When I was a kid John Lennon was one of my biggest heros. At 16 years old I read the Rolling Stone interview, and JL said something like ‘I’m the kind of person, when I have a hero, if I find out they wear green socks, I’ll run out and buy green socks’ and I immediately started to wear green socks myself. Wore ’em for years. I know that’s fucked up.
He did a photo spread in Look Magazine, with Yoko, it must have been around the time of the making of the White Album, and the pictures made a big impression on me. Him and Yoko were posing in a big empty house that they’d just moved into. She was sitting with him and he was playing the guitar, and I just really admired him, with his girl and guitar in a big house where nobody could tell him what to do. It was one of the things that clarified, at the time, my ideas about life. Of course, my image of him was rubbish. He was mad, painfully insane, destroying his mind with drugs, about to break up his great band. But that flux was part of what was great about him. I would consciously, and unconsciously, imitate all of that before too long myself.
I identified with the depth of his problems, as expressed in Yer Blues. That was my favorite for a while. My band ‘Pig Nation’ performed it at every gig we did, through 1969 and 1970. Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan were my other biggest living heros, and that song kind of summed it all up for me.
‘I’m lonely, want to die,’ Pig Nation used to rehearse in my parents basement and my Mom once called down the stairs: ‘Boys, play that nice song about suicide again!’
I’d seen the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show every time they were on. That was the first time I ever talked back to a grown up. My Dad was making cracks about their hair and I told him to be quiet. He got me good for that one! That was the first trouble JL got me in. I still have a 1964 diary somebody gave me for Christmas. ‘Saw the Beatle last night on TV. Mom and Dad think they stink. I think they’re great!’ Then me and a couple guys skipped outta school at lunch, and went downtown. I was 9, what is that, 4th grade? And we stood in the drugstore reading the first Beatle magazines ’til the guy asked us to buy something or leave. My first adventure with truancy, thanks John.
So you see, he was a big one for me. I became a songwriter in 1965, right after ‘I Feel Fine’ came out. Me and George Pope, my first songwriting partner, wrote ‘Stay Away,’ that was my first tune. We played it in my band, The Telstars, and that was it: all I ever wanted to do, after that.
I could go on and on. But I think you see. I spent three years living and playing on the streets of San Francisco. That was sort of my ‘Hamburg’ period. Me and my pals would play 12 or or more hours a day, everyday. During this time, I didn’t give a fuck about anything, just like I knew JL didn’t when he was a young rocker. It was a dark time in a way, but it taught me that I could project rock and roll.
When he died I was in the Plimsouls. That night me and Eddie Munoz had just written our song Shaky City. When the news sunk in, I cried my guts out. What a disaster. Eddie didn’t cry. He just said ‘ They kill all our heroes.’
Peter Case left home when he was 16, taught himself to play country blues on the streets of San Francisco, and was in a couple of signal L.A. rock bands: The Nerves and the Plimsouls . For the last 25 years Case has worked as a singer-songwriter, building a lauded catalog of songs and a reputation as a musician’s musician. Springsteen and Prine and Ely are fans. Sir George Martin tapped him to play Beatles songs at the Hollywood Bowl. He returned from open heart surgery with 2010′s Wig!, a pummeling collection of blues, punk, and garage rock. We talked after a house concert he played at Boston luthier Yukon Stubblebine’s home.
Q: Before I turned my tape recorder on you were talking about arthritis.
A: Yeah. One of the things you take for granted when you’re younger is how many aspects of your creativity are physical. My problem is in my thumb, and everything I do comes through my thumb. I play guitar, I play piano, I write, I drive, I type, and I experience a lot of pain. Lately I know that there’s a price to pay for sitting down and playing piano, and it does hang me up. I’ll sit down at the piano and say “this better be good, I hope this is worth doing, because this is going to cause me pain.” The idea that “this better be good” is very non-productive. In fact it’s totally ruinous.
Q: What else has changed?
A: Songwriting’s a lot different than it was when I was younger and there are so many factors it’s hard to put your finger on. When you’re young, songs come to you. They come fast and it’s like getting hit by lightning. It would be quite a while until another one came or maybe another would come right away, but it always seemed kind of out of control. I didn’t have a writing discipline. I knew nothing about discipline. My life was very chaotic. I was pulling the pieces together of a very kind of shattered scene as a kid and I was on the run for a while.
Q: When did you start writing songs?
A: When I was a kid living with my parents I was writing songs regularly. Bands were playing them, older guys, and when I left, at 16, I didn’t start writing again for a number of years. I wanted to be writing. I wrote words and I played music but it took years before they turned into songs again.
Q: Why is that?
A: I was constantly hustling to make a living and I became very unfocused. But I learned how to play blues during that period, how to sing and play old songs.
Q: What happened to make you start writing again?
A: Here’s what happened. Stop me if it’s not interesting. I started having these dreams and songwriters would come to me in the dreams. I had this one dream where I skipped out of high school and went to a record store and I’m going through a record rack. John Lennon’s in there, and he’s right at the next record rack. I see this record called Hothouse Madmen by the Sergeants, and it looks really good to me, and John Lennon goes, don’t listen to that. You shouldn’t listen to that record. And I said, it looks really interesting to me. I want to hear it. Then he disappears and they put on the record in the record store in my dream and it’s this incredible song I’ve never heard before. And then I wake up and I write the song and it’s called “Hothouse Madmen.”
Q: That’s extraordinary. Did you record it?
A: Well, I was in this band, the Nerves, and I started playing the song and I start singing the words and the other guys didn’t understand them. They didn’t want to play it. They had control of the band and they voted it down. They told me, if you write a lyric that would fit in with the band we’ll definitely do the song. I tried to rewrite “Hothouse Madmen” so the Nerves could play it. I wrote version after version of it and hated them all. I was going crazy from doing that. So I would skip out of school, in a manner of speaking, to write other songs. I wrote basically the whole early Plimsouls repertoire trying to write “Hothouse Madmen” and not succeeding. I never did get that song. Strangely enough the music for it became the first song on my first record. T Bone Burnett wrote the lyric for it.
