"When I start writing," allows Peter Case, "it's not like I have something that I really want to say. It's more like there are a million things to say. And I'm just trying to find my way into the world of the songs."
The world of the songs is where Case has lived most of his life. As a teenager in the '60s, growing up outside of Buffalo, New York, he listened to blues singers and played in garage bands. He hitchhiked and roamed around, and did hard time by himself on the streets of San Francisco, busking for many years before finally joining punk/power-pop trio the Nerves in the mid-'70s. In the early '80s, he fronted the Plimsouls, a Los Angeles rock quartet best known for its jangled blast of alienation, "A Million Miles Away" (featured in the 1983 film Valley Girl). After the demise of the Plimsouls, Case fell back on the two things that had always sustained him: his voice and his guitar.
His sixth solo recording, Full Service No Waiting (Vanguard), finds Case connecting the abject ways and wild joys of his youth to his current existence as a well-regarded middle-aged singer-songwriter with a wife and family. As he's done for more than a decade, Case delivers this latest bunch of songs through a timeless combination of melodic verve and closely observed lyricism. But it's his mature struggle with the restless ghosts of his past that makes the new disc so resounding.
"From my first record on," he says, "I've been trying to take the things that happened to me -- and the world we thought we were growing up in -- hook them into the present, and then look at where it's all going. Some people say, 'Oh, you're writing about the broken American dream.' But I guess the reality is, we were born into a country in this huge transition, and all the people are in transition too, so that's what I write about."
Produced by longtime pal Andrew Williams (of the Williams Brothers), the sound of Full Service No Waiting is mostly acoustic, except for the sinuous cries of Greg Leisz's pedal and lap steel guitars. David Jackson's upright bass, Sandy Chila's drums, Lili Haydn's violin and Don Heffington's percussion round out the first-rate instrumental ensemble. For his part, Case contributes some deft fingerpicking and harmonica, which serve to reinforce the set's down-home tone. But as often happens, the easy animated quality that comes through was born as much of necessity as design.
"Maybe our limitations worked for us on this one," he says. "It was the freedom of the shoestring that allowed us to go with early takes, and work in a real energetic way. The whole process of going in and making a record can be kind of overwhelming. Even when you've done it a lot, it can clamp down on the spontaneity of the music. This time we really made a point of catching things when they were really fresh, and really alive -- before they'd gotten run into the ground. So besides probably being my favorite record to work on, I think it was one of the quickest I've done."
Case's recording career has been almost as rough and tumble as his life and music. And though his days with the Nerves and Plimsouls continue to grant him hip cachet in certain circles, his transition from rock to a much less defined style wasn't easy. For his self-titled solo debut in 1986 on Geffen, he came under the tutelage of like-minded producer T Bone Burnett. Together they made a lean, rhythmically complex album that opened with a "tribal folk" tune they co-wrote, "Echo Wars", and ended with a lilting cover of the Pogues' "Pair of Brown Eyes" powered by Roger McGuinn's 12-string guitar playing.
A harbinger of good and bad things to come, it drew raves from critics, including the late Robert Palmer of The New York Times, who put it at the top of his year's best list. Trouser Press referred to Case's songs as "barbed Americana," back when the term still had a sociological rather than a musical meaning. But in that time before "unplugged" and Beck, it seemed Geffen wasn't equipped to handle such a diverse artist.
"The people who didn't dig it were at Geffen Records," Case says with a sigh. "And that was really a shock for me...totally disheartening. In fact, one night, when it looked like the record wasn't even gonna come out, I had this long talk with T Bone -- you know, about artists who hang their paintings in their own yard, and stuff like that. Like, I might just end up singing for people in the neighborhood."
In 1985, Case and singer-songwriter Victoria Williams married and began what appeared to be a uniquely simpatico personal and musical partnership. Williams sang harmony and helped write two songs on Case's solo debut. But by the time Case's second album came out in 1989, the couple had split up. Despite its unwieldy title, The Man With The Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar (commonly shorthanded to just Blue Guitar) became a watershed album. With its detailed story-songs and incredible group of guest players -- including Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Jerry Scheff, Jim Keltner and David Hidalgo -- it not only regained the critics' attention, it registered with fellow musicians such as Bruce Springsteen.
"I'm really proud of Blue Guitar," he admits. "But again, it was hard to get that one to come out. They couldn't believe I started it off with a Mance Lipscomb song. But I just wanted to make a deep singer-songwriter kind of record -- a blues and folk roots kind of thing. That's what Blue Guitar was. And, until recently, that was probably my strongest batch of songs to go out and play."
Following up Blue Guitar proved tough. With increasing label pressure to make a more commercial album, Case came up with the ill-conceived and, by his reckoning, poorly produced Six-Pack Of Love in 1992. The album was his last for Geffen, and it's clear he's still bothered by the experience, even though he most certainly learned from it.
