10/24/16, 2:26 PMCase In Point – Elmore Magazine

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Case In PointPeter Case opens up about his proto-punk-rock roots, hiskiller collaborations and the reissue of his self-titled solodebutFeatures | October 13th, 2016

Peter Case, Los Angeles, August 2015.

By Mike Cobb

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Peter Case is one of America’s greatest living singer/songwriters. In the early 1970s, hefounded the seminal pre-punk band the Nerves, later went on to front the Plimsoulsand, in the mid-80s, embarked on a fruitful solo career. He has worked with Sir GeorgeMartin, Elvis Costello, Mike Campbell (Tom Petty), David Hidalgo (Los Lobos), RyCooder, Roger McGuinn (the Byrds), Van Dyke Parks, Victoria Williams, John Hiatt andmany more. His debut solo album, Peter Case, produced by T-Bone Burnett andMitchell Froom, earned him his first Grammy nomination, and has just been re-released on vinyl by Omnivore Records.

Case will be performing live at Hill Country BBQ at Rockwood Music Hall in New YorkCity on Friday, October 14th. For more information and tour dates, head to hiswebsite.

Elmore Magazine: How did you get started in music? Did you grow up in a musicalhousehold?

Peter Case: Yeah, I did. I was the youngest kid in the family. There were a bunch ofteenagers in the house, and I was just a little kid. I grew up in a household with a lot ofrock ‘n roll, and it was the ’50s. My big sister played boogie woogie and Fats Wallertype piano, stride piano and she was pretty good at it. And so I grew up with a lot ofthat kind of the music in the house all the time. They started me on the piano, I quit,took up sax for a bit, and then eventually the guitar.

EM: Was there a crystallizing moment when you realized– this is what I want to do?

PC: Yeah, I guess I was about six, and I think it was my sister who said that I had anintense devotion to rock ‘n roll. We had all these singles at the house: Elvis, ChuckBerry, the Everly Brothers. So I really loved that, and then a few years later I got reallyinto the Kingston Trio; they were really big, with Tom Dooley. I was just a little kid, man.My mother bought me a copy when we were shopping, she got these stamps you getfor buying groceries, and you got a free record. And then I guess… I wrote my firstsong in about ’65 when I was 11; it was right around then when I got really seriousabout it. I’m from Buffalo where everyone wants to play football, but I got real seriouswhen I was about 14, I had a band and we were working around town. I was playingfirehouses, dances, youth centers, high school dances, solo at coffee houses, churchbasements. You’d just pick out what kind of gigs you could. I did that for a couple ofyears, one band got pretty popular, and then I joined up with some older guys up inBuffalo who were playing blues. They were in their mid-20s, and I learned a lot fromthose people. I was also doing a solo thing all along, and then I grabbed the guitar andwent to California when I was 18, y’know? I left home at the end of my 15th year andmoved in with a bunch of musicians.

EM: In the late 70s, you founded the Nerves with Paul Collins in San Francisco. Canyou describe the scene back then?

PC: Actually, I moved there in ‘73, then the Nerves started at the end of ‘74, we startedplaying SF in ‘75, made our record in ‘76, and the on the very 1st day of ‘77 we movedto LA.

EM: I know, that was all during the growth of what we now call “punk rock.”

PC: Well, we were previous to punk rock. We weren’t really an outgrowth of the punkrock movement, and we were never really a punk band, but when punk rock arose, wefelt sympathy with it, y’know? Because we were kind of in opposition to our peers inthe music world, and we were very different, also playing very fast, so there was a

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Peter Case, Los Angeles, July 1985

punkish element, but we actually started in late ‘74, so it was that very first blast ofrock ‘n roll from younger people, and that’s really what punk rock was, like a newgeneration of rock ‘n roll. But we were really before punk. I booked the first punk rockshows in LA. Do you know about that?

EM: Umm, well, no. Tell me!

PC: Well, you can read about it in the latest issue of Ugly Things. Do you know thatmagazine?

EM: No, but now I’m glad to.

PC: If you’re a rock ‘n roll fan, you’dreally enjoy it. It’s all about garagerock and punk rock. It’s put out bythis guy down in San Diego namedMike Stacks, and he gets a lot ofgreat interviews with people all thetime. In the latest issue, there’s astory in there about the start ofthe Weirdos and punk rock in LAand how I came in and convincedthese guys to play a gig with usbefore they had a drummer! Andso we were finding the Germs, theWeirdos, the Zeros, the Dils, all those bands played their first gig with us. And we had afew bucks from San Fran, so we came down to southern California and booked out ahall or two and put on these shows. The Whiskey wasn’t putting on young bands, wecouldn’t get booked, so we booked our own shows and affiliated with all these punkrock bands who were just starting. They all played with us, and then we went on tourwith the Ramones, also solo, and we played with Pere Ubu, and Devo, before they hadrecord deals, and then that band exhausted itself by early ‘78, but it was kind of aheadof the curve.