Q: What’s the takeaway lesson?
A: The problem with songwriting is you can’t force it. So the song I was trying to force never came through for me but it pushed me into something else. That’s the lesson, that you need to apply yourself to things that don’t cramp your style. I think we all know that a dream is some form of revelation, and it happens so much faster and more completely than in the conscious mind. The conscious mind is like a cripple. The conscious mind is very slow. If you start doing dream analysis, which I’ve done, there’s all this information in the dreams, and when you start recognizing and adding these symbols up, it’s incredible. Songwriting is a form of dreaming, a form of dreaming that you let happen.
Q: You’re a storyteller. Do stories present themselves in dreamlike fashion, too, or is there a more workmanlike aspect to writing lyrics?
A: Stories started adding up for me in 1985, mostly about things that happened when I was much younger in a period of my life that I never really worked out. The songs just came. Some of them, I wouldn’t even know what they were about when I first wrote them. And then I would realize, oh my god. You can’t just make up a story. For me, I want to feel some kind of authority from a story. I’m interested in discovering things and I use songwriting as a way to know my mind and to know myself. When I was little my father would get mad at me and yell at me and ask, what do you have to say for yourself? And I never had anything to say for myself. I would just sit there. He had a stuttering problem himself and he was passing it along to me, where I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t express myself. So songwriting is a way of stacking the deck so that you can say your best things. You find a way to say the most profound thing you can say. That’s why I love songwriting. When they ask me what I have to say for myself I don’t know. I still don’t know. I find things in songs that I don’t know.
Q: Do you have rituals? Has your approach to songwriting changed over the years?
A: I’ve had to change it every time I make a record. I can’t do it the same way twice. For some reason I have to always reinvent a new way to make songs, and that’s the impetus for writing songs. It’s weird. When I was in the Plimsouls I bought this boom box and took it on the road with me. I would set it up in my motel room and get my guitar and start rocking and wait until something happened. Then when I went solo, for the first solo record, me and T Bone Burnett were living together down in Texas and I was writing in the living room and I would sit there all day and write he’d come in at night and I’d sing what I had written to him. I’d read stuff, think about stuff, play other old songs. Then I got into this thing where I got this pen, this weird pen that wrote really tiny, and I wrote this whole other album in tiny little letters. I was drinking a lot of coffee and write these really concise lyrics. It was all written tiny in these notebooks. It seemed to me like every word was important. The next record I wrote with other people because after Blue Guitar I got married and we had children and all of a sudden I had no peace of mind anymore and no place to work. The publisher called up and said go write with other people so I wrote the record with Billy Swan, Fontaine Brown, John Prine, Tonio K, Tom Russell. It was communal writing. People generally think it’s my worst record and there’s a lot of different reasons for that, not just the writing process. I was distracted. Having children was super demanding. That’s when I started doing the dream thing.
Q: What exactly do you mean by the dream thing?
A: When you’re writing songs, sometimes you don’t really work on the songs. You try to get yourself more in the moment, more in tune with your dreams, less distracted. You put away all the books and stuff, whatever it takes. You try to work on yourself, you know? And maybe you try to be more articulate with people, and you try to be nicer to people, you try to do different things so that you’re in a better state of mind. You have to work on yourself. You don’t work on the songs. I mean, you do work on the songs, but the most important thing is to get yourself in a frame of mind, which could involve doing things differently in your life. You have to be living on the up, to the best of your ability dealing with things. You have to take chances, to feel alive. You have to be aggressive with yourself, to push yourself out on a limb. You have to do things that make you feel excited.
Q: Is it second nature now, getting yourself into that frame of mind, or does it get harder? You sound very alive on the new songs.
A: I agree that my songwriting does seem like it’s still alive, and one of the reasons is that I have not been successful monetarily. Every year starts out and the question is how are we going to get through this fucking year. And at the end of the year it’s, oh my god how’s it going to work? It’s a constant thing. But the nice part of that is it keeps you in touch with something really alive. It’s the world’s condition, you know? My heroes are blues singers and poets, Allen Ginsberg and Lightning Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. Those people taught me something, and what they taught me was that what you want to be, you already are. You can be everything you want to be right now. You’re it. You’re living it, you’re making it right now. John Lee Hooker didn’t need a hit record. Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, they went out and made incredible music all the time and nobody knew them from Adam. I love Allen Ginsberg.
When I was a kid in San Francisco I had this group called the Frozen Chosen, we’d play on the street across from City Lights, and Ginsberg started coming out. He’d come over to the corner with us and say, hey guys, you mind if I sit in? He never introduced himself, but we knew who he was. We’d say, sure man. He’d say, can you do some country blues? We’d go yeah. So we’d play blues and he’d make up songs on the corner and sing to people going by. It’s 1974. Sailors and hookers and tourists and kids are going by and nobody ever stopped but he would make up these incredible songs. If you have that real love of a thing it drives you through it. I love words and I love poetry and I love blues music and I love rock and roll and I love it so much that maybe I could survive getting a million bucks for it. I know Bob Dylan did. He made it through. Some people do and some don’t.
Q: What made you start playing music?
A: I had a lot of problems and music was a solution to me, maybe on a level of the boy who couldn’t stop washing himself. I went through a period that I describe in my book a little bit where I lost my depth perception and nothing seemed real. It was a really trippy period that brought a lot of anxiety. Music was a solution to a lot of different problems I had.
Q: Is it still?
A: Yeah. Absolutely. As you get older, though, you get a few other solutions, you know? I’ve had different things in my life that have really helped me. I don’t put the same weight on music that I used to and in a way it’s been better. I’m still on the road all the time but, without getting too corny about it, I’ve got different things that people do to soothe themselves. Meditation, or whatever you want to call it. As you get older you find things like that. I was against it for a long time, but it has helped me.
Q: Does meditation help with songwriting?
A: Not necessarily. It helps with comfort.
Q: What were your ambitions when you were younger? Have they changed?
