Peter Case

Notebook

A nearly random collection of quotes and notes from all over–

“The only war is the war against the imagination.”

—Diane di Prima

“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”  –Susan Sontag
——

“Every hundred feet the world changes.”   –Roberto Belano

{photo below, backstage at McGonnigal’s Mucky Duck, in Houston, by David Ensmiger}

 

 

 

1) ” WHOSE KID IS THAT?”
songs language must be at least that powerful.

2) development: something happens

3) experience of the concrete world
—–
“Negative Capability”

” I IS SOMEONE ELSE”


–from the second verse of “long, good time”

Sweet little flowers called snowdrops
in the backyard with the fresh mint leaves
A cherry tree with a rope to climb
& robins nests under the eaves
My band was playing in the basement
driving folks out of their minds
Mother called down from the top of the steps
“Boys, play that nice song about suicide”

-That’s a song about people in a place, and I’m trying to render it as vividly as I can. It can “live” in a song, and others can feel it and will bring their own experience to it.

Songs can be written so you can walk into any place in the country and sing them and people will “get it.”

Is songwriting an art, or a craft?
Either way, the words have a double meaning.

Art is many things, but one definition would be: Art is the sum-total of techniques we use to get people to care about something. By people, I not only mean an audience, but also ourselves.

There are a couple of levels to look at:

1) Formal & technical aspects, that is, structure, rhyme, melody, harmony, rhythm, harmony, & the uses of repetition.

2) Content, depth, meaning. “Only emotion endures.” Concrete vs. abstract language.

“I like music where something happens.” — A & R rep, 1985

The comments I make in a songwriting class don’t mean I “like” or “don’t like” : they are meant as “probes,” to stimulate the discussion.

“Now…well for one thing, the music, the
rhyming and rhythm, what I call the
mathematics of a song, are more second-
-nature to me. I used to have to go after a
song, seek it out. But now, instead of going
to it I stay where I am and let everything
disappear and the song rushes to me. Not
just the music, the words, too.”
–BD, 1965

the beatles: improvising
melody + lyrics
over chord changes

“it’s what you don’t play.”

Jack Lee used to say, that professional songwriters always have three songs: the one they just finished, the one they’re working on in the present, and the next one they’re going to write.

at some point I began to feel that whenever you had a problem in life, the best thing was to write your way through it.

 

(below; Blue Distance, from Flying Saucer Blues, Vanguard records, 2000)

 

singer/songwriter–mustn’t forget the “singer” part of the deal.

turn secrets into songs, then sing them for strangers. tell everybody you just make them up out of the blue.

These are all notes from  a songwriting class I put together 10 years ago:

-make a list of your fifty favorite words, then write a page in your notebook, exploring each one. discuss them in terms of things, the sensual world–.

-ideas can be your friends. existentialism, dreams as a mirror of reality, economic justice, environmentalism, human rights, grass roots democracy, beatitude, the grotesque.

-seize on clarifying the ideas you are actually living by–your philosophy.
every word, every note, every beat is important.

-figure out who or what your biggest influences are. then figure out what about their work you would improve on if you could. then set to work at doing it.
-if you get stuck, move on.

— if you are stuck in your writing, just try to put down one honest line

learn all of your favorite songs, and sing’em.

“no ideas but in things”: “close to the nose”
“develop a friendly attitude towards your own thoughts and ideas.” –Ginsberg

-If you don’t get it right the first time, try again…do this as many times as you need.

I no longer try to teach anyone about songwriting. I realized that people just want to be heard.

William Blake–“Without unceasing Practice nothing can be accomplished
Art is Practice. Leave off Practice and you are Lost.”

William Burroughs: “Kerouac… he was a writer. That is, he wrote.”

William Carlos Williams: “It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur”

Andy Warhol : “You think too much. That’s ’cause there’s work you don’t want to do” –quoted in Lou Reed’s song Work, from Songs For Drella.

Leonard Cohen: On his relatively paltry recorded output and how he sets about the creative process, he is blithely dismissive of his talents. “Writing an album, it always feels like I am scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get the songs together,” he says. “I’ve never had the sense that I’ve had a multitude of choices. There is no sense of abundance – I’m just picking at what I have. It’s like what Yeats said about working in ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I do get discouraged by the work.
“It is a mysterious process, it involves perseverance and perspiration and sometimes, by some grace, something stands out and invites you to elaborate or animate it. These are sacred mechanics and you have to be careful analysing them as you would never write a line again. If you looked too deeply into the process you’d end up in a state of paralysis.

“People ask about the imagery all the time but sometimes it’s enough to say that the imagery has its own validity.”

