Peter Rock

If you remember Peter Rock, chances are you remember a genial old man on television, doing a Louis Armstrong impression with a rasping voice, the affectionate grandfather of Chilean showbiz. What almost nobody remembers — and it is an injustice worth repairing — is that this man was the first. The one who opened the door to rock in Chile. And that everything that came afterwards passed through that door.

The Austrian boy who chose Elvis

Peter Rock's real name was Peter Mociulski von Remenyk, and he had been born near Vienna in 1945. His family emigrated to Chile in 1955, when he was a nine-year-old who did not speak a word of Spanish. Here he fell in love with Elvis Presley, and that love beat everything else: he left school as a teenager to devote himself to singing. He would meet up in Plaza Ñuñoa with two other kids, Luis Dimas and Jorge Pedreros, to play Elvis and Paul Anka covers, and there they gathered their first crowds of fans. The Austrian immigrant who chose rock over everything else.

27 October 1959

And then he did something that entered history, even if history later forgot it. That day, having just turned fourteen, guided by the producer Camilo Fernández, he went in to record an Elvis song released in Spanish as "Nena, no me importa", backed by an orchestra conducted by René Calderón. That single, put out by RCA, is the first rock and roll recorded in the history of the Chilean record industry. The starting gun. From there, from that boy imitating Elvis, came the Nueva Ola — the wave of young Chileans who swapped their names for American-sounding ones and sang the new sound — and, further down, over the years, all of Chilean rock. His own great hit, the ballad "Entre la arena y el mar", written by his friend Jorge Pedreros, made him the first teen idol born in the country, and took him to open for Paul Anka in Chile in 1961. They called him "the pharaoh of rock", "the Chilean Elvis". If in the first chapter of this history we said Chile began by singing by ear, as an echo of the world, Peter Rock was the kid who first caught that echo and pressed it onto vinyl.

Fourteen years abroad

And he was not just a neighbourhood impersonator. In 1965 he left for Europe with his brother Alex, and spent fourteen years travelling the United States and the old continent, recording, earning a gold record in Germany, marrying an Englishwoman who worked in the circle around the Beatles' manager. He had a genuine international career, a long one, which in Chile, when he came back, almost nobody remembered.

The showman covered up the pioneer

And there is a sad irony, the one that explains why he ended up an undervalued figure. When he returned, in the early eighties, he reinvented himself as a television comedian: the "Los años felices" segment of "Jappening con Ja", the impressions, the humour. And that is how the country filed him away: as a likeable entertainer, a funny old man on TV, and not as the founding father of its own music. The showman covered up the pioneer. Chile forgot that the grandfather doing voices had opened, decades earlier, the door everyone else walked through.

The circle almost nobody joins up

There is a detail that closes an enormous sixty-year circle, and that almost nobody joins up. Alain Johannes — the Chilean guitarist who would end up playing with Chris Cornell, with Queens of the Stone Age, with Them Crooked Vultures, at the very heart of world rock — is the son of Romy, Peter's sister. And Peter was not merely the uncle: when Alain's father left, he took that place and became his first music teacher. Which means the man who recorded the first Chilean rock and roll taught the Chilean who would later teach Flea to play bass, at a Los Angeles high school, alongside the future Red Hot Chili Peppers. From the Austrian boy imitating Elvis in Ñuñoa to the biggest rooms in the world's rock, along the same bloodline. The door he opened reached further than anyone realised.

The last years

His final years were cruel. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the illness that gradually switches off movement, slowly left him still. The man Luis Dimas remembered as "by far the most cheerful of us all", the tireless showman, ended up unable to move a finger. He died on 16 April 2016, at seventy, near the sea, in Viña.

Remember the musician, not the joke

And there is something else, which says as much about Peter Rock as about the country. Over the years he was filed away as a figure of nightlife and television, as happened to other musicians of that generation whom Chile ended up remembering for the gossip pages rather than for their songs. It is the same repeated injustice: the focus placed on the character and not on the artist. It is no accident that Jorge González, in a recent interview, called for exactly those colleagues from another era to be reclaimed: he said they were "people I think need to be reclaimed", and recalled that their songs were good. Rebobinados agrees: we should look at them again as what they were, musicians, not as the joke on TV.

Peter Rock deserves to be remembered for what he really was, and not for the impressions on television. Every time a Chilean band plugs in a guitar — from Los Jaivas to Los Prisioneros, to the kid recording a song in his bedroom today — they are walking through a door that a fourteen-year-old Austrian immigrant opened in 1959, with a borrowed Elvis song and a nerve nobody else had yet had. If you only knew him from television, now you know the rest. He was the pharaoh of a kingdom he founded himself, and which then forgot him. It is time to remember.

Sources

Peter Mociulski von Remenyk, known as Peter Rock (born near Vienna, Austria, in September 1945 – Viña del Mar, 16 April 2016), was an Austrian-Chilean singer, a pioneer of rock and roll in Chile, nicknamed "the pharaoh of rock" and "the Chilean Elvis". His family emigrated to Chile in 1955. With the producer Camilo Fernández he recorded, on 27 October 1959, the Elvis Presley song "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care", taken from the album "A Date with Elvis" and released in Spanish as "Nena, no me importa", with an orchestra conducted by René Calderón; the single was issued by RCA with "Algo pasó" on the B-side and is considered the first rock and roll in Chilean recording history, the spark of the "Nueva Ola". His biggest hit was the ballad "Entre la arena y el mar", by Jorge Pedreros; in 1961 he opened for Paul Anka in Chile. In 1965 he emigrated to Europe, where he pursued an international career for years alongside his brother Alex, including a gold record in Germany. In the early 1980s he returned to Chile and joined the comedy programme "Jappening con Ja", in the "Los años felices" segment, and later impression shows, where he imitated Louis Armstrong. The guitarist Alain Johannes — a collaborator of Chris Cornell, Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures, among others — is the son of his sister Romy Mociulski; after the biological father left, Peter Rock acted as a father figure and his nephew's first musical mentor. Johannes attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles alongside the future Red Hot Chili Peppers and taught Flea to play bass. Peter Rock died at 70 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His posthumous biography, "Peter, cuando el rock vino a quedarse", by Óscar Aleuy, was published in 2019. On the closing section: in his interview with "El cuarto de música" (2025), Jorge González called for artists of that generation of Chilean music and television to be reclaimed; the text places Peter Rock in that same generation, remembered more for celebrity culture than for his music, without asserting any documented relationship between them. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Sourced from Cooperativa, La Tercera, MusicaPopular.cl, Discogs, Wikipedia and other press coverage.