On the Way Downtown to Show Business, Baby Posted By Peter Stone Brown On November 1, 2017 @ 12:36 am In articles 2015 | Comments Disabled Peter Case and Tom Heyman, are both musicians and singer-songwriters who’ve been writing and playing music for decades, who happen to coincidentally currently reside in San Francisco. Both make music that is aware of tradition and musical history, and both have been through the ringer of the music business and keep on doing it anyway. Peter Case’s new album On The Way Downtown (Omnivore Recordings) consists of two live-in-the-studio sets recorded on the radio show, “FolkScene,” broadcast on KPFK in Los Angeles. The first nine tracks recorded in 1998, find Case backed by a small band featuring ace guitarist, Greg Leisz; Andrew Williams, guitar, harmonium, vocals, Tony Marsico, bass; Don Heffington, percussion; and Sandy Chila, drums. They are the perfect backing group for Case, with Leisz’ superb slide work happening at exactly the right moment, creating exactly the right mood. On the remaining nine tunes recorded in 2,000, Case is accompanied by David Perales on violin and vocals who is equally sympathetic. One of the best examples of what this group is capable of happens on “Honey Child,” which continually builds

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

https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/03-Anything-Closing-Credits.mp3 Los Angeles, California: Peter Case in his studio (Photo: Ann Summa).

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

https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/02-Lets-Turn-This-Thing-Around.mp3

  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)