The final date – at The Observatory in California – was just two days away, but in the hours leading up to the penultimate show in Tucson, Arizona, Peep slipped into a state of unconsciousness at the back of the tour bus, and never woke up. They had crossed the country twice in six weeks, drinking heavily and taking ketamine, cocaine, and xanax in abundance along the way. A real, bell-ringing truth.” It’s a very Terry moment.In mid-November 2017, Lil Peep – real name Gustav Åhr – was on the final leg of a US tour with GothBoiClique, the ‘emo rap’ collective who had gained a legion of fans for their raw goth rock/rap – as well as notoriety for their excessive drug use. “He had work to do, and he wanted to do it,” John continues.
He’s way beyond the blue”-followed by an orchestral swell and a sweeping overhead shot of a deep, endless ocean. Near the end of the film, there’s a long, close shot of John Womack, in his office in Cambridge, talking about grief and eternity-“Gus is gone. . . . “Gus literally told me once, if he was to die, he thinks Jack would be the person welcoming him into Heaven,” she says. “Everybody’s Everything” includes an interview with Gus’s high-school girlfriend. One letter, written on yellow legal paper, began, “Dear Gus, dear grandson, my prophet, my tattooed poet of the sweet heart.” From another letter, also on legal paper: “I know the gold in you, how good you are at heart.” Another, this one typed, ended with “Is there any particular Johnny Cash CD you’d like?” Gus appreciated Johnny Cash, but not the CD format two years later, for Christmas, his grandfather gave him a book called “How Music Got Free,” about the MP3 revolution. “This is my grandpa he is a retired professor of Latin American history at Harvard and a badass communist,” he wrote. “Gus started acting out-punching walls, that kind of thing-and I’d call my dad, freaking out, and he’d say, ‘I’ll write him a letter.’ ” Gus didn’t always respond to his grandfather’s letters, Liza said, “but I know he read them, and I know they reached him in a deep way.” At one point, Gus posted a photo on Instagram: John Womack, looking stern, seated in front of a bookcase and a portrait of Lenin. “I split with Gus’s father when Gus was in high school,” Liza said. The film’s spiritual core is the artist’s relationship with his family, especially his grandfather. Which is how Malick became an executive producer of “Everybody’s Everything,” a new documentary that makes Lil Peep’s talent legible even to viewers who might not consider themselves fans of either emo or rap, much less both at once. Then I called Terry and told him, ‘If this is getting made one way or the other, I’d rather have you be in charge of it.’ ” She kept getting calls “talking about how there was going to be a documentary about Gus’s life, and the first few times I just said no, or ignored it. Handsome, charismatic, prolifically tattooed, and photogenically sad, he had been on the brink of international fame, and he left behind a cache of unreleased footage, both audio and video. The predicament was born of tragedy: Liza’s son, Gustav Åhr-known to friends and family as Gus, better known to the world as the emo rapper Lil Peep-had just died, of a drug overdose, at the age of twenty-one. In late 2017, when Liza was facing a film-related predicament, she called Malick. “A few years after I finished school”-also Harvard, also history-“I went to Paris, and Terry was there, and he brought me to all sorts of dinner parties and introduced me to counts and countesses, which I thought was pretty cool.” “My dad and Terry are still as close as brothers,” Liza said. When Malick made his first feature film, “Badlands,” he cast John Womack as a grizzled state trooper. Shortly after it was published, in 1968, he got tenure at Harvard, where one of his closest friends was a fellow Rhodes Scholar from Oklahoma named Terrence Malick. “Too close to home, I guess.” The book is by her father, the Marxist historian John Womack, Jr. “I’ve read chunks of it and enjoyed it, but I’ve never been able to finish it,” she said the other day. She lives in Huntington, Long Island, in a three-bedroom house with a “Bernie 2016” sign in the front window, a “Workers of the World, Unite!” poster on a wall, and a paperback copy of “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution” on the coffee table. Liza Womack is a first-grade teacher in her fifties, with wide, rectangular glasses and hair parted down the middle, Patti Smith style.
Lil Peep and Terrence Malick Illustration by João Fazenda
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