A: Ambition is hard to explain. I was taught that it’s not good if it’s for yourself. Ambition is for the music, for the songs, to make this beautiful thing that you can give to people or that you can leave. I remember I saw Lightning Hopkins in Boston in ’70, I had run away from home and was travelling around the country hitchhiking and I spent my last $3.50 seeing Lightning in Cambridge. It was so magical. It was such a powerful example of a person expressing himself. I felt the same way about Ginsberg, Art Blakey, sometimes people you’ve never even heard of but you just walk into a club. That’s what I feel like I’m trying to do, is to bring music into the world like that, where it lives in people and they remember it gives them some sort of comfort. Not comfort, but a beauty that makes life worth living. That’s the way I look at it. That’s the ambition. To create things that are beautiful or good and also are of value as you go along, to other people and to yourself.
Q: Value can be hard to quantify. And it seems like the pressure of measuring up would at some point start to feel like a real burden.
A: I don’t know if everything needs to be of value. For me it’s a creativity killer if I’ve got to prove the value all the time. I made this record, Full Service No Waiting, when my kids were starting school, and I had to be home to deal with that stuff. The kids would go to school and I rented this tiny room and I put a desk and a guitar in there and every day after the kids went to school I went straight to this room. I had a Smith Corona and I sketched out the whole album, what it was gonna be, starting with the first word of the first song, and I just typed the whole record and heard the music in my head. I sat there every day from, like, 10 to 3, and I thought it was some of the best music I’ve ever done. It ended up being 40 pages of legal typewriter paper, a big sheath of the stuff in tiny type. I would write the rhymes off the top of my head and create these rhythms, and a lot of lines didn’t make it but I kept going forward. I didn’t throw anything out. It’s an interesting work of art of its own. I’d go home to take care of the kids and I’d pick up the guitar and sometimes the song I heard in my head that day, I’d just sing through the whole thing. That would be it. That would be the music. I really enjoyed making that record.
Q: Where did you go from there? You said you make every record a different way.
A: Writing the next record I tried to do the same thing and it totally sucked.. It didn’t work. I had to try something different, so I wrote it on the run. You’ve got to trick yourself. You’ve got to get away from the rational mind. You’ve got to be thrown into some kind of new situation.
Q: Do you tell that to students in your songwriting classes? Does that advice apply to beginners?
A: I do, but they don’t necessarily get it. We’re at a more basic level. They’re not dealing on that level.
Q: Can songwriting really be taught?
A: Yes and no. You can help people that are songwriters. You can help them over their problems. But everybody in the culture seems to write songs. Everybody is a musician. The two things that are prevalent in modern life are advertising and music. Music is the central activity people are involved in besides being receptacles for advertising.
Q: You had major heart surgery last year. How does illness and mortality figure into your music?
A: Hard to say. I really don’t know yet. I do know that I’ve never had my head in the sand about dying or anything but it definitely brought that to the forefront. Especially for a few hours in there at one point. And then I had a lot of time to think. I took some time off.
Q: Do you think Wig‘s immediacy and raw energy came out of that experience?
A: I think so. It’s funny. When I first came out of the hospital I was on drugs, you know. Somebody pointed out to me that I’m on morphine, and I’m listening to jazz. We’ve gone full circle here, you know? I’m sitting down at the piano and I’m stoned and playing these really weird chords, these weird jazz chords. I was listening to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles, all these ex -junkies. I was just hanging out. Finally I’m like an old man, in one place on the couch. And I started to hear music. Literally I heard this music that I wanted to play and wanted to hear. Sometimes it gets real visceral, you know?
Q: You went through a transformation from pop guy to rootsy singer-songwriter.
A: When I joined the Nerves I turned my back on a lot of the things I’d been working on, the country blues that I’d learned how to play. I started playing electric bass and playing in these rock and roll bands. You know, I loved rock and roll, I really did, and it was a very creative period for me, but I also had turned my back on a whole side of my personality. I rediscovered it when I went solo after the Plimsouls.
Q: Have your powers as a songwriter increased over time? Have you lost things along the way?
A: Dave Alvin said to me that it gets a lot harder, because you’ve already written a lot of songs, and your new songs have to be better than the old songs, or somehow occupy a space that the old songs don’t occupy. I wrote “Two Angels” and I’m not going to write another “Two Angels.” I only felt the one, you know?
Q: People do it all the time. Not everyone places the value on pressing forward.
A: Well, I want to. I keep on feeling that this next one could really be something, you know?
Q: What do you mean by something?
A: I really want to make something that has a life of its own and is surprising, and is beautiful, and that I discover things in. When I was a little kid listening to music my mom would come in and say, does that send you? I’m trying to create that. I don’t know. You’re living in a world with Bob Dylan, such a heavy artist. He’s like Keats or Milton for our time. More so even than Ginsburg. Much more so. Most people don’t come close to that in their songwriting. And we all have to live with that.
Q: Do you think about relevance and your place in the culture? Does it impact your work?
A: Oh yeah. It hurts. It’s really difficult. Nobody cares about half of what you’re doing but you’ve got to feel like you’re doing something. I think gigs like this tonight, they’re important, though you don’t really see how, exactly. It’s often hard to see the present. That’s the art that Bob Dylan has: the ability not to see the future but the present, for what it is. The present isn’t really what’s advertised as the present. The present is this thing that’s being born every day. It’s not in the magazines, you know. I’ve had a couple of friends die in the past few years and it’s been really profound to experience what their deaths and their lives meant to me. You remember moments differently than you experienced them at the time. You go through a little of that and you see how valuable things are. The culture is a one-way ticket to nowhere, if you ask me.
Q: You put the Plimsouls back together in the mid-90s. Why did you want to reunite the band and did you get what you wanted?
A: The band was something I put a lot a lot of energy into creating. The Plimsouls projected rock and roll in an incredibly believable way and it’s a very rare thing to have that. We did it ’cause we could, you know? And I feel like it was a valuable thing at the time. Now we’re kind of at the end of it again, after ten years of being together again, maybe more. Fifteen. It’s sort of sad. We’ve had problems, but it was good, and it kept me younger in a way, too, to remember that. You know music gets in your body. Rhythm gets in your body. Maybe it got a little cerebral and I came back to the Plimsouls to tap into this thing that gave me another burst of youth, in a way.
