Peter Fonda

Peter Fonda is most famous, of course, for his work in films, as an actor, director, producer, screenwriter, and all-around anti-authority figure. It is not as well known that he was a musician and recording artist, doing one obscure 1967 single, "November Night," written by none other than a then little-known Gram Parsons. As celebrities who didn't actually do much music-making go, he had more influence on the world of rock than almost anyone, as a friend of the Byrds and other heavyweights; a partial inspiration for one of the Beatles' songs; and (with Dennis Hopper) the prime creative force behind Easy Rider, one of the first films in which a hip rock soundtrack was crucial to the movie's impact. It has never been uncommon for entertainers in different media, and for musicians and actors, to mix socially. Peter Fonda was doing so from about the time he began to act professionally. What made him different in some senses from generations that had preceded him in such activities, though, was that he was among the first relatively well-known Hollywood figures to align himself with the rock counterculture. Indeed, when he became a big fan and close friend of the Byrds in the mid-'60s, the rock counterculture had barely begun. In 1965, when the Beatles played in Los Angeles, he and the Byrds were invited to visit them in a house where they were staying. Most of the party, including Fonda, took an acid trip, and at one point Fonda began to talk about how he knew what it was like to be dead, having almost died on the operating table as a child once. John Lennon overheard these remarks and was apparently supremely annoyed. Changing Fonda's gender, he made the statement "I know what it's like to be dead" a key lyric in the Beatles' 1966 song "She Said, She Said." Fonda...