No Exit for Peter Case

December 2000

Interview by David Ensminger

“I was always sort of not interested in what my generation was doing,” Peter Case told me two years ago after flipping through Louvin Bros. re-issues at a suburban bookstore in Sugar Land, Texas, surrounded by car dealerships, business parks, and seamless lawns. Radio pop, as I knew it from endless FM hours listening to his band the Plimsouls' “A Million Miles Away” in my ugly yellow-shag-carpeted room almost two decades ago, seemed to mold and take shape in his face. But this skinny, five-o'clock-shadowed, gumption-filled rocker had a poise that reminded one of a cinema of solitude. “Yeah, I liked that one Velvet Underground record, the one with ‘Heroin' on it,” he murmured, then vented about rock & roll's infantile, cream puff, lackluster edge. His bluntness was indelible. After he sang dog and monkey songs (striking chords like he was chipping away at heaven) to a confused, grassy-haired five year old, I gave him a tape of Don Walser's broken-down drive-in, Indian Country tear jerkers. “Thanks,” fell from his dinky lips. Two years later he thanked me again, and spoke so candidly that I'm content knowing that I've written “Case knows you have to unhinge memories and know where to fall down. You have to die a little to remember anything at all.”

A lot of the major punk musicians from the late 1970s San Francisco scene, such as Penelope Houston from the Avengers, Chip and Tony Kidman from the Dils, Alejandro Escovedo from the Nuns, and yourself, have become country-influenced singer-songwriters, which is somewhat removed from what has happened to David Byrne, Deborah Harry, and Joey Ramone. Why is that?

There's something about the West, and remember all those people were in San Francisco. It's a Wild West town, a gold town, and it's a 49ers town. When I got there in the early '70s, it still had a wide-open, weird Western feel. There were people from all over the country there, as if somebody had tipped the country, and everything that wasn't nailed down rolled out to San Francisco. There were all kinds of people on the street playing blues and country music. The San Francisco rock movement—not the Sly & the Family Stone scene, but the other one, the 1960s one—was completely founded on country and blues music. The Grateful Dead were a jug band, the Charlatans were basically a ragtime band, and the Jefferson Airplane was founded by guys playing the Reverend Gary Davis. Even Skip Spencer from Moby Grape was playing country and folk music, so it was all really grounded in that. You also have to look at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

Punk was just an outgrowth of everything before it?

I always look at punk as an explosion of counterculture energy, just like all those other movements, but in a different key. There were a lot of elements, of course, that were unique to punk, but there was a big vibe of beatnik poetry in punk. Allen Ginsberg even wrote a poem about San Francisco punks in a book from the late '70s.

Is it important to you that you have a shared community with writers like Tom Russell, Dave Alvin, Alejandro Escovedo, and others?

Yes, it's a nice thing. It's a lot better than in 1975, when you felt very isolated. Apparently Russell was up there at the same time playing the same folk clubs in 1973–74, but I didn't know him then. I'm inspired by those guys, but I'm also inspired by a lot of things.

Has your relationship with Vanguard been different from prior relationships with, say, Geffen?

A million times different. This is the first time in my whole career that I've made two records running with the same crew. Usually on a major label, if you're like me, they fire your A&R person, fire your producer, and tell you to write 30 more songs and don't record you again for another year and a half or two years. They did everything they could to hinder me.

They kept knocking your feet out from under you?

It was real rough for awhile, and I couldn't get out of the deal. They kept making records with me, which was good for me in a way, but it really wasn't, because it was just debilitating in many ways. I was making good records, but they looked at Blue Guitar like it was a horrible record, yet it was my biggest selling record, and a lot of people in the States think it's my best record.

Robert Earl Keen covers “Travelling Light” on his last record, Walking Distance.

Four or five songs off that record have been covered, some overseas even, like in Ireland. But they kept me under contract. They hated it but wouldn't let me go, because they let John Hiatt go, and then he had a big hit. It's hard to make a good record in that environment. Vanguard is a great environment. I love working there.

