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
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.
2 comments
I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject this last year or so. Not sure if this will make any sense as I’m still under the influence of a sedative or whatever conked me out at the doctor today, but I’ll give it a try. What is it that really happens inside us with these heroes that we mostly don’t know personally, but sometimes do.? Dylan incorporates Woody. Case incorporates Lennon. And when they die, the grieving is as real and deep as for our dearest family members and friends. I know I grieved (really grieved) Bowie’s passing. Same with Cohen and Shephard and Prince and Clark and Stanton and McLagen and Petty and others. How do thee people fill holes big enough in our souls that their loss feels so immense? Why do I feel big parts of myself, of my very fabric, die with them? I have to believe it’s a mixture of shared humanity, the art, that the art so often is the only thing that “gets” us, that connects us to life and leaves us feeling less alone, less isolated. I’m not talking about hero worship here or being starstruck or delusional. Dylan wasn’t delusional with Guthrie. Case isn’t with Lennon. I really don’t think i am. Anyway, would be curious on your or anyone else”s thoughts
Beautifully stated Peter … and Art.
Sedated, huh? I wanna be.
I’ve grieved the deaths of artists I’ve admired and drawn strength from. Much more so than, say, family members. Real fathers vs. the ones you get saddled with.
I have personally been moving forward by singing up their songs whenever I can: Jesse Winchester, Prince, Allan Toussaint, Bowie, Jimmy Lafave, Hag, Guy Clark, Steve Young and now Pettya … and those are just the recent ones.
Or as Dylan puts it in “Joey”: “He ain’t dead // he’s just asleep”. Of course, reading Lester Bangs essay about Desire will make you wonder about all the crazy shit — which we love so much — that Bob says or sings! But reading it will sing up Lester which is a worthwhile thing to do. Start with the collection by G. Marcus and then proceed to John Morthland’s. Lester sings … a real writer. Check him out, Art, if you can. His essay on Van Morrison is my favorite thing I’ve ever read about popular music. And his stuff on Lou Reed is definitive on the “fan”‘s relationship to the artist i.e. very relevant to what you write above. What IS it about Lou that resonated so deeply with Lester? He gets at that in an articulate and moving way.
The great ones don’t disappear when they die. They’re still with us. Cliches abound. But it’s late over here.
What really got me with Lennon: hearing the song “I’m a Loser” … so liberating and disarming. No one says shit like that anyone. Or they say it but it doesn’t have weight (cf. Beck).
PC: safe travels!
Art: safe sedation! Hope you are ok.
Ok, back to Finnegan’s Wake which begins with HCE (Here Comes Everybody!) who is either asleep, dead, or both.
David Ackles, Inc.