and had written a lot of songs for other artists etc, and was even an artist himself. With The City Peter put the band together, wrote most of the material, and produced the album, as well as playing all the keys on it.
After The City had passed, Peter and I stayed in touch over the years, he went into software development, writing and a few other things, and I continued knocking around LA as a player, and we would get together now and then for different things, with the last time I saw him being out in Colorado, where he came out to a thing I was on and we got together a coupla times on that trip. He wasn’t in physically great shape at that point, but was still able to get around pretty well and come hang at the gig etc, and it was fun to see him again.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this, that record was at the time a very big deal for me, and I learned a lot from that experience, and Peter was a very talented and extremely intelligent guy, like all of us had his foibles and such, but I think he was at basis a good person, and I have generally good memories of him.
Anyway, as we all know, it’s pretty weird when someone you have history with and knew pretty well passes, even when you haven’t had much recent contact….I didn’t see that one coming today, thought I’d put in my 2 cents for the moment.
Comments
As a software engineer, he interviewed me right here in Fort Collins for a potential job working on a speed-reading app where the words are presented one by one and your eyes don’t have to move — there was a patent on the pacing algorithm. That would have been in early 2000’s. I couldn’t really afford to take a job working on spec like that, but I really enjoyed talking with him. I had a personal recording studio at the time, and I tried to talk music production with him. But he had moved on from that world and was focused elsewhere. Really nice guy. Sorry that he has departed.
Yes, I remember that time when he was working on that, and in fact I was helping build some of the websites for the related parts of that… To be honest I thought he was on something there, I don’t know why it didn’t take hold but it may be that some of the many other things that had to fall into place just didn’t…