Will we ever get a live record?

I'll have to talk to Vanguard. I never actually recorded one. There's always bootleggers out there recording the shows, so maybe at some point I'll have one. Maybe one will just fall in my lap.

You don't mind people making the recordings?

If I'm getting good copies of the stuff, it's cool. I have three records in mind that I want to do. And to tell you the truth, a live record is not one of them.

The live songs are so different from their recorded versions, as if the songs have jumped out their skins.

I wonder if that's been a problem for people; it might be confusing. I was trying to go out with a band this year, the same people I went out with in 1989, but we couldn't do it because of this, that, or another problem. Most of them were economic or touring problems. The same reasons why Woody Guthrie probably didn't take a band with him. Also, clubs are just as happy to see you play solo as with a band. Once you've been niched like that, like I have, clubs don't want to pay any more for a full band. They'll put you on a Saturday anyway, so you ended up playing with a band for artistic reasons.

And the money is spread five ways instead of one?

There's no money in the first place.

On “Paradise Etc,” from Flying Saucer Blues, you say that you've been on this road from the age of two. Are we to take this literally?

When I was around four or five, right as my sister was listening to rock & roll, I just really loved it. I don't remember so well, but my parents do. I had a ukulele and was trying to play it, so I'd run around and bang it all the time. I was just home talking to my family about it, and they tell me these things, so apparently I had a calling for it then. Now when I say that in the song, I'm not necessarily talking about music, but the whole general road I've been on. It was more of a general, all-encompassing remark that I started the album and song with.

Your sister had Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry records, but was she the person who also turned you on to the blues?

I kind of got into that on mine own. Buffalo, where I grew up, has a big local blues thing going on there, which I was part of. It was like Detroit and Chicago. A lot of people came up from Mississippi to work in the factories. It was a real Northern city with a large black population that was relocated from the South. It was an integrated blues scene. There were people like Elmore Witherspoon that played local blues, who would come over from his shift at the Ford plant. The Band knew all those guys in Buffalo, and that whole style of music was passed down to younger players. I came up in the scene playing piano when I was 14 or 15.

How did you even become aware it? By venturing downtown into those areas?

I left school when I was 15, before it was even legal, and was hanging out in bars. I'd be the youngest member of the bands; everybody in the band would be like 30. They really didn't have songwriters there to lead the charge, but they had the most incredible piano players and guitarists. Van Morrison would come through and pick up people. It was pretty well known, because at one point John Lennon was even coming over and looking at the bands because of Ronnie Hawkins. I had the good fortune of coming up through that. Back then it was not a unique form of expression; you played blues piano the way you were supposed to play in bands. There was a job for every instrument in the band. It was more like basketball than psychedelic. There was a whole way of playing it.

So what made you decide to hit the road for California?

I never felt like the scene was all that welcoming. It was pretty rugged. It was a thing I loved to do and I was playing it, but like most guys in the scene I wanted to take off. I had a thing calling me. All the people in that scene would blast off. The road was calling and I wanted to go to California. I had a lot of problems getting along, and it just wasn't my scene anymore. So I was 18 in 1973 and went to San Francisco.

You got burnt out on the bar rock scene?

I was too young, and wanted to go out and explode onto the road.

You consciously knew that you wanted a musical change too, hence hit the road with an acoustic guitar?

When I was like 15 or 16 I used to hit the road with an acoustic guitar. I just ran into a guy at my father's funeral not too long ago who said he met me when I was 14 walking down the street in Hamburg, New York, and asked me what I had been doing, and I told him I had been doing some hard traveling. (laughs)

Stuffing America under your belt?

I used to try and get 20 bucks in my pocket and go out and hitchhike, catch a ride to wherever it was going. I'd see how far I could go.