He does confess to a troubling kind of perfectionism. “I wrote 80 verses or something for Hallelujah .

 

That song was written over the space of four years and that’s my trouble – I can’t discard a verse. I have to work on it and polish it. I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”

 

 

Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie: “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.”

Tom Waits: “We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.”

“Just the right phrase can go a long way.'” -Chris Rock

Invention: the finding of suitable topics. ‘a finding, a reaching into oneself to find what comes next.’

William Carlos Williams: “So most of my life has been lived in hell–a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear. What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination?”

Charles Baudelaire: “To use a language with superior knowledge and skill is to practice a kind of conjuring.”

Plato–“He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.”

Robert Graves–“Poetry is rooted in love and love in desire, and desire in hope of continued existence.” Also, “The poet must learn to think mythically as well as rationally.”

Hart Crane– “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.” –quoted by John Berryman

Bob Dylan–“I always try to turn a song on it’s head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”

“potential… of a single vibrant word’ to create a world, to release infinite energies”

“The nucleus of my solar system is ADVENTURE “
— Roberto Bolano

“Journey of the act of writing through zones not at 
all favorable to the act of writing”
—Roberto Bolano

“push the dragon out of the way…
& walk in!”

‘the void, charged with potential’

 

Lost Songs and Outside Favorites (2016)

” It has to come naturally, you know…you’ve got to do it just like you talk & walk..”
—John Coltrane

“Every hundred feet the world changes.
—Roberto Bolano

“The only war is the war against the imagination.”

—Diane di Prima

“Imagination is nothing but the springing up of
reminiscences. And ingenuity, or invention is nothing
but the working over of what is remembered”
—Gaimbattista Vico

“The sound in your mind/ is the first sound that you could sing.” —JK

“It is by folly alone, that the world
moves, and so it is a respectable thing 
upon the whole.”
– Joseph Conrad

“…the duty of a poem in his mind was to be as good as possible when ever possible…”
—Mark Van Doren

” In true plain words, by thy true telling friend.”
-Jacques-Pierre

“Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage, and up to that, what I thought made music great was practice and study…This album says there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply, with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.”

“Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he’s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along…It’s the great search, fuelled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.”
 ~Lester Bangs

William Carlos Williams:
“Life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always, there should never be permitted, confusion–
There are difficulties to life, under conditions that are impasses, life may prove impossible–But it must never be lost–as it is today–
The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated facts is not Knowledge. There is no end–
And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge–
It is for this reason I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science–in spite of everything.
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality–Poetry.
The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current–which it has always sought–
In other times men counted it as a tragedy to be dislocated from sense–today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts–broken, bruised
few escape whole–slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity–Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination–
With decent knowledge we can tell what things are for
There is no confusion only difficulties.”

” I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn’t make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way.”
-Bob Dylan

[the film about my music, Peter Case: A Million Miles Away, is streaming now on Amazon Prime]
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Have You Ever Been In Trouble?

Jail

When the door clanks shut that’s jail—in the dark body boiling heart beating fast—trapped in anxiety—the bench is a bed there’s no one through the bars—nowhere to go—waiting is all—the concrete—hard & cold—the door is solid wood with a little window that slides back to reveal eyes the sink & toilet unused five feet to pace in the vibrating memory of all who’ve stood here in guilt and fear—my frail flesh contained by steel—anger directed by dead eyes—my voice surprises me & no one hears it—I’m a mystery to myself—and there’s no one else in sight—listening waiting & reading the nothing scratched on the wall—talk outside approaching steps echo in the hall key in the back with a hollow ring.

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Many Roads To Follow–The Nerves–San Francisco–’70’s

a beat up building on Folsom Street
cars rush by late for the freeway
late for the bridge
trash in the street cracks in the window
& every player in the band
lives on a separate floor
aligned by the window well
A bass amp on the floor
pressed into service as a coffee table
linoleum asbestos & an old junk tv
tuned to the all night movies (movies ’til dawn)
a beat up record player & speakers
& kitty cats torment the puppy
(who howls when they slap him
with their claws out stretched)
someone upstairs is yelling again fighting again
round & round shouts down the well
I had an onion Paul had a spud
& we fried ‘em up in oil
with catsup borrowed from Clown Alley
San Francisco—the ’70’s—a city of outlaws
the West—drifters & outsiders
rents are cheap & we’re passing the days
in a basement
hours of rehearsal while
the clock tower on a downtown bank
ticking the hours by ten or sixteen
nothing in the fridge nothing in the cupboard
no books on the shelf
no money but time
dreaming up songs that somehow limp back
we laugh together it works sometimes
working hard for hours but it’s a lonely group
something out of nothing that’s how to write songs
it’s always amazing when something happens
& I hear them laughing.