You know what they say, the early bird doesn’t get the worm, it’s the second bird. I thinkGuy Clark used to say that. It’s kind of true. [Laughs] We didn’t get the worm, man.Though one of those guys from the Nerves made a lot of money off of that song“Hanging On The Telephone,” y’know– the guitar player.

EM: Next came the Plimsouls. Tell me about that.

PC: So the Plimsouls…the vision of the Nerves was a band where everything wasminimal. I was really getting it together in the Nerves, but the songs were reallystripped down, they were like two minutes long. With the Plimsouls the whole thinggot fleshed out; we were more of a live act. As a result, the band went over pretty well,live, everywhere. So we’ve always been known more as a live act. In fact, my favoriterecords by the Plimsouls are the three live records that have come out from back then.There’s one called One Night In America from ‘80-81, another called Live: Beg, Borrow, &Steal at the Whiskey A Go Go from ‘82, and then there’s Beachtown Confidential from ‘83from the Huntington Bear. And those are my three favorite ones; to me those arebetter than our studio records. The band never did really get comfortable in thestudio.

EM: They didn’t quite capture what the band was truly about?

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PC: The live things did. We were breaking attendance records live in California. We hada big record on the radio, A Million Miles Away, but it never seemed like it got producedcorrectly. Maybe even the Nerves were produced better in a way. But the Plimsoulsmade their reputation as a live band, so that’s fine with me.

My songwriting was evolving from writing these two minute songs I’d been performingsolo since I was 15 or 16. Towards the end of the Plimsouls I started writing theseother kind of songs that were songs you could play completely solo; a lot of myfavorite music has always been like blues singers like Robert Johnson or Lightnin’Hopkins that could bring the whole picture to you just solo– really exciting, rockingmusic, not any esoteric thing, just done by one person.

When I was a kid, I hitchhiked over to Boston from Buffalo– which is about 600-700miles– and I saw play Lightnin’ Hopkins play over there. It was early ‘71. I went overthere in a blizzard, man. It took me a few days to get over there; I actually wrote a storyabout it. It was incredible man; it was, like, really moving. So I always carry that in mymind. Actually, there’s a song that I do based on some Lightnin’ Hopkins music on thatsolo record [Omnivore’s reissue of Peter Case] that just came out.

EM: Excellent, looking forward to hearing that. Since departing from the Plimsouls,you’ve moved in an increasingly acoustic direction. Why is that? I imagine it’s easierthan dealing with band dynamics and all that.

PC: Yes and no. Easier is a strangely relative term. Going out and playing solo isrigorous in its own way, because it’s all down to you, y’know? So to keep doing it, youhave to bring it up to a certain level where people are getting off on it enough that it’sworth doing.

I haven’t been increasingly acoustic. You’re either acoustic or you’re not. I go back andforth between all those things. It’s more about the song than whether you’re acousticor not, though I do like acoustic music. But I like rock ‘n roll too. I love full on rock ‘nroll, and I believe you can play acoustic rock ‘n roll like Jonathan Richman did, or like Ido too. All those boundaries and borders and definitions in music are not as interestingto me as whether something moves me and gets me off. And so, I don’t just like genresof music. I love Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Bert Jansch, those guys all played soloacoustic, but I don’t like everybody who plays acoustic music. And I like all their electricmusic too. A lot of different musicians play electric and acoustic, and I’m that way too.It depends on the situation; you have to make up your mind. I tour a lot solo, and I dolike it. I like the freedom of it, the contact with the audience, and I just like the freedomto be out there and put everything into the song as opposed to having to rely on anarrangement. I just like putting everything into that one performance. They’re kind oflike movies that you project on people’s imaginations, y’know? If you do it right, youcan take people to a whole other place that can almost feel like a whole big orchestra.It’s possible to put it all into a real simple approach. I’m into songs and singers,y’know?

EM: I’m a singer/songwriter too. For me, playing solo often feels very naked. There’snot much room to hide. Do you feel that way as well?

PC: Well, certainly when I first started doing it, after being in bands for many years, Ifelt really exposed. But I’ve come to love that. Over the years I’ve learned to put a lotmore into it. When I first came out of bands it was kind of shocking, kind of like a catbeing thrown into cold water, y’know? (Laughs) But if the songs are really right, andyou’ve worked on it right, it can go to a whole other place where you don’t have tosuffer like that. But I know what you mean, I especially felt like that when I came out of

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the Plimsouls.

EM: Your first solo album was produced byT-Bone Burnett and Mitchell Froom andhad quite a roster, including VictoriaWilliams, Mike Campbell, John Hiatt, JimKeltner, Roger McGuinn, Van Dyke Parksand many others. How did you assemblethat crew?