Q: What is it about youth, or the qualities we associate with youth, that brings so much to bear on creativity?
A: It’s unbridled, uncynical energy. A freshness of life, you know? You have it when you’re young and it goes away. When you’re young, every room you’re in is so intense. Every person you talk to and everyone you meet, it could go anywhere. Anything could happen. With the Plimsouls you’d get this burst of energy and it would seem like something magical could happen, like you could walk through walls or something, just for a little while, you know, you would feel those walls come down. You’d feel once again like you were in this place that was very fresh. It’s hard to describe, really, but that’s sort of the role of music. I think it’s what people want from music. That’s what art does. It makes you feel the impact of being alive. Music allows you to feel things that are so big you can’t feel them until you hear the music. When you’re young, emotions come through your body. You feel them. And I think people shut them off because they’re painful. Plus they’ll get you in trouble, you know? Everything changes when you get older. I’m old now, man. I’m 56. I’ve been on the road a long time. These days I wonder, you can’t help it when you go on the road, am I going to make it through this tour? After the heart thing and all this stuff, you wonder, you know? There’s a lot of different aspects of being older that are weird.
Q: Are there good aspects?
A: Some of them are great. When you turn around 40 you get a bird’s eye view of life. I understand things that I never understood when I was a kid, man. I see people and situations and I know exactly what’s going on.
Q: Does that make you a better or a deeper artist?
A: I don’t know. Only if you can figure out a way to use it. You have to get at it somehow. And that’s the whole trick about art, you know? You got to keep going to that place. You’ve got to be willing to go out on a limb. That’s the trick.
Q: How do you get to that place?
A: I don’t know. Keep going. Hit the road. Have a heart meltdown. Nearly die. Keep doing rock and roll. Have no money.
Great, Great, Great interview with Peter. His songwriting wisdom is always worth spending time with. I especially like the part where he says that whatever it is you want to be you are already it! Also that Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell made great music without anybody much knowing who they were or that they existed even. Never thought about it that way before, but now that I am I like it.
I was living in San Francisco’s North Beach, and on my spot in front of the Swiss American Hotel one night in 1973, playing the 13th Floor Elevators song ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me, ‘ when I noticed this skinny white guy, about my age, leaning against the no parking sign, smoking a cigarette, watching me. He had short curly hair, wore old blue jeans, white deck sneakers, and a blue/green wooly sweater. At first look, he didn’t really fit in with the scruffy Broadway outlaw scene. I watched as he walked off, and I saw when he came back later, with a big German Shepherd on a short leash, and stopped to listen again.
The next evening he passed by, walking, with a pretty, long haired woman, up a few doors to the Condor Club. She was wearing the full length type of overcoat that all the Condor dancers favored wearing to and from work, and after she pushed through the curtains and disappeared into the club, the guy came back, and listened to me play some more. He was definitely checking me out.
I took a break, bummed a smoke, and started talking to him. He loved Roky Erikson’s wild harp on the end of ‘Miss Me.’ I was surprised he knew Roky’s name. Me & Johnny had been the worlds prime interpreters of the Elevator’s music, we played their songs every night, and talked about them endlessly. Anyhow, the guy said his name was Jack, that he was a songwriter, came from Alaska, and dug the music I was doing. He was putting a band together. I went back and picked up my guitar and played ‘Friday On My Mind,’ ‘Secret Weapon’ and ‘Sunnyland Moan,” and made a couple bucks.
He asked me ‘How much, on the average, do you make out here a night?’ and I lied and said ‘ fifty bucks.’ He lied and said ‘I’ll pay you double that if you join my band,’ and that was the beginning of it.
He invited me up the street with him, to share a joint.
Sure. I packed up my Yamaki and we headed up Broadway past the strip clubs, to Stockton Street. We took a right and walked another half block, up to where a white Ford Country Squire wagon was parked on the curb. He unlocked it, we got in, he lit up and we smoked.
I got real high. Maybe ’cause I hadn’t eaten all day, but as we were sitting there watching the traffic on the street, I felt like an alien, the SF street so foreign, the light, the sky, the pigeons, all seemed so chaotic. Life is so strange.
‘How you gonna make it?’ he asked me.
A deep question. I felt like I was in the bottom of a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, and Jack had leaned over and yelled it down to me from a great height.
‘Huh? What do you mean, make it? I am making it’ I answered.
‘No, how are you going to make it in music? You know, make records, get famous and rich… play concerts around the world? You know what I mean. How are you going to make it?’
I’d never thought of that before, it had never even occurred to me as a serious subject. I was playing music for a living already, wasn’t I? I mean, vaguely, as something that could happen in the distant future, a big career in rock and roll? Maybe. Derek and I had talked about it, but had never got anywhere. Johnny was running from the law, so he wasn’t interested. I had kinda figured I wanted to be like my heroes, a nomadic blues singer, or some kind of wandering minstrel.
I had nothing to say for myself.
Jack asked if he could borrow the guitar so I got it out and passed it to him, and he started to sing, sitting right there, all cramped behind the steering wheel, turned my way. It was a loud fast one, that he’d written himself, and his face turned crimson as he sang. ‘Don’t leave me hangin’ on the telephone! Don’t leave me hangin’ on the telephone!.’
Impressive. But I wasn’t really moved. So he played another one, and turned an even brighter shade of red. This one was ‘I’m a new man living in wide world! I’m a new man, living in a wide world.’ It had a driving beat and a great melody. I got caught on the hook. This one got me. A wide world, that was my dream. Starting a new life, a million miles away from my past. Yes.
I told him I’d think about it.
He split, and I walked the streets of North Beach. Man, I had better get busy.
By the next time we ran into each other on Broadway, Jack had worked up a secret plan to make it to the top. His ideas and enthusiasm were charismatic. At least I thought so. Soon I began to see a lot people weren’t so taken with him. He talked fast, with a sort of Northwestern twang, and it was obvious to me, he was going to make a dent in the wall of the worlds indifference. He was a couple years older than me, and though he seemed to have come up on the outside of life like I did, he was ahead of me in a lot of ways. He was his own Lennon, McCartney, and Brian Epstein all boiled into one dreaming loudmouth!
