My version of Memphis Minnie’s great song, which I learned watching Honeyboy Edwards play in L.A. twenty years ago. This was recorded during the HWY 62 sessions, but never released, as that album featured songs I wrote about contemporary topics, and Bumble Bee didn’t seem to fit. But I played it on a guitar Ben Harper gifted me, a Fraulini version of Lead Belly’s Stella, and they recorded the first time I picked the instrument up. Minnie’s version is the one. All her records are great. Play them loud! But check this out, it is what it is… https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/PC-Bumble-Bee-day-1_01.m4a

https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/Peter-Case-Santa-Cruz-Crime-Wave-od-vocals_02.m4a Historical song about a recent hair-raising moment in Nor-Cal history. With Dany Frankel on drums.

“When the race starts close to the finish line…” The Formula “1)  Get in touch with your feelings- access your underground: the unconscious: always feeling the background. 2) Nobody can make any good music unless they first learn to play for themselves. Forget about exterior stuff, their image, whether the stuff they play is any good or not , whether the audience is pleased or not, and all that superficial stuff.   “Go by your feelings, kid, forget about whether the audience likes what you write, what you play…” 3) Hard work…there’s no such thing as talent. Just emotions & paying attention to them, & hard work…thats the formula, & in the end, you can’t lose.” -John Fahey “Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”    -Marianne Moore Woody Guthrie: “Just the idea of the title for your song is more than half the battle to catch your ballad. I’ve got thousands of titles laid away like postal saving bonds. I spend hours & hours just writing down my ideas for titles to my songs. I jump up late of nights & grab somebody’s pencil & somebody’s paper & write down just the titleline

If you dug the Plimsouls Kool Trash, here’s a solo track cut at roughly the same time, that has a similar vibe, in a way. By that I mean, a rocker story song set in the big city, with a big chorus, kinda like “Down.” 1995. This track was cut at Capital Records, with Steven Soles on harmony vocals, Jerry Scheff on electric bass, Greg Leisz on electric lap steel guitar, and Don Heffington on drums. It was cut at the very end of the session, when we had five minutes left! Billy Swan helped with the vocals too, I think…Larry Hirsch engineered it. Steven, Larry and I produced it, as a team… Torn Again (1995)   https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/02-Baltimore.mp3

Falling Awake is another of the Sunset Sound Demos. I played the surfy sounding leads on a Rickenbacker just like the John Lennon guitar. Eddie played the bluesy breaks in the middle and at the end. I goof up after Eddies solo and don’t get my pick-ups turned as load for my last twang lead, it doesn’t really have the bite. That always bugged me, but a card laid was a card played. This is a demo, I never really felt we got the arrangement right on this, but I dig the lyric, addressing the acute anxiety I call “falling awake,” that is, coming to a realization about life the hard way. Clem Burke played great on this track.  So there you have it, the seven cuts from Sunset. The album was filled out with three tracks recorded digitally, somewhere else, and the drums didn’t sound as good, as nothing beats tape.  But there you go, Shari Lipman!   (If you want to hear the rest of the ones I’ve featured, go to the blog here at www.petercase.com/blog  and scroll down through he most recent entires. The titles I’ve featured are “Down,” “Playing With Jack,” “Lost,” “Pile Up,” “Dangerous Book,”

I think this will be my last Kool Trash post, and the last of the tracks cut at Sunset Sound in ’95. Dig the crazy piano part, frantic tempo, pissed off lyric, and explosive ending. The Kool Trash album was completely overlooked at the time, even missed by a lot of our friends. Maybe it was lack of management, or publicity, or just the atmosphere of the era. We played a ton of gigs, with Clem Burke, and then later, Bryan Head, and they were all fun, but the muted response on the record eventually sorta made the band a dead issue: what’s the point of writing and recording new material? People just dug the old stuff. Don’t take your bands and songwriters for granted, folks, if you do they may have to go on their way. Oh well, its all ok, life is such a gift, if you’re not rocking’ somewhere you’re rolling somewhere else. And Kool Trash certainly has it’s fans…   If you want to hear the rest of the ones I’ve featured, go to the blog here at www.petercase.com/blog  and scroll down through he most recent entires. The titles I’ve featured are “Down,” “Playing With Jack,”

https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/05-Pile-Up.mp3 Another track from the Kool Trash sessions, this one recorded at about 3:30 in the morning, the last thing we cut at Sunset Sound. Rock and roll at it’s simplest, down to the core. Eddie’s guitar lick is cribbed from a Texas blues standard “Kinda Mixed Up,” but it fits perfect here, while my lyric reflects everyday tensions and frustrations in the Los Angeles area. Clem Burke is on drums, as on the rest of the album. Brett Gurewitz sings backing vocals with David-o. I put the words here, as the diction is pretty gnarly. For a long time this was my favorite from the sessions. “well they’re comin’ for miles/with beans in their ears/socked in/crocodile tears/dead set/caught in a cage/they’re flipped out/all in rage/it’s a pile up/it’s pile up/ they’ll slaughter the lamb/shut down and the road is jammed/help me/yeah we’re gonna be late well my baby called me on the telephone/imagine that/ she said I’m all alone/I went out/ frantic search for my car/jumped in didn’t get so far/it’s pile up/a pile up/try to dart in this roadster slam /some time we’re all in a jam/oh/ we’re gonna be late/ ah-oom-bop-diddy! the priest came down to bless

Here’s another track, from the Plimsouls album of demos, Kool Trash, recorded in 1995 and released in ’98. “Lost” slows it down a little, and was placed, along with “Pile Up” (which I’ll post later) in a Liv Tyler movie called ‘Heavy.” I remember this as a live performance in the studio, next to no overdubbing. It’s raw but maybe that’s how the feeling gets through…

This Plimsouls recording was released on the Fuel 2000 label in the nineties, and is now out of print. The drummer is Clem Burke. It was recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles as a demo.  I’ll feature a few more tracks from this one in the near future.

https://petercase.com/wp-content/uploads/03-Down-1.mp3 Kool Trash (1998) Another in our series of Kool Trash posts.This song is about two kids showing up in the big town on the day of the riot. I’m playing the lead guitar on this one, as well as the rhythm. Eddie’s in there somewhere. I play almost this whole album in C tuning…