About Peter Wick
Peter Wick grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, spending most of his childhood in the city of Bellevue, Washington. He was 4th of five siblings. His oldest brother, David Wick, is a respected Historian at Gordon College in Massachusetts, a lecturer on ancient Greece, and organizer of a yearly conference in Athens. His younger sister Keren is also a professor, involved in medical research at the University of Washington, in Seattle.As a teenager Wick hooked up with an eclectic group of suburban teenage musicians and artists, from several different area schools. The center-piece of this disorganized and chaotic group was the early 1980's punk band "Mr. Epp and the Calculations." Although the band was described by local radio DJ Stephen Rabow as, "The worst band in the world," (immediately prior to his airing of "The Pigeon in the Fountain Bed," a noisy spoken-word rendition by Wick of his short story, over a wall of background noise) the band played a formative role in what would eventually become Seattle's "grunge" movement. In addition to the band, this eclectic group of teenagers also published small magazines ("fanzines"), the most notable of which was "Attack" magazine, for which Wick contributed mostly humorous articles and stories.Wick was the band's drummer, but quit when he worried that the band would become too famous to allow him to focus his creative energies on writing and acting. Guitarist Mark Arm - later of the band Mudhoney - recalled this moment years later in an interview. He jokingly asked Wick, "Wait, you're quitting because you're worried we'll become too famous?" Mr. Epp's biggest hit song was 1982's "Mohawk Man," which reached #1 on L.A. radio station KROQ's "Rodney on the Roq" show. Ironically, after quitting the band Wick often sat in for the regular drummer at practices. He lived off and on at the house where they practiced (the Morey house was a place where these kids often crashed), and Wick would sit in on drums whenever the regular drummer failed to show, which happened fairly often. Two songs that were recorded with Wick on drums later turned up on the band's retrospective album, "Ridiculing the Apocalypse," released in 1996.Mr. Epp and the Calculations broke up in 1984, playing their last show Wick was invited on stage for a good bye appearance - followingopening act, "Malfunkshun," which featured a then 18-year-old Andrew Wood, who died six years later while the front man of "Mother Love Bone."As their wild teenage years passed on into 20-something-hood, in the mid 1980's, this eclectic group of friends began to disperse. Epp guitarists Mark Arm and Steve Turner would form another seminal Seattle band, Green River, with Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, both of whom were later in Mother Love Bone, and then Pearl Jam. Arm and Turner would eventually form Mudhoney.Wick continued to write for small magazines with names such as Feminist Baseball, and Hey Magazine, published by former Epp member Jeff Smith (aka Smitty). He continued to dabble in music, playing drums for a short-lived band, "Lapses in Grammar," which featured Smith and another ex-Epp member Darren Morey, as well as female bass player, Liz (Wick), whom he would later marry. During the late 1980's Wick began working professionally as a stand-up comedian. He became a regular at Seattle's Comedy Underground and toured clubs around the country, working in California (L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento), Colorado, Texas, and the mid west.He also became a fath...