Who is Peter Lewis?

He was there the night Tupac was shot in Manhattan. Yes, he was helping Biggie record another masterpiece when Lil Cease left the studio to invite the other Hip Hop legend up to watch NOTORIUS work. Lead flew instead. The beef began. Indeed, despite beefs real or contrived, Peter was there many nights, locked-in till dawn with iconic producers and artists, at the board where digital magic glues riffs and themes and vocals and beats and melodies and rhymes and flow.

It was Quad Studios on Times Square, the brain and ganglia of music from the late the 80s to the 90s.

He witnessed the evolution of Broadway and Seventh Avenue from city grit to the beginnings of touristy Disneyfication; he captained the sounds of the transformation, from the Death of Disco and the rise of Heavy Metal to Hip Hop's Golden Era to East Coast versus West Coast self-destruction.  In 1997 he moved to Nashville, thus lending his expertise to America's second-biggest self-contained genre.

   And yes... that's him in one of FDNY's most beloved rescue images before 9-11, when the old studio burned and a firefighter grabbed Peter, clinging like another Peter (Parker) to the façade of a crumbling and sooty outer wall, 1991.

The guitar image? Yeah, that's Dripsy as a lad, with Peter-- perpetrating like I was Eddie Van Halen or Slash (who Peter knows, by the way). The guitar remains one of Peter's many talents. And obsessions: he collects and refurbishes the instruments, from exotic wood acoustics to downright freaky custom electric models.

He's now a restless New Yorker in backward-ass Florida but hey, can't beat the sights and the weather, right? Listen in, and you'll understand why Dripsy cherishes him as a living encyclopedia of all things musical.

Peter Lewis. Uncle Pete...