There's No Exit for Peter Case, Former Plimsouls Leader
and Singer-Songwriter Auteur
By David Ensminger

"I was always sort of not interested in what my generation was doing," Peter 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. This skinny, five o'clock shadowed, gumption-filled former rocker, whose bands the Plimsouls and the Nerves once defined power pop, had a poise that was almost unnerving. "Yeah, I liked that one Velvet Underground record, the one with Heroin on it," he murmured, then vented about rock n roll's infantile, cream puff, lackluster edge. His bluntness was indelible. After he sang dog and monkey songs 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 lips. Two years later he thanked me again, and spoke so candidly that I wrote, "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 1970's San Francisco scene, like Chip and Tony Kinman from the Dils, Alejandro Escovedo from the Nuns, and yourself, have become country-influenced singer songwriters. Why is that?

There's just 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 forty-niners town. When I got there in the early seventies, 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 and Family Stone scene, but the other one, the 1960's one, was completely founded on country and blues music. The Grateful Dead was a jug band, and The Jefferson Airplane was founded by guys playing the Reverend Gary Davis.

Punk was just an outgrowth of everything before it?

I always look at punk as an explosion of counter culture 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.

Has your relationship with Vanguard been extremely different than your 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 thirty 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.

The live songs are so different than their recorded versions, as if the songs jump out of 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.

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 n 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 onto 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 was 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 fifteen, before it was even legal, and was hanging out in bars. I'd be the youngest member of the band, 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.

You loved 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 loose 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.

In many ways, when you hit the road in the early 1970's with your acoustic guitar 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.

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; 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.

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 1960's. 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 9pm-3am on Broadway and Columbus, right across from City Lights bookstore.

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?

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 recreating 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. 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?

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.

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.

At the Plimsouls' parties after gigs, you often ended up playing the acoustic guitar and 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. There was a show 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.

When you hit the streets again after the Plimsouls broke up and played coffee shops, 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.

How much did T Bone Burnett shape your sound?

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. But the fact is that I was deemed by the record company, and T Bone, as being too primitive to even play on my first record.

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

On the first record, there are a lot of slick arrangements. There are 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.

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 it 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 a flesh them out a bit. I love playing solo. I could name you my ten 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 are 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.

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 1973-4, but I didn't know him then. I'm inspired by those guys, but I'm also inspired by a lot of things.