https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/13-No-Sleep-Blues.m4a “Oh, will your magic Christmas tree be shining gently all around?” -Chinese White (Mike Heron) The String Band weren’t the inspiration, nor the Beatles. I lay the juggernaut straight to Madison Avenue’s Time Magazine. It was late Spring, 1969, the year I turned 15, and got out of the ninth grade. Time made the psychedelic world sound so beautiful, and a lot of us had become filled with anticipation and desire. My friend Jeff and I were feeling its power, for the first time, in the yard outside his parents split-level tract home, in the middle class Forest Glen housing development sub-division of Hamburg, New York. I was lying on the lawn along the side of the house, and my girlfriend, Mary Anne, came riding up the sidewalk on a purple Sting Ray bicycle with a white Banana seat. “The little long haired girl,” one of my pals used to smirk and call her, when she first transferred in from the Jesuit school in Buffalo. Now she was wearing cut-off mod
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to David Ensminger, for Joe Carter: In response to your question: “What do I believe are the poetic qualities of Hendrix’s lyrics?” First of all, he created memorable, and dynamic original phrases of speech, blazing lines that stick in your head forever. I think he had more of these in three or four albums than the Beatles, for example, made in their whole run: “‘ ’scuse me while I kiss the sky!” (from purple haze) ” I know what I want but I just don’t know/ how to go about gettin’ it” (from manic depression) “will it burn me if I touch the sun?” (from love or confusion) ‘there ain’t no life nowhere!” and “”i don’t live today/ maybe tomorrow, I just can’t say” (from I don’t live today) ‘let me stand next to your fire’ and ‘move over, rover, and let Jimi take over!” (from fire) castles made of sand/ fall in the sea/ eventually (from castles made of sand) “aw shucks/ if my daddy could see me now’ (from up from the skies) ”if all the hippies cut off all their hair/ i don’t care/ I don’t care” and “if six turned out to be
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/01-Give-Me-One-More-Mile.mp3 Produced by Andrew Williams, at Mike Meltzer’s TMOP Studio in Van Nuys, CA, sometime in the mid-90’s. With Sandy Chila on Drums, David Jackson on Fender Bass, and Peter Case on 12 string, harmonica, and vocals. This is the opening track on the Case Files compilation, on Alive/Naturalsound Records, available from their site: http://www.bompstore.com/case-peter-the-case-files-plimsouls-nerves-breakaways-cd/ The Case Files (2011)
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/01-Playing-With-Jack.mp3 Kool Trash (1998) Davido, Eddie and I, with Clem Burke going crazy on drums. The Williams Brothers, Andrew and David, sing backups, the way they did on the original A Million Miles Away. Ethan Johns, (son of Glyn) engineered this, and Andrew Williams produced it. Ethan brought in a Gretsch that was once David Crosby’s, and I played it throughout, one of the greatest guitars I’ve ever had my hands on, it just had a river of electric musical power running through it, amazing. The lyrics spin a cautionary tale, but it’s all with a rock n roll sense of humor. This track was pretty much ignored at the time by radio etc. I thought they’d be all over it. What did I know? But its still a good listen… By the way,shows coming up: July 13 Burbank, July 14, Long Beach, July 15, Santa Barbara, July 26, San Francisco check “gigs” on the menu for complete info and tickets.
