The next show is north of San Francisco, in one of my favorite clubs in the area, Rancho Nicasio, on November 8. www.petercase.com/gigs gets you to the ticket link. Hell of a week for a gig…but I played the day after Obama won in 2008, and that show was sold out. I played the day after the 2016 election in the Ozarks, and that show was sold out, too. After the 2000 election I was up in Spokane with my friend Dave Alvin.  I was just starting a long tour across the US and Canada and Dave was just returning from one and we crossed paths up there. Sold out show. On the other hand, the day after the second Bush election was a dud…up in Minneapolis at the Cedar Tavern. The audience seemed quite down that night but we made the best of it…anyhow…c’mon out, whatever happens, I guarantee a dynamic and moving night of music.

Now I”ll pick up this winding tale of a journey. I hopes it’s not any sort of affectation of mine that drives me to tell all this. The point is, we’re all going somewhere, for better or worse, and maybe some of you will see yourselves in this one…or maybe just see and hear the music from another side.

 

 

 

 

 

All of these stories, I’m not sure what they mean, are they the tale of one man’s journey   only?  Maybe I was under the delusion I could be the exception to every rule. Or maybe we all were. But, somehow my parents and teachers let me get away when I was small.

Dead ends I’d slide out of, down wrong way streets.

Pestered for results like buttons for shoemakers, trash on the infield, never did an honest days work it was always play time for me, even when I was exhausted and my hands were bleeding, or when the hours were way too long and the Summer heat was like a furnace. I got lucky and stayed that way through a thousand disasters. The moon fell out the sky was a neon blanket and the stories plod hop and roust the boredom of another predictable landing forgone.

•Somewhere towards the end of the Plimsouls’ initial run for rock n’ roll fame and fortune, I had a rebirth of wonder and amazement at the power of a song itself to move listeners, especially in the absence of elaborate musical or band arrangements. I was returning to the belief that one songwriter with a guitar or piano and voice, putting across a song, was the most powerful and complete form of musical performance possible if the song was right, and the execution, completely committed. It was a feeling I had, as well as an idea and it came to life in my fantasies and visions regarding the pending first-time McCabes solo show, which was exciting to contemplate, in my calmer moments, but the prospect of which scared the bejesus out of me.

 

Ramblin’ Jack Eliot was performing a stand of club engagements around town and I decided I needed to hear and see as many of his shows as possible. Everybody knew Jack’s energy and attentiveness could run either hot or cold at these things, but the fact was that when he wanted to, he could stop the world with a crazy, heartbreaking, completely fresh arrangement of a song that you might have heard a hundred times, and it felt like magic. One night he sang “All My Trials,” the Trinadadian folk-song and I never got over it, he broke my heart, I was hooked, he was a big inspiration to me. And it was always a kick to see little Ramblin’ Jack perched under that huge Western hat, and delivering one of his famous “stream-of-unconsciousness” raps, or having a “nervous breakthrough.”

 

 

•“If this record doesn’t sell a million copies I quit the business.” T-Bone Burnett announced loudly to the people in the control room at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles. It was early 1986 and they were listening to a playback of my first solo album, a collection of songs and music that was a big departure for me, a record that had begun its journey to vinyl two years before, born in inspiration, then run through a gauntlet of trouble and interference. Making that album was one of the big turning points of my life, and in a lot of ways, though it’s been decades since, it still feels current to me. It was lauded by New York Time’s critic Robert Palmer as the top album of the year, hailed as a “masterpiece” by David Wild in Rolling Stone, described as “genius” by New Musical Express in the UK. And since I was the first musician of the “punk generation” to commit fully to the solo/folk approach, it’s style inspired a large group of third generation rockers to become singer/songwriter’s, to acknowledge ‘roots’ music, to widen the approach to powerful music.

It wasn’t just going solo that interested me, it was the idea of playing solo that came to me so powerfully that night on stage in Lubbock, Texas. The Plimsouls were all there with me, playing the arrangements from our first album to a basically empty house. The ‘souls were a great band, and even on the bad nights they played with an intensity and passion that few groups could match, but I looked around, and felt this kind of rock n’roll was a thing of the past. It just seemed over to me, it was rocking music but my head and heart were going somewhere else.