 

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Banging the Piano, part 1

Courage is who you stood up to while your back ached your heart beat your breath galloped your heartbeat doubled—he got next to me and I could see murder in his eyes—he wanted to teach me a lesson—he growled and ordered me to sit down– in a chair he threw into the middle of the room—I knew what his intentions were and I ran—he couldn’t catch me and I hid—soon after that I began to stand up to him— when I stopped running and turned around he wept–the real father and son night—courage is of the heart—it’s not just resistance but resistance for a heart-felt cause—we never discussed the heart—I did a lot of things other people are scared of—did they take courage? I know I’ve shown some—but you have to know your heart to defeat cowardice—you gotta believe—standing up to a beating—I’ve never been good at but I kept my terror in check a couple times—they say what I did took courage—but I don’t know only the individual can know about themselves—Lord Jim—hitch hiking when I was a kid? say what you gotta say—do what you gotta do—fear is always there but “take away my fear and direct my attention towards what you would have me do” let me stand up step forward reach out—”save the boy! save the boy!”

 

Dr Moan is my new album and will be released March 31 on Sunset Blvd Records.

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Jumbo Twelve

Discolored from rain on the tarmac near Detroit—TSA left the snaps half undone—and now it looks bruised—the old jumbo twelve string—called it “the cannon”—it’s loud and deep—feels alive in my hands—a sound I’ve developed to express the american red brick honky tonk beauty I’ve been feeling since 1970 or so—the twelve string is a spiritual  instrument—I said it for laughs but it’s got a lot of truth to it—the thinner octave strings suggest a parallel dimension—the realm that follows and corresponds to this one—the plonk and jangle–boom and chime quicksilver brightness—

The deep notes with their higher twins—cut through the air–through depression, despair and boredom—objectivity and abjectivity—the twelve string brings extra arms in the fight for light—harder to bend—but more rewarding—still pliant—people say “oh, it’s samey I wouldn’t want it on every song” and I don’t either but it helps me make the most of a simple phrase—always the ghost—the top-end reminder of the spiritual—twelve gates to the city—my protector—a wall of sound?—blues on the twelve—Hendrix—Leadbelly—Keith Richards—it’s heroic—John Hammond Jr. at McCabe’s that night on a guitar just like this one—maple—blonde—tuned way down to C—to see—needs to be treated with blessings, gratitude and respect.

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The Gifts (some notes on Bob Dylan’s 80th Birthday)

 

Thanks to Bob Dylan, on his 80th birthday for all the gifts he gave to us. Personally, I always feel like it’s Christmas on Earth (as Rimbaud coined it) when I experience Bob singing, speaking, writing, acting, painting and drawing, most whatever he does has been illuminating. I learned about American music and America itself. For me, time stopped when I heard Mr. Tambourine Man for the first time, and shortly after read “Folk-Rock: the Bob Dylan Story” in paperback, (which was very misleading in, but also enlightening in some ways.) By the time I was 14 I’d heard his first several albums, read the poems enclosed with the third album, 11 Outlined Epitaphs, started learning the songs in the Bob Dylan Songbook I received as a gift in 1966, listened over and over to HWY 61 through John Wesley Harding, then read Tarantula from a mimeograph while high on mescaline, and weeping, in 1971, in my first room away from home, with the Dont Look Back poster on the wall, hidden when the door opened, that movie, then companionship on the bank of sand Watching The River Flow, later the generational tale of Tangled Up In Blue, and all the others—Dignity–I pulled the car over when I first heard it on the radio—Jokerman–I brought home and alone listening was transfixed—it was riveting—so alive—earlier he taught us that all the American folk music belongs together—that the sound of the words is as important as anything—somehow it led me to Shakespeare—Kerouac also a part of this—the WORD—to Eliot when I was a kid—Stevens–Ginsberg–Kaufman—now Notley–Tongo Eiesen-Martin-—that life is an adventure, an opportunity, is important.    Life—is holy—Death so powerful—the mystery—anima—the invisible world—the champions of civil rights—the dignity and value and stature he brought to rock n’roll and folk—music, etc—is no small thing—he made me want to live, to strive, to contend—wisdom of the street—the vision, the powerful sweep and scope—Chimes of Freedom—It’s All Right, Ma—Baby Blue—he sang for freedom of the spirit and the soul—”the guardians and protectors of the mind”–“it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to”– ““an’ mine shall be a strong loneliness dissolvin’ deep/t’ the depths of my freedom/an’ that, then, shall/
remain my song.”

