RIP, Pete

(Welcome, Don Butler!)

Mrs. Mendelsohn cries approximately five times per decade, but as I sat here in my study this morning, trying to figure out ways to get the world to pay attention to my glorious writing and beautiful music, I heard her wail as she came up the stairs. She’d just gotten off the phone with the daughter of her former boyfriend Pete.

When they met in their early twenties, they were young and gorgeous and Destined for Greatness and immortal. Pete was the lead guitarist in a London-based band of note. When he and TFMM went to Paris together, Parisien youths mistook him for Keith Richards. But maybe he wasn’t so DFG after all. He’d been devastated by the suicide of his filmmaker father a couple of years before, and had drowned the pain in alcohol. After a couple of years, though, it because clear that he wasn’t drinking to dull the pain of his father’s loss anymore, but because he had A Problem. He recorded a single for a Major Label and got a publishing deal. He drank more. And more and more.

(Mortality. ©2025 John Mendelsohn. Performed by Johnny Ned Mendelssohn and the Clean Hankies, with Darryll du Toit on guitar.)

Mrs. Mendelsohn trying everything she could think of to get him to stop, and he did stop intermittently, but never for long. Pretty much since I’ve known the current Mrs. Mendelsohn he’s been living a pisshead’s (as a former musical accomplice put it) life of loneliness and regret. Decades of pouring poison down his throat had made him frail. His sole human interaction for months at a time was with the NHS-assigned carers who came in to look after him.

Early last week, he began dying, and had completed the job, unconscious from morphine, by Thursday.

Pete Castle (1954-2018) is upper right. Photo: Fred Valentine. .

I’d lost an alcoholic, guitar-playing Pete of my own not so long ago. He’d grown up, unbeknownst to me, seven years his senior, in El Segundo, on the other side of LAX from my own home in Playa del Rey. I invited him into my band The Pits when he was 23, and quite the hotshot at a time just before Edward Van Halen, from not-very-faraway Pasadena, was about to redefine guitar hotshotness. He was insufferably aloof and fond of music deteste, and I’d have been pleased when he abandoned the band if we’d been able to find a suitable replacement.

In my 1995 autobiography I, Caramba, I spoke, a little rancorously, of his having seemed a latent alcoholic. It offended him — though I’d been right — and he contacted me for the first time in 18 years to confess his displeasure. But by 2015, membership in a succession of no-hope cover bands and marriage to Lulu, the Indonesian woman he adored, had cured him of his arrogance. He joined my band the Romanovs, and we actually became fond of each other.

When I Pass. ©2025 John Mendelsohn. Performed by Johnny Ned Mendelssohn and the Clean Hankies. The irony being that in middle age, Pete Castle became a Rush Limbaugh conservative.

Unlike Mrs. Mendelsohn’s Pete Vas, Pete Castle beat The Problem, except for the occasional bender. Except for the one time he was too drunk to turn up for rehearsal at all, he invariably turned up right on time — the courtesy of kings! — and was a joy to work with. But neither of us could stand the Romanovs’ bass player (Pete for musical reasons, I for reasons both musical and personal), and I returned to Mrs. Mendelsohn’s side in southwest London. Three years later I learned that Pete was dead, apparently of something he’d caught while visiting Lulu’s family in Jakarata.

I haven’t felt as close to Mrs. Mendelsohn in months as when I comforted her yesterday morning after she came upstairs in tears.