Gordon spent summers at Boston's Berklee College of Music, studying Webern scores and playing saxophone in a punk band. “It became clear to me that I was not going to be a jazz cat,” he said. “I had to learn how to make my own music because I couldn’t imitate Charlie Parker’s solos.”
Gordon discovered the electronic music program while visiting a friend at the University of California, San Diego. “It felt like my destiny.” The school had futurist duties and early models of the Moog and Buchla synthesizers located in Quonset huts left behind by the campus' previous occupants, the Marines. “There was no respect for any kind of local music,” Gordon said. “Tones are prohibited.”
“Peter was an early adopter. He was always ahead of the game,” said Ned Sublette, a guitarist and musicologist who met Gordon when he was a graduate student at UCSD. A performance that found him “both vernacular and radical” led Gordon to move there and to the Bay Area with his girlfriend, Acker.
At Mills, he studied with Ashley and Terry Riley, whose landmark work “In C” (1968) captivated him. “It’s like, wow! “This is the music I was looking for,” he said. In an email, Riley called Gordon “one of the most outstanding students I have ever taught at Mills.”
Gordon began to imagine a combination of his influences: part Riley, part Jeff Beck, part Captain Beefheart, and the hard-hitting R&B saxophone sounds of Junior Walker and King Curtis. Minimalism and punk share a common element: repetition.
In 1975, he moved to New York with Acker. Acker quickly became famous for his transgressive, blood-soaked prose. Her biographer, Jason McBride, wrote that she “often behaved like a child and, for that matter, brazenly,” and many of her Gordon friends disliked her. “She had a very dark spiral.” Gordon said. “She can be fascinating and persuasive.”