‘We’ll make it right off the street! San Francisco is our Liverpool. This street music scene will be our cavern club. We’ll use amps, man, battrey operated. Pat’s got one, a Mike Matthews Freedom Amp! We can take the whole band out to where the people are. Play outside on the Wharf during lunch hours. School kids and secretaries will come out, it’ll be a sensation, we’ll cause riots. Herb Caen will have to cover it. But the whole thing has to be undeniable! The songs, the guitars, the clothes, it all has to be right, powerful.’
There was a big street music thing going on in San Francisco. And if the songs were great, when you really thought about it, with a little imagination, it did seem possible.
He wanted the band to wear short hair, long hair was hippie, old style. He said the electric guitar should sound like a saxophone, he was tired of all the guitar noodling that was in vogue in 70’s ‘progressive’ rock. He hated hard rock, heavy metal, and progressive, and he mocked it all.
‘Music’s been dead since the 60’s, but it comes back again every ten years,’ he said.
I wasn’t so sure. He challenged me.
“What’s any good. then?”
“The Stone’s Exile” I answered. “The Band, Bob Dylan, blues.”
‘The Stones were great when they had Brian Jones, man, and when Jagger and Richards were still writing great songs. They’re past it! That blues stuff is tired, man, it’s been done.”
He wouldn’t discuss those other guys, still, there was something about what he was saying. I was intrigued, this was the invitation to an adventure. And he was by far the most talented songwriter I’d met in California so far. There was some real magic in those tunes, something I knew was hard to come by.
The first Nerves rehearsal was a gas, more like a party. It was in someone’s apartment on Sutter Street. Pat Speed, the rush freak, was there to blow harp, and Sitka Pat, the street musician that frequently played out in front of the Swiss, played lead guitar. It turned out he had grown up with Jack in Alaska. An old black blues singer named Koko made the scene. He always played a harmonica taped to the broomhandle neck of a washtub bass that he thumped in crazy rockin’ jump time. Koko was a big drinker, had lost all his teeth, and sounded like Sonny Boy Williamson. I think Rush invited him, Guitar Pat invited Rush. Jack invited me, though it wasn’t clear what my role was supposed to be. i didn’t have an electric guitar or amp, just my Yamaki. Jack wanted me there, so I went, ’cause I was curious, drawn… this band thing was fascinating in it’s possibilities. I pulled it out and rocked along in another dimension.
Jack and Sitka Pat got their arrangement of Hanging On The Telephone down, while Pat Speed vibrated, twitched, commented through his high velocity mustache, and generally irritated Jack, every so often even blowing a little harp. Koko rocked, drank wine, and his speech got more and more unintelligible, his patois was so thick in the first place, and after awhile no one could understand a word he said but Pat Speed, who held great lively conversations with him.
The next session was across the bay, in a black residential neighborhood on the Oakland/ Berkeley line. WE met in the garage behind the house of the drummer Bobby Freeman’s Condor Club band. he was a great drummer, but he’d never played anything like ‘Hangin’ On the Telephone.’ This was the first day of the new dispensation, the first blast of the new music that would be coming from everywhere in a few years. Something new was being born that day in that garage.
We were all smoked up to the moon. Jack was on bass, Sitka Pat played loud electric lead through the Matthews amp. Pat Speed was nowhere to be seen, guess he hadn’t made the cut. I banged on the acoustic, and played percussion, and as the day went on, the session got more intense.
Jack sat in a chair facing the drummer and shouting at him, trying to get this guy who was used to 50’s R&B and strip house show band rock grooves, to play a fast and driving straight eighth note groove, without fills, or anything fancy. Everytime the guy tried to tart it up, Jack yelled over the electric blare. It was ‘yeah… yeah…. YEAH! … NO! on and on. Jack turned red and the whole thing kept going.
It was the assault of the new: loud, driving, a catchy song, but intense and screaming. Nothing had ever sounded like this.
I knew it was great, that I was the witness at a birth, and I was bored at the same time. I saw it was Jack’s scene, he didn’t care what anyone else did or thought. I got restless and went outside, looking around the area for something to do, while I waited for a ride back to the city with Pat and Jack. I played my guitar. I was still looking for it.
“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 striped shorts, some kind of teenage short sleeve blouse, and her straight brown hair spilled over her back and down both sides of her face. She rode right up to me, across the grass, then stopped and peered at me through tiny wire rim glasses, looking very sad. And she was angry with me. I was stretched full, flat out on the ground, face toward the sun, and I couldn’t stop laughing. She stayed for a minute or two, but we weren’t communicating, so she rode off, shaking her head. “You always said you wouldn’t do this” she said, right before she split. She looked like she was gonna cry.
Me and Jeff decided to pull ourselves together and began the trundle into town, walking down a long and busy high road called Sunset Drive, then over to Mike Bannister and Jon Duffett’s place, known to all the kids in town as “The Apartment,” the first and only hippie pad around, where we all used to hang, the grey garage apartment behind a two story house on well-named Pleasant Avenue, a few doors from the old brick school building, right in the center of town.
Bannister and Duffett were my heroes. They were several years older, and had seen the world, surviving on their own terms. It seemed to me like they lived on Mount Olympus. I’d see them walking around the village, in a crowd, with long hair, looking like gypsies, scarves and sashes, and beautiful girls by their sides in likewise colorful clothes, all in rag tag hippie wear, especially Duffett, though Western dapperness was Bannister’s thing, and with cigarettes dangling from all lips beneath shades. Seeing them was like sighting an outlaw version of the Beatles walk by your house, on their way crosstown for some kicks. Just watching them going by was sort of a high. I was sitting on my parents steps as they passed, so I got their attention by blowing some train licks on the blues harmonica, and the procession stopped. Hello. We all became friends, and soon found out we listened to the same music.