In the cottage up in Laurel Canyon I was writing songs daily, living with the door open, digging the air and the fire-blue howls of the coyotes in the night, as they would burst out suddenly from an invisible spot right below my bedroom window and tear up the hillside. I was living alone, and for first time in ten years, wasn’t a member of a rock and roll band. Once in the early morning hours I’d heard a marauding band of raccoons outside going through the cans, and when I came out on the steps to yell at them, they just stopped rummaging for a second and stared at me, then went right back to rifling through the trash. They didn’t seem to be that impressed by my solo career. But, sometimes, looking off the porch at night, I’d see a big tufted owl, up over the road, balanced on the power line, a silhouette against the dark sky, and that sent a chill down my body. Big snakes would crawl out of their skins and holes, disappearing into the brush by the side of the dirt road. We were high above the city, which could be glimpsed, silent in the distance, all sparkling, darkling lights. “My bands all gone,” I’d say to myself, “I’m on my own, where is it all going now?”

The Plimsouls could’ve made a million bucks, it had seemed, but now, it was over, and instead, I was broke and owed at least a million bucks, between the tax and the lawyers, and other of the band’s creditors. They were all coming straight for me, that’s how it felt, and that’s how the record business works, on any musician bold enough to take a bite of the bait. I’d reached for the rock’n’roll ring, almost grasped it, then slipped. The ring had moved on, but there was something else brewing inside me, another kind of music, and I could hear it in the ether, alive in the atmosphere, coming in more clearly everyday. I had a vision of what I could do, and it was based on the music that’d excited me, in my days before the Nerves. I was gonna take a page from Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Bob Dylan. I was gonna lay the songs out there, stripped down, on my own, alone.

Some big packages of phonograph records had begun to arrive in the mail, out of the blue. I opened up the first one and found perfectly clean copies of several Bob Dylan albums. I didn’t know what it was about, but I opened the other packages and was soon glad to be in possession of the entire Dylan vinyl catalogue. The return address was his publishing company, but with no name or contact there. I never found out why they were sent, but I started to listen to his records again. It had been a while since I’d really poured over his work.

I was disorganized up there in the canyon, living alone, banging on the piano I’d rented, with records scattered all over the couch and floor, and notebooks too. All I did was write and demo songs. There was never anything in the refrigerator except beer. On the shelf were boxes and boxes of sake. And I powered down coffee like mad when I wasn’t drinking beer or wine, sake or brandy. Not being much of a cook, I took all my meals out, down on Sunset Boulevard usually, at one of the places down there. My two favorites were Ben Franks’s twenty-four hour diner, and the famous natural food restaurant The Source, where I could pretend I was doing great things for my health.

One night I was sitting in a booth at the Source, picking at an avocado, beet, and bean sprout salad, when I realized Mohammmed Ali was seated at the very next table, in discussion with a number of men. I listened in, couldn’t help it, and from what I could pick up, straining my ears as best I could, the guys were from the Olympic Committee, doing their best to convince the Champ to host the Olympic Boxing that was coming up in LA later in the Summer. I was trying to be cool, and not let on I was eavesdropping, but I nearly fell out of my seat when I heard Ali tell them, “I threw my medals in the river.” He was turning them down, and they were beseeching him. His no was solid, no matter how they begged, and finally he got up to walk out, right past my table. He was big as life, looking very strong, totally cool, and he winked at me as he walked out.

Another time I was up at Ben Frank’s restaurant in the small hours of the morning, sitting at the counter drinking cup after cup of the bad coffee they served there. David Bowie was just a few seats down from me at the counter, wearing a khaki coloured jacket, drinking the coffee too, leaning on his elbows and absently chain smoking, looking off into the imaginary distance. No one else seemed to notice him there, or seemed to care. That’s the way it was in Hollywood, it still had a few surprises left in it back then.

I was songwriting all the time, trying to catch a ride to the next level, looking to tap secret power, pouring over the Song Of Solomon in the Old Testament, Robert Browning, the complete Hank Williams catalogue, and the ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound. EP laid it down as “dichten = condensare,” poetry as concentrated verbal expression. To condense. Highly charged language was the goal. Every word, every note is important to the whole. Whenever I saw the word poetry I read the word “songs.” I was consciously trying to expand my mind on the subject. I had a box set of Lotte Lenya singing the Brecht-Weil songs from Three Penny Opera and Mahogany, and I followed the lyrics in print in German and English. I was developing a love for condensed, colorful , concrete language. The best songs told their story by referencing the world of people and things directly, vividly evoking the senses. Dylan’s records reflected all of this in a big way. And I was digging Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, plus all the pre-war blues, and somewhere in there I was still working on the lessons I’d learned as a street singer, as one of the Nerves. I was brewing up a hybrid.

[Walk In The Woods, from my first LP, rercorded 1985,  produced by T-Bone Burnett, on Geffen Records]