–“don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue”—“when you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose” —“she’s got everything she needs she’s an artist, she don’t look back” —“she never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall”–  like Bob in ’64-’65—(“he never stumbled” said Penny)– when I was a teen—“somebody got lucky but it was an accident”–  “goin’ back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough”– (marvelling at the chaos of life and New York.) The beauty of Girl From The North Country—Went To See The Gypsy hit me in my 1971 isolation—at my biker friend Rose’s Cadillac dealership, waiting in the parking lot for her to get off work– in the days before I left town for good—the last song that moved me like that for a while—’til Billy—which also I loved and identified with–Billy’s trouble as I was on the lam 70’s style—so vivid and finally got that great inscription in the pink lyrics book perused at the SF bookstore two thousand miles from my home—“to all those high on life—from all corners of the wild blue yonder.”

–PC 2016

*  Long Time Gone, an early Dylan song, from my cd “HWY 62” on Omnivore Recordings, 2016.

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Fifty Years Since “Let It Be”

the priest who never slept

was our favorite

you could talk to him

he was always there alone

smoking and writing

equations on the board

but poor Gaynel

took her own life

at sixteen

and the little longhaired girl

with glasses

cried for her

and got out of that

stuck up school

I never wanted to go

that’s how we met

in a suburban development

with no trees

called Forest Glen

not far from the Thruway

the priest had theories

that’d scare you

if you ever thought of ‘em

and the little longhaired girl

with glasses was very thin

and very sad

in the spring

the snow was filthy

still in melting piles

shrinking

the earth smelled

like an open wound

wet clay and rotten leaves

trees still bare

on Pleasant Avenue

I smell the raindrops

in her hair

she’s my best friend

and we both

wear long coats.

debris in the gutter

broken plastic toys

shreds of colorful

garbage

in the living

room we watched

he held a gun

to the man’s head

and blew his brains out

everybody saw

and soon

a few minutes later

the Beatles

were somberly singing

let it be.

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for Crazy Horse Danny Schrimsher

For my old street singing buddy

Crazy Horse Danny

no reunions on stage for

us/ the ‘Frozen Chosen”

we never played much

on stages anyways/ 1973

usually a streetcorner/ a

telephone + a

parking meter were all

we needed  to put on a

show: a couple winos

would glare red faced +

itchy

from the curbstones/

leaning on a letter box while

the neon flashed/ + the

headlights crashed/ the cop

on the sidewalk/ sends

for the paddywagon/ so we

had

to dash/ How is a life like

this pieced together? You

worked

on the black market +

fringe/ jobs like guarding

the pot fields

for the jungle growers in

Hawaii/ hustles/ rock +roll

cover

bands for Honolulu

tourists. Our secrets +

dreams were

looked up + mixed in

poverty’s ferocious history/

always

one step in back// so if

we get weak/ too lonely/or

drunk on cheap

fireworks. If his eyes are

swollen from a

brawl on Broadway/ with

usurpers who had the nerve

to

pull a swithchblade/

Danny reached into the the

trash

bin  + pulled out a

weapon: a coke bottle/ one

of the

ones made of glass/

boink! boink! boink! on the

guys head

the fight then garbage

canned right across the

street through

nightclub traffic + into

the Garcia Vega Cigar store

+ here comes

Nick the Cop. We split up

the alleys–reconvene at the

Coffee

Gallery. Later we follow a

drunken man who  flashes

a roll of

bills at us/ while throwing

a tip in our case/ all the way

to

Washington Park/ but we

decide not to roll him/ what

if he

yells + we have to hit

him? “I can’t do that for

money, man.”

we’re broke + hungry/

with nowhere to go/ but

Heaven.

 

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 Courage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who you stood up to while your back ached yr heart beat yr breath galloped yr heartbeat doubled—he got next to me & I could see murder in his eyes—I know he wanted to teach me a lesson—he ordered me to “sit down” in a chair he threw into the middle of the room—he was going to terrorize me & I ran—he couldn’t catch me & I hid—soon after that I began to stand up to him—I stopped running & turned around & he wept—courage is off the heart—its not just resistance but resistance for a heart-felt cause—we never discussed the heart—I did a lot of things OTHER people are scared of—did they take courage? I know I’ve shown some but I also suspect my cowardice—you have to know your heart to defeat cowardice—you gotta believe—standing up to a beating—I’ve never been good at but I kept my terror in check a couple times—they say what I did took courage—but I don’t know  only the individual knows about themselves—Lord Jim—hitch hiking when I was a kid? say what you gotta say—do what you gotta do—fear is always there but “take away my fear & direct my attention towards what you would have me do.”  :et me stand up step forward reach out—save the boy!

 

 

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