Peter Case and How He Got That Way by Guest AuthorIna May Wool The Gig I drove into the parking lot of Rotman's Furniture in Worcester MA on a windy overcast Saturday in October and saw a man playing guitar near the ramp into the building. No, I was not on some out-of-town bargain hunt looking to snag a couch or an armoire. In fact I was here to open a Peter Case show. Now I knew the Café Fantastique was located in a furniture store. My friends Rick and Michele (a.k.a. Open Book) had told me their gig there a few months previous had been great. Attentive crowd. Live radio broadcast. Excellent sound. And good money. But I had imagined some kind of funky antique store with a mishmash of objects from various eras - overstuffed couches to sit on, fringed lampshades, that kind of thing. Here was this very industrial looking building - and that couldn't be Peter Case, could it? Shirt out, longish hair, warming up in the parking lot?
When I'd been offered the opening slot for Peter Case, I took it right away. What did I know about him? Bob Hillman had opened for him several times. Bob is a young songwriter who looks a little like Rob Lowe (but six inches taller he will tell you) and he writes highly intelligent, often edgy, often funny, and beautifully melodic songs. I respect Bob's opinion, though I don't always agree with it, and he's very enthusiastic about Peter Case I knew Case was on a major label (Vanguard) and that he'd been in a band called the Plimsouls. I'd read they were "power pop." I'd been listening to a recent solo record of his in the car on the way up from New York, in the usual struggle to break out of the NYC forcefield. This record, "Beeline," sounded rocky and poppy to me. So who was this guy in the parking lot? By the time I parked, collected up my gear, and started into the place, the mystery minstrel had disappeared. The store was a serious furniture store. You walk through a room with huge rugs hanging down from an enormously high ceiling and through numerous warehouse style rooms crammed with setups of couches and chairs and cabinets. Our dressing room was an office/conference room behind the bland looking cafeteria where we'd play, and as I set up my tuner and guitar onstage for the soundcheck, there he was: Parking Lot Man. It WAS Peter Case. He listened attentively while I did my soundcheck. This was definitely not headline-act-from-LA behavior as I would have thought. Who was this guy really? The first show was at 6pm, and, somewhat dazed from the road trip, I went out and did my set. I guess I had expected a hip, kind of edgy crowd -- a Peter Case crowd as I thought of it- but the people seemed more like whoever in Worcester might want to come to a 6 pm show in a furniture store - series regulars maybe. It took a while to calibrate the difference between my imagination of the event and its reality.
Then Case came up to play. He's a strong guitar player with a lot of energy and rhythmic feel, and he stalked around the stage confidently. Voice somewhat reminiscent of John Lennon. He did a song called "Bumble Bee" by "a great hero of American blues music - Memphis Minnie." (Once again, not what I would have expected.) Case mentioned to the audience that his grandfather had been a conductor on the railroad that ran through Worcester. He said his mother was a big rock and roller. When his first rock band --"Pig Nation"-- rehearsed in the basement of the family's house and they used to do "Yer Blues" (Beatles) his mother said, "Do that nice song about suicide." She also said, "There's never been another one like Jimi Hendrix, has there?" He sang a song about a homeless Vietnam vet -
"Tom fought for freedom and never took a free breath. He was free to walk the streets all night. Never cared about money and there's no doubt - he never had much money to care about."
"Wake Up Call" is about Donald Rumsfeld's first post- Abu Graib press conference.
"An encyclopedia of lies. You twist the question til the answer quits."