What music were you playing on acoustic guitar? Say, Kingston Trio? (laughs)

They were happening when I was five. I made my mother buy me every record. That was before the Beatles. They were fantastic. They sang songs about death, and being a sailor, and calypso songs. But the things that put me on the path I'm on now were the records of Mississippi John Hurt. In 1968, I heard his record Today on Vanguard.

What about Lightning Hopkins?

I was a huge fan of his. I actually took off from home and saw him in Boston. I was on the road and spent my last three bucks to see him sit down and play electric guitar, and he was just awesome. It must have been 1969 or '70. With country music, I listened to Hank Williams, which really penetrated up to where I was. Then you'd go around the corner to Eden, New York, the farm towns, and go to the bars up there and people were playing the country music of the day, which was also fantastic, like George Jones. The Byrds came out with their country stuff, and I was way hard into that.

What about rock stuff like Jefferson Airplane and the MC5?

I was never an MC5 fan, though they were great.

In many ways, in the early '70s you were actually going against the grain of popular music.

I had this girlfriend and she really liked me, and started taking me to concerts all the time. Every weekend, she'd take me to a different one. I wasn't going to that many myself, but she started carrying me to those things. She'd win tickets in a contest, or this, that, and everything. I just didn't dig it man. I was the only guy at the Led Zeppelin show in 1969 in Buffalo who wasn't digging it. I just thought it sucked, it was so fucking boring. Ten Years After was not good.

Because it was all so bombastic?

No, it was just really boring. It was like really long, drawn out, and excessive. Even the singing wasn't right.

So, in a sense, you were already in the punk vein, which you pursued with the stripped-down Nerves style?

I was already a fan of things that were really good, but I was a real choosy fan. I was really into Lennon's first solo record, but I knew when Imagine came out that it wasn't as good. I knew “Crippled Inside” was not really a great song, just a piece of humor. Or Randy Newman's third record too. People think I'm nuts. I knew by that record that he was no longer cutting edge. You could just hear it in there. It had become a formula already, and I quit listening to him. I love Arlo Guthrie for Alice's Restaurant…

But everything following was a disappointment?

I wouldn't say it disappointed me, I just never listened to the records. He was a complete genius in my pantheon, but that was it. He never let me down because I never got into the other records. Other people too would win your attention, and just lose it. Like the Doors, whose first two records were great, but I knew by the time Waiting For The Sun came out that it was bullshit. So I didn't go for Grand Funk Railroad.

And Creedence Clearwater Revival too? You told me once that they were bubblegum.

People put me down for calling it bubblegum. I liked “Born On The Bayou,” that thing killed me. It was a really great brand of bubblegum, the great American bubblegum that Elvis made too.

And Jack Lee from the Nerves found you playing on the street?

I had been on 8th Street for about two years. The whole period of playing on the street was very exciting, because it was almost the last gasp of the 1960s. Patti Smith has referred to 1974 as a huge energy year, and it was. There was an explosion in the folk clubs and poetry places. During 1973–74, I was on the street corner every night, from about 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Broadway and Columbus, right across from City Lights Bookstore.

Did you ever run into the black beat poet Bob Kaufman, who in the early ‘70s came out of his 10-year vow of silence?

Sure, I used to hang out in bars and talk with him. He was at the Coffee Gallery a lot. He was great.

What did you expect from Jack Lee after he approached you? Did you both decide there and then to make the Nerves a different kind of pop band?

The original concept was that we were going to write these songs and play them on the street and be the first band that blew right off the street. We were going to do what the Beatles did, but do it right off the street.

Instead of playing a strip bar in Hamburg?