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/01-Echo-Wars.mp3 “If this record doesn’t sell a million copies I quit the business.” T-Bone Burnett was addressing the visitors to the control room of studio B at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, on a distorted radio shack bullhorn. It was early Spring 1986, and we were listening to a playback of my first, self-titled solo album, a collection of songs and music that was considered a big departure. The material had begun the journey to vinyl two years before and run into a gauntlet of trouble and interference. Though I’d spent the previous ten years playing in some “perfectly good rock n roll bands,” I was hearing music in a whole new way. It was a personal, musical, and spiritual upheaval. “Unraveling the mysteries of music.” That’s how I expressed it— “the quest for musical fire,“ after a popular caveman movie that was exhibiting around then. I’d travelled back and forth across the country a lot by this point touring in the bands. More recently I’d been delivering some cars for an agency in LA, making the fast and vast transcontinental drives, and the songs were coming during those jaunts. And I was praying on my knees a
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/06-Whos-Gonna-Break-the-Ice_.mp3 This is from a live album, Beachtown Confidential, recorded at the Golden Bear, in Huntington Beach, one of our favorite clubs, in 1983, and released on Alive/Naturalsound Records. This and the other two Plimsouls Live recordings I believe are the best recordings we did, and surpass the studio versions for sound and excitement. We were a live band! Below is a link to the record at the Alive store. There’s another one available there, Live! Beg, Borrow and Steal, from The Whiskey a Go Go Halloween 1982. There was talk at the time that this tune would be the next single… Both of these are available at iTunes and Apple Music: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/beach-town-confidential-live/id492812876 For the vinyl or CD: http://www.bompstore.com/plimsouls-beachtown-confidential-custom-mixed-yellow-marble-vinyl-ltd-ed-of-100-lp/ Beach Town Confidential (1983)
Jimmy and I worked it out so we didn’t have to go home. He told his parents he was staying at my house, and my folks were under the impression I was over at his, so everything was cool, we both got out for the night. We made straight for Jon and Mike’s garage apartment on Pleasant Avenue, all ready to go psychedelic. The cast that night, besides Jimmy and I, included Dennis Bicknell, his girlfriend Donna, and Jon, and they were all older and more experienced in everything than me and Jimmy, who had just taken our final exams for the ninth grade. Bicknell was probably twenty-one or two, Donna, maybe twenty. Jon, I think was eighteen. Dennis was a good cat, kind of a car-guy gone psychedelic, and had just got out of the Navy. He was half-crazy, liked to laugh hysterically and pull outrageous stunts. He’d grown a mustache while he was gone, but his hair hadn’t grown long yet. He smoked a lot of weed, was also big on pills, and enjoyed drinking a bottle of Robitussin every now and again, digging the codeine high. Donna was a tall thin brunette, a hairdresser, quiet,
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/02-Lets-Turn-This-Thing-Around.mp3 Let’s Turn This Thing Around is a track we recorded at Stan’s Lumberyard Studio, back during the W. Bush epoch. Sad to say, it’s come back into relevance. But it’s a rockin’ little number I want my jockey to play, ‘cept that never happens. So, here it is! Me on vocals and banjo, Stan on drum machine and SOUNDS. LET’S TURN THIS THING AROUND! Let’s Turn This Thing Around when the next election comes & goes• before it’s stolen by a nose Americas been growing strange• we the people want a change LETS TURN THIS THING AROUND Democracy is our ideal • without the truth its all unreal Jesus Christ said it plain• you can’t serve God on a golden chain LETS TURN THIS THING AROUND Our countrys split that what were told Our constitutions bought & sold turn off the tv hear the news without the lies & violent spews LETS TURN THIS THING AROUND who are the heros? who, the thieves? who tells lies & who believes? we the people hear the voice the time has come to make the choice LETS TURN THIS THING AROUND when the next election comes &
https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/Peter-Case-The-Plane-That-Never-Dies-m150102_03.mp3 There is a plane warming up it’s jets on the tarmac. It’s long & white & the windows are all blacked out. It is the Plane That Never Flies. Late at night it pushes back from the gate and heads out on it’s mysterious errands,taxiing down a back runway to the other end of the airport, passing out through a concealed gate and taking to the streets of our streets & states. Once it gets out in the city, it takes on the appearance of an old dumpy off-green ice cream truck. There’s a little song that plays, but don’t be fooled. It’s traveling at mach three, that’s three times the speed of sound,and it bears a crew of 153 highly trained Navy Seals… No one knows where it goes, why it goes, or even when. No one sees it return, yet in the morning, there it is again, parked at the usual gate, silently embodying all the great enigmas of our time. The president has received a briefing on the PTNF… but to date, he has never been allowed on board. Oh well, them’s the breaks! The air whistled through a hole in the hold– a stream of
21 comments
Good stuff.
Cool ! my friends don’t appreciate this band, or don’t understand it. but I always liked them. Thank you for putting words into their particular approach of music . Joe Boy, in his book Whyte Bicycle wrote nice things too about them too. Cheers Marc
hey Marc, glad you enjoyed this. best to you and the folks in Nice!
Joe Boyd. Their producer for Elektra Records. Will havta look up that book.
Saw the Incredcibles, Philly Folk Festival, took up whole stage with their instruments.
You might like the chapter in my book Acid Drops in which I review Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter which deals with Hangman’s via an acid experience.
Love.
Y’all might like this ISB tribute as well: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/search?q=Incredible+String+Band
wee tam /big huge alltime fav. played it on my weddingday in 69. think nobody understood.love them still
Beautiful piece!
Thanks, Stan! Glad you dug it…
Thanks!
Thanks for this peter–I had no idea–connects a few more dots for me
Same here!
Love this piece! So evocative. Could serve as the prologue to Passport. Just paste it in, man!