This was not at all what I had expected from the one recording I'd heard, in subject or style. A lot of fingerstyle and blues inflected guitar work. Between shows, because we each did two sets, we talked some in the dressing room. About our mutual friend, Bob Hillman, about the songwriting scenes in New York and L.A. He asked me about the Songwriters Exchange and said Bob had invited him and he'd never made it there but he would be in NYC later in the week. He gave me his email address to let him know details. I was very curious to find out more about who Peter Case was and how he got that way, so I arranged to interview him before his show at Satalla that week. Who was he? A pop star? A political songwriter? A take-no-prisoners live performer? A Grammy nominated producer for Avalon Blues, a Mississippi. John Hurt tribute CD that included performances by Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Beck? A singer-songwriter comfortable with playing little rooms all around the country or the big time recording artist with umpteen CD's to his credit on Geffen and Vanguard? The Interview A few days later, I interviewed Peter Case before his Satalla set here in New York City. The show turned out to be another romp by a seasoned pro still excited by performing. There was some problem with the sound system and he went ahead and played without a mike for the first few songs. The set included blues tunes, a Neil Young song -- "Flyin on the Ground"-- and a Peter Case/Bob Neuwirth/Tom Russell co-write called "Beyond the Blues." The Four Corners and the Sisters As Case told it, the story all began for him near Buffalo, NY, in "a little four corners which actually burned down, one at a time. Going down there you felt like you were going down to Times Square when you were a kid," said Case. "Where my friends who died still hang around," is a lyric of his song about the place, "On the Way Downtown," on his album Full Service No Waiting.His sisters, who were 10 years older, were into music. "I remember my sister going to see Fats Domino when I was like three. The first album I ever had was an Everly's album. Elvis was big… Chuck Berry… Link Wray. I inherited all the singles when I was a little kid. So when they went off to college I inherited a big stack of 45's which I played all the time -- Richie Valens and a lot of other stuff. "My sister played stride piano, my sister Phyllis. She was really good at it. Boogie woogie and stride. That really influenced me a lot. I loved it so much. She would play like Fats." "My other sister came back from college and she was into the folk movement. She was into Joan Baez. This must have been '63. So she had Joan Baez records. I loved the Kingston Trio. I loved rock 'n roll too, and I played all that stuff." Case wrote his first song at age 11. It was called "Stay Away from Me." "Yeah it was pretty dark. It was in the air back then I guess. It was a defensive measure." Bands and Heroes There were garage bands, but also coffeehouse gigs from the first. He continues the story: "I played with this other guy and we did a duet. I was playing a lot of blues back then. Then I got into the Incredible String Band. I wrote about people we knew. We had a big gang of kids that were our friends so I'd write songs about that group of people. We had 'The Ballad of Michael,' a real funny song about this guy Mike." "Being from Buffalo it never occurred to me that you could have a career in music in any sort of professional way. My heroes were of two types. They were Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and I guess along with that I would also have to say Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers, etc., and Chuck Berry. And then, on the other hand, blues guys started to become my heroes - like Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Lightnin' Hopkins. At the time - there wasn't - like now there's a million different CD's you can get -- but at the time it was kind of hard to find those guys, and so I got into that. "It was so exciting to write the first couple of songs and have people ask to hear one of mine. One of them became a break song. I played with a lot of older guys. When I was 15 I was in a band that was called Street Train, and the guys in that band were like 30, 32 - old men. I remember the bassplayer was a tough guy. He would say things like 'Yeah, I need two tickets for the show tonight, one for my wife and one for my girlfriend.' I couldn't believe these guys. They were a real incredible band. We played a lot of blues in that band, and they started playing my break songs. Those were instrumental pieces. Then I had other songs I wrote the words to. It all started to come together.
The Streets of San Francisco But then the worst thing happened. I left home when I was 15. Before that I had all the time in the world to relax in my bedroom, y'know play guitar, have a snack - write a song - it was really relaxed. But when I moved out onto the street - which I had to do, because of disagreements in the home, all of a sudden I didn't write a song for a few years. It just totally set me back. I was scuffling to stay alive." Case hitchhiked all around the East Coast. He played some coffeehouses, but mostly it was band gigs, and he didn't really get back into acoustic music until he began playing in the street in San Francisco at about 18 or 19 years old. "It was folk music back then. You didn't really hear about acoustic music." Playing on the street in SF, I immediately fell in with people out there. I fell in with this guy Mike Wilhelm who was a friend of Jorma Kaukonen. He had started the first psychedelic band in SF. They were called the Charlatans. When I got to SF I set up on the street and I was there for like fifteen minutes. I had a bunch of blues songs, about death basically, that I sang on the street corner. And I met this guy and he immediately asked me to start playing with him. He taught me all the secrets of fingerpicking the guitar -- turned me onto Robert Johnson, Reverend Gary Davis -- he turned me onto Eddie Cochran. So that was that. I was writing poetry and then learning how to play ragtime and blues and rock 'n roll - especially blues - Elmore James and this kind of stuff. And then I was into this beatnik writing - like Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Leonard Cohen and all that really hit me hard - so I thought I was writing poetry. Under the Influence Another guy who influenced me when I went out to California was Jack Lee. He was a very original songwriter. He wrote these little rock 'n