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
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)
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 &