Our strip bar was going to be the street, except the thing that was going to make it happen was this huge vibe that we were just talking about. We were fashioning a thing that was completely a whole new approach to music. It was punk for us. We were going to take it right to the street. Jack was the real prolific writer. I was a performer and wrote some of the lyrics, but I didn't have it together. I was re-creating myself and learning a lot about music. I was a laborer, driving the car, and playing rhythm guitar. I was not a leader; I could have been, but Jack was way ahead of me. He had a mad vision, and was kind of on the run from the law. I don't know what was going on with him, and Paul Collins was an enthusiast. We were going to use amps that had batteries and rock on the street, go to jail, and get really famous. But the problem was that the streets dried up after the winter of 1974. The energy dissipated over that winter and never came back. That vibe was gone, and we entered into a period of attrition and went into the clubs. It was like, “Where is my generation?”

Did the generation of 1975 supplant the one you were already familiar with?

For awhile, there was no generation.

A real Generation X?

It was lonely, and we were just busking around doing our own thing. It felt really bad. But we started crossing paths with bands like Crime, who were really ragamuffins. A lot of the punk rock people from San Francisco I knew from being on the street. We moved down to LA even before the Mabuhay started having shows and put on the first punk rock shows there with the Weirdos and the Germs. We had 700 bucks, and rented a hall and invited everyone to play. Then we became the opening act for the Ramones on their tour.

The U.S. by van?

No, by station wagon actually. My first car ever in my life, because I left home before I could drive Dad's car.

Did you know you were on the cuff of something that would become a huge musical movement, or did you just see it as an accidental station?

We were disappointed, because we were there for the fostering of this whole new thing, then watched it take off in commercial terms, but were stuck listening to the station with a suitcase our hands. The thing that we started and had a vision for didn't include us commercially.

And it didn't simply happen once. Blondie covered Lee's “Hanging on the Telephone” and it became a huge success. A few years back the Plimsouls released a solid new record with Clem Burke on drums, but it was barely a blip on consumers' radar. But as soon as Blondie re-formed with Burke back on drums, they had a smash hit all over again with “Maria” (not written by the Lee). You always seem swept under by a tidal wave called Blondie.

There's something about Blondie, something they got, maybe their front person. The whole period with the Nerves was like being in the Merchant Marines for me, like going around from city to city meeting people. It was very exciting meeting people like Pere Ubu and Devo. Yet I still have never felt like I've been a part of any of the waves that have gone out. It hasn't been my experience, for some reason. Perhaps because of my restlessness, which pulls me out before things pop.

But that can't really be that true with the Plimsouls, especially with the hit “A Million Miles Away.”

We probably broke up before we had major success. At the time, I did what I had to do, and decided either the Plimsouls were going to do it with me, or I was going to leave them and go do it myself.

At after-hours parties at hotels, you often ended up playing the acoustic guitar and the blues songs you grew up with?

I was doing this jug band, and the Plimsouls were the roadies. I was doing it after the gigs, and it soon became more important than the gigs themselves. It was crazy, but that's what was happening with me.

Did you feel pressed between two places? Did you end up, instead of in the audience at a Zeppelin show, onstage at your own shows saying, “This sucks.”

It was actually in Lubbock during the 1981 Plimsouls tour. I just suddenly woke up and said, “I can't keep on doing this, I've got to take it to another place.” It was just a command.

Did you see Joe Ely at that time?

Matt Groening actually turned me on to him in 1977. He was working at a record store across from the Whisky A Go Go, and I brought in some Nerves records to sell, and he turned me on to Joe Ely and Butch Hancock and gave me Life in Hell, the #1 issue. It was a cultural trade off.

Ely's 1981 live record won him so much attention.

I don't understand how culture works. People talk a lot about that and his time with the Clash, but I don't ever think of him in those terms. I remember the records like Honky Tonk Masquerade, but then the Clash took him on tour and kind of validated him in terms of youth culture. We're a lot a like, because we can both do rock and the acoustic thing. He's a great acoustic solo performer.

When you hit the streets again after the Plimsouls broke up and played coffee shops up and down the coast, you practically self-started the unplugged movement.