roll songs, and when I met him it was 1973 or 4 and he said, 'Hey man let's go smoke a joint,' and we went around the corner and sat in his station wagon. He said, 'Hey man gimme your guitar. This is a song I just wrote,' and he goes, 'I'm in the phone booth it's the one across the hall.' He'd just written 'Hangin' on the Telephone' which became Blondie's first top ten hit 4 or 5 years later. But at that time it was mind-blowing. This guy was very together and he had a whole code of songwriting based on immediacy and minimalism -- very catchy and kind of Beatlish but in an updated way. It was very cool, very driving, like the Ramones, but it was before that. I learned a lot from him. I played bass in his band for 3 or 4 years. That was the Nerves and we were the opening act for the Ramones in '77 for a while. We were driving down the road one night in '77 when Jack heard Blondie on the car radio, and he says 'They're gonna record my song,' which was insane cause we didn't know any of them. Shortly after this, I guess it was, we gave our single to them - and our manager told us they hated it and don't call any more. At the same time Jeffrey Lee Pierce -- who ended up being the leader of a band called the Gun Club which was a pretty influential band -- at the time he was president of the Blondie's fan club, and he gave a tape to Debbie and Chris when they flew to Australia and Japan. So they cut the song. It was one of those weird destiny things. Another guy I learned from was T-Bone Burnett. Me and T-Bone lived for a while down in Texas, in Fort Worth. I'd write during the day and then play him the songs at night and he'd criticize them. Another teacher was Bob Neuwirth who's a great songwriter as well as a painter. We wrote together a lot. This was after my first album, before my second one. We'd meet every day over this guy's Steve Sole's house in Santa Monica and have coffee and usually write. We'd just write joke songs sometimes to make ourselves laugh and every once in a while - y'know we just wrote for our own entertainment and for our friends -- but every once in a while a song would come out that would have some sort of resonance, like that 'Beyond the Blues' song is one. I was writing writing writing but never really putting songs together, though I had done it earlier. You go through different periods where it doesn't add up. Tom Waits' Advice / Building Songs I was walking down the street one night in the middle of the night a few years ago in LA when I ran into Tom Waits. He was standing in a doorway, and I said, 'Hey Tom (laughs) or something like that, and he said, 'What are ya doin?' and I said, 'Tryin to write a song but it's not comin,' and he said, 'Sometimes you just gotta wait til ya fill up with water.' And a lot of times you do have to really wait. I have my own things too that I brought to it that maybe these other people didn't show me at all -- like sometimes you can sing in tongues. It's like the sound of the whole thing is the meaning. I've always felt that was true and then I found out that there's actually a scientific study of the meaning in just the sound of words and that you can imitate meaning - that meaning is implicit in the syntax or something. So at times you can just pick up a guitar and turn on a tape recorder and just start singing and at first the words are complete gobbledygook -- and then you come back later and translate it. That's what I call singing in tongues. You translate it back out into English and find your lyrics that way. 'You gotta wait til you fill up with water,' like Tom Waits said. But sometimes you just gotta add up life. I was playing in a rock 'n roll band and then before I went solo -- right before all these story songs… I'd never really written songs like this -- started coming to me. This was in '83 and '84, I guess it was. These story songs started coming to me that sort pointed the direction for where I was gonna go. They were story songs about things that had happened to me, but they were things that had happened to me 15 years before. So it shows me -- it's true -- you never know how things are gonna add up. I still have a feeling… I feel like I'm gonna do something but I don't want to just write to write. I want to clear something up. I want to invent something -- invent a way out of this impasse -- that's the way I feel about it. Changing Times: The Song Explosion Music means a completely different thing that it's ever meant before. That can be good and bad. I'm trying to get to the heart of it. Like I was reading Bob Dylan's new book today, and the world was just so incredibly different. He talks about signing with John Hammond and looking at the pictures of y'know Jerry Vale -- like those kind of people - the Andrews Sisters -- this is who was on the horizon at that point. There weren't that many recording artists. When I went on the road in '77, there was like one band in every city we went to doing original material &emdash; maybe. New York had a dozen. Boston had three or four. New York had the Tuff Darts and the Ramones and Willie Deville and Blondie, of course, and the Talking Heads and a few others. You'd go to Boston and they had Willie Loco Alexander and the Cars and Jonathan Richman. And Chicago didn't have a band. They didn't have a band that played any original material! Now there's more folksingers in South Kalamazoo -- you could have the "South Kalamazoo Sampler, Part One, Two and Three." There's more people doing it in South Kalamazoo than there were in the whole world. But that's just a shift in the culture. Possibly we're moving towards something like Bali -- where everybody plays music -- like gamelon music. There's a whole world now of different opportunities for music. I think it's great in a way that there's so many people playing music. It's a huge opportunity for everybody to create something incredible. There's something that will come out of this culture. It's all going somewhere. This is almost like the jazz era now -- where you had a huge proliferation of people playing jazz. Now you have a huge proliferation of people playing music that's simpler, so that you can play with other people really easily. And it could almost be going towards some sort of new 21st century folk jazz. It's like an explosion of writing." Peter's latest CD, just released on Vanguard is "Who's Gonna Go Your Crooked Mile." For a complete Peter Case discography, his road blog, tour dates, etc. look at petercase.com. Full Service No Waiting (1997) is a good one for the more acoustic, singer/songwriter style Peter Case.