"I play guitar and I sing," Case says. "And things sort of need to be centered around that. And then some producer comes in and they want it to be centered around their keyboard playing or something. You end up feeling like a guest on your own record."
In 1993, determined to take control after a period of post-Geffen depression, Case decided to record and release a homemade album of traditional songs and perennial favorites he ironically titled Peter Case Sings Like Hell. The Marvin Etzioni-produced collection rambled from Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Matchbox Blues" to Roy Orbison's "Down the Line". Its stark folk-singer arrangements put his voice and guitar in high relief, and caught the ear of listeners at the recently revived independent label Vanguard Records. They reissued it in 1994, and the small company has remained his happy home ever since.
"Vanguard takes on artists they believe in and lets them do what they need to do," says Case. "That's what they did in the '60s -- that's what they're famous for -- and they're living up to that legacy. That's so alien to the big-time record industry, in my experience."
Torn Again, released in 1995, was his first original album for Vanguard. It marked both a return to form and an overdue bit of housekeeping. "It had songs from several different periods," Case says. "It had six brand-new songs, then a few that had been left off Six-Pack Of Love that I really wished I'd recorded. By contrast, the songs on Full Service were all kind of conceived in one way. They came in this one big burst, and the recording kind of went down like that too."
Though he won't come right out and say it, you get the distinct impression Case thinks Full Service No Waiting may be his best album since Blue Guitar. Like several from that set, most of the new songs deal with his scattered youth and the ripples that continue to flow from it. "That period of time between when I was 10 and 21," he says, "is something that, for some reason, keeps coming back to me. There's a lot of energy and a lot happening there, and hopefully I think I'm starting to work through it."
"Aw, man it was great, if you had to be there," he sings on "See Through Eyes", a song he says is about the first group of songwriters he ever fell in with. The lines that follow continue the bittersweet tale: "We were pulling the songs out of thin air/Played 'em and laughed and threw them away/Just passing by, well I decided to stay/Through the black nights and high times."
Case started heading for those times at an early age. "I feel like I was born to do what I do," he says. "Basically I live to play and write. And I've known what I was going to do since I was 10 years old." He discovered the music of Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin' Hopkins at 13, and their music became his key to the highway.
"Basically I wanted to be an itinerant bluesman," he says wryly. "That was my career choice. And I started taking off hitchhiking all over the East Coast, running away from home, going up to Canada. My parents were teachers, and I quit going to school, so that was a big problem. And I moved out when I was 15.
"I was older when I was 18 than I am now in certain ways," he continues, echoing the chorus of Bob Dylan's classic "My Back Pages". "I was an old man there for a while, I was so fried. By the time I was 17, I was pretty messed up. By the time I was 18, I was a young acid casualty -- really hurtin' bad and into all different kinds of trouble. I ended up leaving Buffalo one night in a blizzard, heading west on a Greyhound bus. I got off in Chicago, I don't even know where, and went into a bar and got drunk. And then I bought a train ticket for the West Coast. That got me to Oakland, and then I took a bus over to San Francisco and walked off at the foot of Mission Street in, like, 1972.
"I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was sort of fleeing my life -- looking for a geographical solution. I lived in San Francisco on the street for a couple of years, just purely living on the street without an apartment or an address or anything. I lived in a junkyard out in Sausalito in a truck on blocks."
Powerful images of leaving home and living and singing on the streets course through Full Service No Waiting. Though he claims he's "not really a confessional writer," "Crooked Mile" is as close to a full-scale rendition of the Peter Case story as anything he's put down. "Originally that song was a lot longer," he says. "We cut a bunch of different versions of it -- one was like 10 minutes, and there are a lot more verses. And yeah, it's autobiographical. It sort of brings my past forward into the present. But I finally ended up cutting it down to its bones. I cut out a lot of the detail, because it was a really involved thing."
When he's not on the road, Case spends his time working in his studio across the street from the famed McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California. He's currently cooking up a children's album, so even when he's at home looking at the world through the eyes of his two young daughters, music is often on his mind. His wife, Diane Sherry, is a writer who shares credit on "See Through Eyes". And his son Josh, 23, who plays in an Austin, Texas, group called Gold, helped pen "Spell Of Wheels" and "On The Way Downtown".
Most of what makes Case such an interesting character, though, lies hidden beneath the surface of what he calls "daily survival" -- down in the world of the songs.
"I was basically trying to just write my way through my whole situation," is how Case sums up Full Service No Waiting. "That's what I always try to do to begin with. And then I'm looking for some place where it lifts up to something worth singing about. It's not just journal notes. You have to capture your own imagination.
"My ideal is that I could take one of these songs, walk into a room with a guitar and play it for a stranger -- just sing them a song and blow their mind with it. It's that whole mystery that I'm trying to unravel."
Bob Townsend lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he writes lots of stories for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Stomp and Stammer, eats lots fried chicken at Son's Place, and drinks lots of beer at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club.
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