“Oh Lord, live and learn
I see your face and know you”
-(Williamson)
These were the first other Incredible String Band fans I’d met. Mike Bannister was a true rolling stone, and so was Duffett. They were 19 and 18, respectively. Mike was a drummer, and looked like a cross between Brian Jones and Eyore. He had played for a while in a popular and loud, local garage band called the Novas, and was a founding member of a rebellious high school gang called the Fountain Club, which really pulled off some insane and locally legendary hijinks. Once, using jump-ropes they tied an abusive gym teacher to the lockers. I loved that story. Mike also belonged to a dirty-water street-fraternity called ‘Club 69′ who built their own patchwork clubhouse in the woods by the Eighteen Mile Creek, a shack covered with tar paper complete with beds and a refrigerator for their beer. There was nothing too bright about that place, it was a teenage Punch and Judy show, but Mike had picked up some subtlety since then, and jettisoned that crowd. He had a more thoughtful manner now. Maybe it was Jon’s influence. Jon was a folkie, kind of a young beat-generation type and a teenage wino, a slim dark haired handsome kid, who had travelled the breadth of the country already, hitching rides, and jumping empty boxcars, all the way [to through ]and from California in 1967. He played an ancient beat[-]up Martin guitar somebody had laid on him, and was a fan of Dylan, Donovan, Van Ronk, and Memphis Slim. I knew and loved all these artists too, and at 15, tho’ I was a lot younger than him, and pretty green, soon after our meeting we started writing songs together, and performing around the area at basement coffeehouses, freaked out parties, and even liberal church group meetings.
Their place was quite small, and seemed even smaller when it was packed with stoned kids making out and listening to records, the usual story in 1969 and ’70. I spent some of the most formative hours of my youth in that pad, in various attitudes and mental states, and while some of those hours went by in a second, others seemed to last an eternity. The local police had the place under surveillance, and shakedowns were common, along with the occasional full sheriff’s raid.
“‘Whatever you think, it’s more than that”‘
-Job’s Tears (Williamson)
Mike Heron and Robin Williamson were Scottish, from Edinburgh. They looked like gypsy time wanderers from the the 19th century, and played exotic musical instruments no one in rock had ever seen before. They were called the Incredible String Band and every record had a different line up. They’d started out playing Uncle Dave Macon and Carter Family songs, and immediately began to create their own style. After their first album was released the trio became a duo, as legend has it, after their banjo-man made a trip to Afghanistan and disappeared for 10 years. One of the guitarists, Robin Williamson also vanished—took his advance money and, with his girlfriend Licorice, set off for Morocco. He came back months later playing an instrument he’d found there called the Gimbri, a fiddle with a mystically insinuating whine and they used it all over the next records, as well as the sitar and tablas from India, the Arabian oud, the Irish pennywhistle, thumb pianos from Nigeria, and good old funky guitars played in tunings, with banjos and harmonicas grounding and rounding out the sound. Robin, who described himself as feeling at the time more like a “Celtic Barge” than a bard, as they packed this boatload of weird sound makers around the world on tour, was a virtuoso Irish pennywhistler, and a top-drawer a cappella balladeer in the traditional Scottish fashion. He had perfect pitch and a unworldly voice, capable of soaring leaping or spinning on a driven nail. He spoke more than a few languages fluently, and told stories that’d make a bear hold his breath. His partner Mike was a psychedelicized Beat Combo refugee, and together they were magical because they were fearless, and had a great appreciation of chance events. They were courting ancient wisdom, unravelling the mysteries of music, and shooting high dice with pop music and epic poetry, something Bob Dylan recognized and mentioned at the time.
-Bob Dylan quote in Sing Out:
Q: Do you think [The Beatles] are more British or International?
They’re British I suppose, but you can’t say they’ve carried on with their poetic legacy, whereas the Incredible String Band who wrote this “October Song”…that was quite good.
Q: As a finished song–or did it reach you?
As a finished song it’s quite good.
It was their aspirations that characterize their music as something that could soon be called ‘progressive’ in other quarters, though it was a word they never used. They were on a higher, more creative track than nearly anything else in music, and were shattering audiences reliance and expectation on the common forms of song. Verse bridge chorus went bye bye… form was directed purely by content, and, in other words, they did what ever they felt like doing whenever they felt like doing it! And it was powerful good.
Already a big chart hit in the UK, with their third LP, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, they were introduced to American teenagers by the writers of Hit Parader Magazine, which, way back in the 1960’s, was probably the first great rock magazine ever, delving deep into music way off the beaten track,( and I’ve been waiting in vain for years to see reprints.) Their pictures showed them to be charismatic and intense looking attractive “stars” in their own way… they were completely different from anything else on the scene, and, I’d say, completely original (within what we know are the limits of that word.)
All of the mad music was in pursuit of something high and strange and I think it can be pretty well defined in this description of Emmanuel Swedenborg, “the wonderful Restorer of the long lost Secret” (from a book I read recently about William Blake):
“‘there were ancient truths to be revealed, … that which for many Ages has been lost to the World…’ And what was this long lost secret? It is the opening of the gate. It is the sure knowledge that nature and the material world are the vessels of eternity.” (1)
Ok, maybe I was so ripped I didn’t know what they were talking about.
And, on the first day of Summer, as me and my friend Jeff walked along the road shoulder, deep-breathing poisonous exhaust fumes and nearly getting run down by trucks, I was mesmerized by the sight of the flowers at the side of the road, all red blue and yellow, glowing brighter than neon signs. And the trees were breathing, waving above us, the green leaves swirling in a mass, inhaling and exhaling as we walked by below. And the lyrics to these songs kept playing in my head.
