https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/10-Many-Roads-to-Follow.m4a I learned how to cure the spins. I learned how to split a quarter in half. I learned how to tie my shoes while running. I learned 37 names for the police. (the fuzz, newts, the royals, the peelers, rocket boys, black & whites, G-men boys-in-blue, bobbies, john law, rangers gumshoes, the gang, officer krupke constable, the chaperones, mounties catchpole, beagles, roundsman, feds mace-bearer, tip staves, beadles, coppers blue coats, bull, flatfoot, gendarmes, shamus, dick, pigs, flattie, Dogberry, New York’s finest gestapo & The Man.) names for G-O-N-E: • cheese it! vamoose! head for the hills! scram—make like a tree—jam—vanish alacazam! dive—scat! git—be gone! get along! away with you! get a hot dog! on your way! get out clear out! allez-vous-en shoo! “stand not on the order of your going but go at once” “go and hang yourself” buzz off! skidoo—skedaddle—make yourself scarce—get lost! take a walk! take a hike! go chase yourself—go play in the traffic— shove off—step off—stand off—push off take a powder—blow—& I mean, split! • what kind of magic could I bring to you, who knows all the answers? magic: illustrious, glorious, brilliant radiant, resplendent, bright shining, charismatic, glamorous luminous numinous & alacazam I learned

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

  https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/03-Hanging-On-the-Telephone.m4a ‘Don’t leave me hangin’ on the telephone…’ 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,

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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  http://https://youtu.be/Vrs0XgnXsxk 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

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)