When I did it, they had no idea. It was before Tracy Chapman had a hit. But John Hiatt was playing acoustic gigs, and X had the Knitters. I had a band called the Incredibly Strung Out Band at the same time with Victoria Williams around 1984.

What kind of vibe was it?

We were the world's most foremost interpreters of Blaze Foley songs.

But your first record didn't come out until 1986, with T Bone Burnett and Mitchell Froom producing. How did you know them?

T Bone came to me and asked me who produced “Million Miles Away,” and used my producer on one of his records. The road ran both ways with me and T Bone. He helped me out a lot. I went to him after my confusion with the Plimsouls to help me sort things out.

How much did they shape your sound?

I think those guys are powerful producers, perhaps too powerful. T Bone's a great producer. I came to him with this whole vision of the songs I was doing, and we talked about it and came up with the idea of tribal folk, meaning using acoustic guitars with a huge groove in the back, which only made it to the record on songs like “Three Days Straight.” Froom is a great technician and musician, and knew some people to call. The fact is that I was deemed by the record company, and by Froom and T Bone, as being too primitive to even play on my own record.

Does that go back to you being a rock & roll folk singer, a real rollicking force?

On the first record, there's a lot of slick arrangements. There's even a couple of cuts that I don't even play on, I just sing. So when I made Blue Guitar, it was just me and Steven Soles producing, so it's closer to my own thing and what I was trying to get across.

It's much closer to a straight-ahead, Steve Earle–type of record.

Yes, because I wanted what I was doing to be the center of the record, which is something that Steve Earle insists upon, and not about the arrangement of the high-priced session players.

Were you gigging out with the people on the record?

Since 1985, outside the Plimsouls reunion, I've only taken one band out, the one in 1989 for the Blue Guitar tour.

And really only Sings Like Hell captures your bare-boned live performance, and even then it's rather subdued compared to your actual shows.

I'm still hoping to capture that. I love playing live, but when I go in the studio, I really try and nail the songs down in way that people can listen to them over and over again. Especially with Andrew Williams (Full Service No Waiting, Flying Saucer Blues), we are trying to create a sound that is sympathetic, but brings out a lot of the different things from the songs. I'm not the first person who has done this, but I can't remember who the other person who does this way is.

You've said that it's hard to make the records feel alive?

It's a different process. You want to make them feel alive, but because you have a small budget, you can go into a studio and flesh them out a bit. I love playing solo. I could name you my 10 favorite solo records by people, like Thelonius Monk in San Francisco, though I love his Blue Note stuff; Bob Dylan solo, but I like Highway 61 Revisited, and so on. Robert Johnson didn't need a band and was great, and Muddy Waters was great solo, but was great with his band too.

Is it difficult to balance images in the songs with the pace or the momentum of the narrative?

The whole trick with songwriting is to say as much of you can with the least amount. It's almost like sending telegrams in a weird way. It's different than poetry, which is going to be scanned over again and again on the page. Poetry moves at a different rate and speed than songs, and songs have to live up to the land of song, the world of song. You can get away with certain things in poetry that you don't want to do in song, like bog it down. You want to get a whole lot across quickly, and set up your premise quickly, and do it in as detailed of a way as you can. There's different recipes for it, so you keep coming up with new recipes. When you have a story, sometimes those are the hardest songs, because it's a lot of work, practically a battle, while pop songs seem to just jump out.

Back in 1989, Bruce Springsteen said he was listening to you more than any other songwriter.

He's a great songwriter, and he's a peer. He came out to one of my shows in New Jersey. He was at my sound check and asked me specific things about my first two records. He knew all about them, he's very knowledgeable.

People like Richard Buckner slightly made fun of me for liking his work.

He should go listen to “Racing in the Streets.” How could a songwriter not know that Bruce is a great songwriter? I don't understand that. Maybe it's just his personal taste. Guy Clark played me that song on his guitar in an Athens, Georgia, motel room, and I thought it was his. It's a great song.