“For rulers like to lay down laws,
And rebels like to break them,
And the poor priests like to walk in chains,
And God likes to forsake them”
-October Song, (Robin Williamson)
But by the end of that Summer, I was pretty much out of my mind. I began to experience a lot of problems. Somehow I’d lost my depth perception. It was just gone one day. I could be overcome at any time by strange feelings and huge terrors. And I felt like I was emotionally ripped open all the time, not angry or anything simple like that, but more like ablaze in my chest, and a rollercoaster feeling in the pit of my stomach. My heart hurt from just contemplating the quotidian details of life. All feelings were extremely intense. The fact and idea of death was making me sick. I was in despair, and not just a little bit. I felt like my tongue was hanging out, black. It was then that a seemingly wise and older friend, who was all of 23 years ancient, and had just come back from far away, and a college down South, suggested that I was having a spiritual awakening, and all my mad symptoms were a good sign. I’d never thought of that! He said that people who went through spells like I was having were often destined to be truly religious people. Not like organized religion, he said. He said my sub-conscious was kicking off the fetters of my repressive up-bringing, the look-but-don’t-touch, absurd and lonesome dues and don’ts of my schooling, and suggested that I read, for companionable knowledge and entertainment, the 18th century English poet William Blake. So I started to do just that, and found it helped, and even though I couldn’t understand vast sections of it, I kept feeling drawn in. The poetry was exciting at times, and also could be very soothing. And Wee Tam and The Big Huge by the ISB was on the crummy old record player in the corner of the joint, and it was on A LOT.
I dropped out of the tenth grade that Fall. By then, I could barely function, even amongst the freaks. When I first heard the String Band’s “Changing Horses” LP it was on a trip to the country with friends. They were taking turns walking me about out in the gardens, and then we returned to the house and listened to this record, the ISB, now a four piece on the cover, with their girlfriends Licorice and Rose, all singing a goofy psychedelic boogie woogie about a pig named Big Ted.
I lost track of them after that, and for while in the 70’s. Life got better for me, after it got worse, but it took long time, and I didn’t even hear of them again for several years.
“… if you let the pigs decide it,
They will put you in the sty.”
“No Sleep Blues (Williamson)
As it turned out, the ISB and the popular culture developed in opposite directions– the String Band were literate, melodic, and insanely inventive. Heron, coming from a beat-combo background, was the tunesmith who crafted most of the catchiest songs, while Robin Williamson’s best numbers were like spells. All the arrangements were magical and floating, at times spinning upside down, and often springing loose like a mad music box, with two guitars carooming off each other, while pennywhistles dixielanded insane counterpoint, and backwards grooves were pounded out on bongos, congas and woodblocks, until the whole thing seemed to deny gravity. And Robin’s mastery of his voice and language were no joke, however launched into the 1960’s hippy slipstream the songs may appear at first 21st century perusal.
They were Incredible alright, wowing and charming audiences in the UK and across the US. And they were aspirational, seeing themselves as the first purveyors of what would become known as world music, as wells as lyrics composed along the lines first laid down by the Beats, a philosophy summed up in the idea “First thought, best thought,” a concept later popularied by Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa.
Said Robin in an interview:
“It Struck me that you could write a spontaneous, free- form lyric, a la Jack Kerouac. And then you could link it up with spontaneous free form music, drawn from the various regions of the world.”
Form followed content, so, wherever you dropped the needle on the record, you’d be lost for a time, and similar to later progressive groups like Pink Floyd or KIng Crimson, you had no choice but to follow the melodic bread crumb trail out of the enchanted sound forest. And it was wonderful.
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.
America was being submerged in violence, both on its streets and from it[‘]s foreign policy, Great Britain was going along for the ride, and even the gentlest citizens on both sides of the water were losing their attention span. Did that have something to do with the evolution of the people’s tastes? The U.S. was being led by a man who was busy telling the world he wasn’t a crook. The Beat was King, and the drugs and sounds kept getting heavier.
As Bob Dylan had noticed several years before, the ISB had a true poet in Robin, who could tell you of the world close to your nose in rhymes that led you to see it in a fresh way. Robin could prophesize, telling the present and the future with mythological eyes, but if the public wanted words, they demanded their singers be confessional. And as the sixties hit the end of its road, all the heros died or disappeared, most either shot by assailants with three names, or choking to death while on pain killers. And it was hard for the culture to recognize their poets when words were used all day, everyday, across the radio, television, and in the newspapers, to confuse the populace about its actions products and programs.
“Now there comes a time to every man
When he must turn his back on the crowd
-Log Cabin Home In The Sky (Heron)
But I loved the Incredible String Band anyway, because they went so far the other way, away from the common fixations on celebrity, away from music as sex tonic, away from teenage rock and roll problems, or even the Beatle’s Taxman-type rock-star anxiety musings, and they blazed their own trail, into dreams, to strange hidden valleys of countryside and memory, to isolated hilltop villages, in the gaps between mountain tops, to places where they were bringing their own music, and poetry, and pursuing the quest they felt couldn’t wait, the one for God, while all the time remaining a couple of Scottish wise guys with an outlaw attitude. The String Band enacted a true rejection of the culture, were actual full-service rebels, and always did things at their own speed, in their own style. They had an original sound, and their own voices. Their songs were pitched lighter and lower than what anyone else was or is doing, and much of what we’re used to, far away from the usual bump and grind of the rock of any period. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good bump and grind. But I learned to dig these guys early and it stuck with me. They were psychedelic Woody Guthries, Blakean men of the people, and in fact Wee Tam concludes with a tune Woody popularized: on the end of the song/suite called Ducks On A Pond, they bust into a rousing version of “Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore,” and its not precious, but nuts, with stomping feet, caterwauling voices, an overblown harmonica, raucous…. and comparable to Woody and Leadbelly’s rockin’ team-up with Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston on the Stinson sessions.
There are problems, railroad gates you got to jump if you want to dig them, traces of precious cuteness, excesses of the diminuative, the little clouds, little hedgehogs, and caterpillars for cousins. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer may be the worst song the Beatles ever recorded, but the ISB have a couple as bad as that in their ouevre.
But basically, a couple rambling ragamuffin folk singing guitar players from Scotland introduced what’s now called World music into Pop. While doing this they broke nearly every rule of musical arrangement while somehow maintaining a rootedness in the music that kept it plugged into the earth, to true feeling, spaced but somehow with a foot in traditional forms. They exploded folk music while somehow keeping it alive far beyond its time.