And now I know where the red chucks come from. Being a strictly black or blue man in that regard, I was puzzled. Tho, I swear I’ve seen you in green ones too. No?
But enough of fashion.
I’d like to get into this statement later in the BOT reading group (party of two!)>>>>
“But the one thing String Band didn’t have was the BIG BEAT, the hard and fat Dionysian noise on the two and four with the passionate screaming voices and noodling electric guitar solos–the evolutionary development in sound that came to dominate all rock and pop music at that moment, and for the next several decades.”
In light of our readings, I’m not sure. This could be an imposter Dionysius. Jim Morrison if you will on the 2 and 4. The real item, the satyr, strikes me as lighter on his feet w/ no one, two, three, or four!
But more below … later … in the Netherlands.
Best, Dave
We need to discuss this , Ackles, somewhere no one else will hear, that is, in the Nietzsche Reading Society comments. I was wondering if I could put that Stringband thing in Passport, but I get hung up. maybe you’re right. I need an editor again, because my instinct, (not necessarily my intuition,) is too throw it all in there, essays, memoir, poems, etc…but maybe thats too “post-modern, ” whatever that means. Rejecting forms and norms…wow, which is what that string band did big time. Could work. When I was talking about the Big Beat Big D, I was thinking more the the plmsouls, and the way I would get lost in the performance, lose my self in the band, in the sound and volume. I had an “expert” (may actually have been an expert, who knows) tell me it was Dionysian, but I’ll explicate that in the other thread.
What IS the origin of the big one two three four? Interesting question…
I saw them at a gig in the church of Scientology headquarters in NYC, must have been around 1969. What I remember most was a lot of back and forth in jokes with audience members. I’m still getting mail from Scientology! The Onion record and Hangman are still in rotation on my iPod.
I too was schooled by Hit Parader. It was my pipeline growing up in Montreal. Bits of pieces remain…..McGuinn talking about the influence of Coltrane, Spoonful news, Zappa writing, Pet Sound love letters and so much more. Also would love to be able to revisit via reprints. You can see fragments on the web. Thanks for ISB appreciation. They were quite the turntable item in my home Montreal in their heyday.
Glad you enjoyed it, Elliot. Yes, HP was a real education, the first behind the scene rock and roll magazine, ahead of its time, never credited. Jim Delehant, Ellen Sanders, Valerie Wilmer…a whole cast of journalists inventing the genre. They had a series about the development of the electric bass. An interview with Mike Bloomfield about the Dylan sessions. An interview with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Steve Cropper was the Memphis correspondent. There was a two part interview with Issac Hayes and David Porter about how they wrote songs for Sam & Dave. It was the first place I heard about Doc Watson…Juke Boy Bonner…etc so great, yes, schooled by “Hit Parader” for sure. Donovan. interviews with Joe Tex,Janis Ian, the Supremes, Bobbi Gentry, Eric Burdon, Albert King, Otis Redding, Grace Slick, Rufus Thomas, Smokey Robinson! The Stax Records Story! This in 1967 and you could get it at your local drug store…I never saw Crwadaddy until later, it was hard to find out in the provinces…anyhow…
Thanks for writing!
Great piece! I just stumbled across it, maybe via Expecting Rain, and I think you’ve got them down right. Back in ’68 two double-albums were released on the same day and I wanted them both, but could only afford one. I figured everyone would get The Beatles (White Album) so I’d hear it plenty; I bought Wee Tam & the Big Huge, which was cleaved in two for US release. Worked a treat. Going back a little earlier, I am frequently reminded of Way Back in the 1960s, but my fave always was Hangman’s. Thanks for the memories, I’ll play it now.
Hangmans Daughter and the double album are so inspiring. It’s all great, they are as important as Dylan or the Beatles to me, the voices, the singing, the emselble playing, the cliche free writing, the colorful visuals, etc….and everybody took from them. Secret rulers of the world…
Yes…I was part of the scene in those hopeful days when some of us believed we would heal the world with acid….maybe we did a little……the string band was my favourite band… psychedelic gypsies….we hitched to the second Glastonbury from Wales with our beads and bangles….yoga, organic food, Meditation..hashish. ..those early festivals have nothing in common with the what is now a commercial event … they were free and frequented by the counter culture ….we had had enough of endless wars .. we were going to change the world with love and consciousness…
Worlds they rise and fall within her eyes……..the gulf is spanned …
Enlightenment ……..how naive we were..However I wish they’d listened to us…..we might not be in this ecological mess…..sadly the dark corporate forces have raped this planet and the Babylonian money system caused global misery with its debt…..thank you for your energy Mike Robin Licky Rose and the other one….