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And your teeth start to crack and you’re never coming back.
Until the stars all disappear

Peter’s bedroom is downstairs. It is a neat, utilitarian space, dark and warm. Daylight filters through slats in the pulled blinds. A quilted panel with pictures of guitars cut from rich blue and green swirled fabric hangs over his bed, a gift from his mother. Tidy stacks of jewel-toned CD cases sit alongside prescription bottles and guitar picks on the dresser; a few fliers advertising shows are stuck to the walls with pushpins. The bed is neatly made. Almost everything in the room is music-related. This is where Peter has created much of his prodigious body of mostly unclassifiable work, using some basic recording equipment and a few programs on the computer in the den next door.

Peter can write addictive pop songs that stick in your head like gum to the bottom of a shoe, indie rock ballads that make even the most detached hipsters uncross their arms and wave their lighters in the sky and galactic love songs that would make David Bowie weep androgynous tears.  Peter’s bands each have a different flavor, but to him, the music they make ends up becoming too poppy and mainstream.  On his own, Peter makes music that sounds like computers beating each other up, like amphetamine-ramped gnomes chattering until their teeth fall out, like deep space after the birth of a new universe. Whether some of it is even music is questionable, but that’s what Peter loves: stretching the boundaries of experimentation to infinity’s gate. Peter’s biggest musical influence is The Residents, a San Francisco band whose identities have remained anonymous throughout its thirty-year history, a feat achieved chiefly by wearing giant eyeball masks (with tuxedos) during live performances. When Peter conceived of The Worrynauts, he hoped it would be even weirder than The Residents: no instruments, just toys. No songs, just sound arrangements. It was supposed to be the weirdest band in the world.

Three very small men with long tickling beards/ are lurking in my navel
He combs his beard with a plastic fork/and softly sings to all and none

Peter’s lyrics say much more than he usually does in conversation. They are about bears, giants, asteroids, astronauts, robots, elves, existential questions, skeletons, doctors, ambulances, microwave pizza, bagels, absurdity and doom. The subject of hair comes up a lot. Meet Peter and you’ll understand the fixation. Peter has a roomful of hair, and it’s a color that is difficult to ignore: the hair on the top of Peter’s head is a mild, gingery auburn, but his beard somehow galloped away with the gene. It is the red of raw steak, of Mars on a clear night.

Peter’s hair seems to function as a barometer of his mood. Five years ago, Peter was in Anbot Rodroid, the most popular band he’s ever been a part of.  He wrote songs that approached pop music, and a friend’s record label had 1,000 copies of the band’s album pressed. Hundreds, not dozens, started showing up to Anbot concerts, and Peter defied his anxiety enough to sing. Pictures show a slim and goofy 25-year-old Peter at a backyard party, his beard contained in a geometric goatee, his hair cropped close as a missionary.

In the intervening years, Peter has wandered a strange internal wilderness, and it shows. His hair has grown out -- he hasn’t cut it since around his thirtieth birthday -- and his beard has reached proportions that make him look like a fiery Hasidic Jew.   He has renounced real musical instruments and started The Worrynauts.

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Julian Snow might be Peter’s biggest fan, maybe the only Peter DeGroot fan willing to make an exhaustive 42-song CD primer of the man’s music for an interested journalist (“Please listen to tracks 18-32 at least 3 times, carefully with phones,” reads the attached note) or to contemplate recording a Peter DeGroot tribute album with other local musicians.  Julian is tall and lanky with a mop of curly hair. He has the look of a mad professor, and is, in fact, an instructor of jazz piano at Willamette University. For Julian, as for Peter, art and life can mostly be found in a tight radius around downtown Salem. Julian met Peter back in 2001, on a night that changed his life. That night, Julian’s wife Angela dragged him to a Bloody Muse show. During the song ‘Guitars in the Forest,’ Julian says he felt like he could see the distant planets described in the lyrics: sunshine pouring like honey through trees, tiny men constructing little ornate structures on a moon-like surface.

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