“When I was born I had no head
My eye was single and my body was full of light”
-Douglas Traherne Harding (Heron)
I saw them soon after my arrival on the west coast in 1973. I was on the run from my disastrous teenage life in New York, had said goodbye to my pals Banister and Duffet, and made the bus-and-train journey to California myself. I was at the start of a bold new Western Adventure, the one I’m still on. And there they were, the week I got into town, playing at San Francisco’s elegant Palace Of Fine Arts, to a more than half-empty theater. I was surprised to see they were electric, now, with bass and drums, but found the show to be dynamic, and Robin and new ISB member Malcolm spoke at length between songs, and were very funny, talking spontaneously about America and the coast they’d travelled the length of just the day before. One hilarious rant was a satire of Los Angeles all-night television, including an impression of “Movies ’til Dawn” sponsor, cowpoke- turned-used-car-salesman par excellence, Cal Worthington, walking ‘his dog Spot’ (an elephant) through the lot. This was followed by a rocking fiddle reel version of ‘Black Jack Davy” and when I heard that I knew they were still great.
So the next day, I went to a record shop and purchased the new album, “No Ruinous Feud” took it back to the house where I was staying, played it about twice, and completely lost interest. It wasn’t terrible or anything, but the magic from the night before couldn’t be found in the grooves, nor the songs.
18 years later, I saw Robin play for a full house at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, one of the great folk clubs in the world. He played celtic harp and guitar, sang and told stories, and was brilliant throughout. He had completely turned into the magician-poet he’d always evoked. I met him upstairs after the show. I had a baby asleep on my shoulder, and Robin said, after taking a good look: “You have a very beautiful daughter there.” He was wearing red converse low tops. I went out and bought a pair.
Dedicated to the memory of friends Jon Duffett, 1952-2011, Michael Bannister,1951-2008, Story Bannister, 1993-2015, and Mary Anne Shifferli, 1954-1974.
(1) from Blake: A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd
This piece originally appeared in 2013, in the anthology Yes Is The Answer, published by Rare Bird Books.
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 nine/ I don’t mind/ I don’t mind
’cause I’ve got my own world to live through
and I ain’t gonna copy you” (from if 6 was 9)
’she’s walkin’ through the clouds/ with a circus smile/ running wild’ (from little wing)
This just touches the surface, off the top of my head.
These are great powerful, forever memorable and meaningful original phrases, with a rhythm and punch present, in the best American tradition, which often has a punchline-type diction, and often lands with an accent of sound and meaning on the last word of the phrase. It’s the “American Sound” and Hendrix has his own version of it, big-time.
2) Secondly, he used the poets tools. Jimi was a natural poet. But, I think he was helped in his quest to write great songs by studying strong sources, that themselves were tapped into poetic tradition. These would be:
A) Exceptional soul music songsmiths like Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Don Covay. From these he learned how to form the premise of a song around a powerful, but simple idea, with a catchiness, and simplicity of phrasing. The imagery in these writers work is reflected in JH’s songs like ‘Remember” ’You Got Me Floating” ‘Little Miss Lover’. Is it poetic? I believe this type of writing at it’s best IS. Also, he knew Chuck Berry and Little Richard, both for the great SOUND of their words, and for their INNOVATION. Chuck Berry is a chronicler of American Culture and in his way, Hendrix was too, (though of a more psychedelic era.) Little Richard spoke in tongues “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bop bop” (from tutti frutti) Hendrix excelled at this, in all of the above examples and many others.
B) Bob Dylan: a huge and liberating influence on JH, “Songs can be about anything”. Dylan was a path to the Beats for Hendrix, using the poetic tools of vivid imagery, alliteration, assonance, dissonance, as well as his art of twisting phrases that Jimi adapted. Listen to the album “Blonde On Blonde,” to hear all these poetic tools being used. It was reportedly one of Hendrix’s favorites, along with “Highway 61 Revisited.” He learned a lot from these, eventually covering ‘Like A Rolling Stone” in his US debut. Dylan would say “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” which could easily be a Hendrix line. Colorful mad twists of rhythmic language.
C) The great blues singers and songwriters: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, and others. He topped the imagery in these writers most forceful material, in songs like “Voodoo Child” ”If 6 was 9″ and others. It’s a strain that runs all through his work. Rhythm conveying emotion, mythic bragging imagery like JH’s “knock down a mountain with the palm of my hand’ etc is from songs like Dixon’s ‘Hoochie Koochie Man’, or Muddy Water’s “Just To Be With You”
And intimate talk like Jimi’s acoustic 12 string version of “Hear My Train A-Coming” (be sure to watch this on youtube if you haven’t yet) (a great performance of a great piece, his emotion so close to the surface he nearly cries, common for him but very clear here) (great poetic lines like “I’m gonna buy this town/ and put it in my shoe”)
I think it’s important to recognize how deeply JH studied and played into the tradition he was coming up in. He made sure he knew EVERYTHING about R+B, Blues, and Rock and Roll. He knew the songs, the licks, the grooves, and he knew about what went into making up the WORDS. He played with everybody who was great, and he listened and learned intensely.
I think Wind Cries Mary is one of his best: Mary is his mother (tho’ her name was Lucille) also the Virgin Mary; a feminine deity or principle he looks to for protection. His sorrow in the wake of events leads him to feel the whole creation is calling out for this missing feminine spirit.
It’s imagery that creates a dimension of feeling that goes beyond normal songwriting: I call that poetic.
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary
The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it’s wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary
I hope this helps you as you consider Jimi Hendrix the poet. I could go on a lot more than this. It’s an interesting subject. Have you see the book Cherokee Mist with so much of his writing in it? I recommend it. Another great one, maybe the best book about Hendrix, is Greg Tate’s “Midnight Lightning.”
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/
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.
When I was a kid John Lennon was one of my biggest heros. At 16 years old I read the Rolling Stone interview, and JL said something like ‘I’m the kind of person, when I have a hero, if I find out they wear green socks, I’ll run out and buy green socks’ and I immediately started to wear green socks myself. Wore ’em for years. I know that’s fucked up.
Pig Nation used to rehearse in my parents basement and my Mom once called down the stairs: ‘Boys, play that nice song about suicide again!’