PC: Well, me and Victoria were married, so she had to! [Laughs] No… she didn’t haveto, but she did. We were up picking guitars one night; it was me, Elvis Costello, whowrites about it in his new book, T-Bone, and Bob Neuwirth. Elvis played me “Pair ofBrown Eyes.” It was a single off the new Pogues record. We were all playing our new

songs for each other. I’d never heard it orany of Shane’s [McGowan] songs, and Ireally dug it. We started talking about it, andI said we should do what the Byrds did withBob Dylan. We could take that song by thePogues and electrify it. We put togetherpretty much the same band as the Byrdsused on 5D. Van Dyke Parks, who playedorgan, and Roger McGuinn is on it. It’s sortof electrified and expanded, sort of a far outversion of the song. T-Bone asked who Iwanted to work with, and I said Van DykeParks, I’ve been a fan of his since I was kid.

We had Song Cycle and Discover America. I also loved all the work he’d done with otherpeople; he also played on that record with Judy Collins and Stephen Stills, Who KnowsWhere The Time Goes. Anyway, it was fantastic working with him. He put a stringquartet on “Small Town Spree”; I got to take a harmonica solo on that, if you canimagine that. It was super fun; it was a joy.

The idea on the first record was folk music, like Appalachia, but with a groove to it. Soyou really feel it. That was the vision for that record. The track “Three Days Straight”has Victoria on it with a drummer named Jerry Marotta.

EM: I know there’s some extra tracks on it. Can you tell me about that?

PC: There’s seven extra tracks. Several of them are from the original recordings we didin Fort Worth from ‘85 that I did with T-Bone. Some of them are the same songs butdone radically different. There’s an outtake song called “The Toughest Gang In Town,”with stacks of harmony vocals from Marshall Crenshaw, who is a friend of mine. Itreally sounds great. One of the best songs on there, I don’t know why we didn’t put iton the record, is called “Trusted Friend.” It’s a good song and we did get a really nicerecording of it.

EM: What informs your songwriting?

PC: My heroes when I was a kid were solo blues singers and poets, especially the Beatpoets. And for a while there I really wanted to be a big rock ‘n roll star when I was withthe Plimsouls. But before that my heroes wrote and represented life. I like all kinds ofstuff like that. Obviously it feeds your mind if you’re writing; it opens up your mind. Ifyou don’t read books it limits you. You gotta read, man. I get the feeling that a lot ofcountry singers these days don’t even read. [Laughs] I mean at least Hank Williams

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read the bible, man. You gotta get all that experience. You go and get real experiencefrom the world, live, talk to people and read! That’s how I see it. And you gotta knowthe history of music, listen to the old stuff and get over the hiss in old records. If youdo that, then you’re on the right track. [Laughs]

EM: How does the songwriting process work for you? Where does inspiration comefrom these days?

PC: Well, I don’t know man. Inspiration’s the big one. There’s no point in doing anythingif it’s not inspired. Inspiration’s the only really important part of it. Where does it comefrom? You never know where the next thing’s gonna start, so you can’t really plan for it.Things just happen. A lot of it’s just based on your life. That’s why I stay on the road alot. In a way it’s inspiring to be out seeing and meeting people, playing for a differentaudience every night and traveling. I find that inspiring because it sets you up for thingsthat are unexpected, and when unexpected things happen, that allows things into yourmind. A song will come in through that window.

Craft is different; it’s not really a compliment. It’s sneaky, crafty. What you want issomething that takes people away, that has an incredible vibe to it. It’s mysterious.You’re always looking for that thing that’s more than you are or more than we all are. Itcomes from a window or from outside; it’s not just mundane. You never really knowwhere the next thing’s gonna start.

EM: Your career has spanned all kind of different scenes, moments in history,analogue to digital. What’s different today than when you first started out?

PC: Music today has a much less important place in society. It was looked at in adifferent way in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now it’s just part of all the options that people have.But music’s really prevalent anyhow. A lot more people want to have an authenticrelationship with music than they used to. It used to be that I was the only kid whoplayed guitar at school. Now everybody plays, or they’re a DJ or something. So it’s verydifferent. In a way that’s good, that’s interesting. On the other hand, there’s lesspeople who are really committed to the history of it. You gotta know the history andknow what’s been done to know what’s left to be done. And you need to know the oldstuff. These days people know less about the past; it’s more homogenized.

EM: Do you think the transition from records to CDs to digital downloads hasaffected people’s relationship to music? Clearly an mp3 is not the same as holding arecord in your hand, but there’s been a resurgence of vinyl, which I hope helpspeople connect more again.

PC: Yeah, like streaming. They don’t pay the artist, which is a huge demotion, but onthe other hand you’re able to hear more. But it’s possible that you hear more but haveless of a relationship to it. I remember when I was a kid I had one Bob Dylan record,Bringing It All Back Home, and I used to listen to it like a million times. I had like about10 records. You learned them so much, you knew everything about it. That’s a verydeep relationship to music. I guess that’s still happening, but you have to create thatyourself. But like they say, you can have incredible access but no context.

This is an excerpt of a larger phone conversation, recorded in September. To listen to thefull interview, head over to Mike’s Mixcloud page here.

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