Featured: Q&A with Peter Case

 

 

During the pandemic, we all sought small bastions of sanity wherever we could find them. Especially visually, locked in at home with so many relatively new streaming services available like Netflix — you could latch onto an uplifting movie like “Eurovision Song Contest — the Story of Fire Saga” and dodge the doldrums, at least for a little while. But there was a strange comfort to be found in programmed cable and network TV viewing, as well, what used to be touted as “Appointment Television,” exemplified by way stations like FETV, GRIT, and then-hot hubs like MGMHD, which ran two classic old MGM film noirs, back to back, every Tuesday night, and campy drive-in-cheesy features every Friday. It became something to look forward to, something to mark on your (pretty vacant) calendar as a place to be on a certain evening. And there were great bonuses that went with all of this, screenings of vintage movies you’d almost forgotten, like Nicolas Cage’s film debut Valley Girl, which still holds up.

A bit awkwardly, to be sure, because the only notable earmarks of Cage’s supposedly ‘edgy’ Randy character’s being punk is a subtly-spiky, skunk-striped haircut and a few promotional buttons he’s sporting. But the screen can’t help coming to vibrant life when he drunkenly staggers into a dark-lit New Wave club while L.A. punk/power-pop ensemble The Plimsouls are rocketing through a set that’s capped off by its signature “A Million Miles Away” hit. Bandleader Peter Case throws himself ardently into an ever-kinetic, clanging chord, and the crowd (of equally spike-haired extras, granted) jolts to life, actually capturing that era’s long-gone magic for a few effusive flashback minutes. Me? I watched “Valley Girl” any time I stumbled across it on MGMHDTV’s schedule, all the way to its panoramic closing limo scene, perfectly soundtracked by Modern English’s anthemic “Melt With You,” and it always took me straight back to that optimistic era, before the AIDS pandemic had really taken lethal hold. Anything was possible, Case seemed to be exuberantly, innocently shouting at the time. And what could possibly derail such unbridled enthusiasm now?

What, indeed? Seeing an actual sweaty nightclub concert flickering past on television proved to be an unexpected balm during Covid. Because whoever suspected back in 1983  that there would one day come a time when such communal gatherings were not only verboten but potentially deadly to participants, unmasked or even masked. There were no guarantees. But hearing the perpetually rasp-throated Case cron “You’ve lost the key to paradise” in another “Valley Girl” live selection, “The Oldest Story in the World,” somehow just felt not only apt but eerily prophetic; Humanity had, in many ways both literal and figurative, lost that fabled key, and we were all summarily, simultaneously exiled from any cushy, comfortable collective past. Even now, concerts that are Plimsouls-invigorating seem like a dated anomaly, a vague memory that we’re all desperately trying to recreate or simply return to when no one remembers exactly how.

A lot of folks, quite logically, would just rather stay home and maybe watch Valley Girl again, for the umpteenth fun time. Because it does reflect a halcyon California era when punk and post-punk had spun off into an effervescent power-pop movement, led by The Plimsouls and peers like 20/20, The Pop, Code Blue, and The Motels. That energy would morph, re-distribute, and relocate to locations such as Seattle’s grunge groundswell. But it essentially would never come again, being only perfectly visible in hindsight. And Case doesn’t want to devalue his three-song appearance in Valley Girl — after all, The Plimsouls had a pretty good run, with only two full-length albums to its credit, The Plimsouls in ’81, and its sublime ’83 followup, Everywhere at Once (plus a debut Zero Hour EP in ’79).“But you realize that we were just lip-synching, right?” He asks rhetorically today, on the release of his latest solo album, “Doctor Moan,” his 16th, wherein he trades his trusty six-string for more evocative piano. He agrees with the performance’s unique staying power. “But hopefully, they all hold up,” adds the vocalist who went solo in 1986 with his eponymous, T-Bone Burnett-produced debut disc. “Because what I’m trying to do is tap into something that’s kind of timeless like that. And my heroes are all people that just played until they dropped — Lightning Hopkins and blues singers and poets, too — those were my heroes when I was a kid, and they still are now. And hopefully, if you’re awake and you’re paying attention, you’ll just keep getting better and better. And that’s what I feel this record is for me — just another stage of that.” To explain his new keyboard, almost anti-Plimsouls bent on “Wandering Days,” “The Flying Crow,” “Brand New Book of Rules,” and “Have You Ever Been in Trouble” — whose flickering video has him bearded and Tom Waits-rumpled, wandering the San Francisco streets — he comes clean in the following stream-of-consciousness chat…..

IE: So this album had some unusual keyboard influences, like San Francisco’s own St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. Did you become a patron?

PETER CASE: They’ve been here in San Francisco for 50 years. They have an ordained minister named Reverend Francis King, and I love John Coltrane’s music, right? And I was going down there because they had a band there, and it’s an ever-changing band, and the services are very beautiful. And they have a radio show, too. And the first record I bought when I came to California, the very first thing I purchased, was a John Coltrane album, and that was in 1973, so I’ve been a big fan for a long time, and I didn’t even have a record player back then. So the thing is, I just went down there one day, and their piano player hadn’t shown up, and they have a group, but the group was constantly changing. And they play on Sunday — it’s a church, and so the music of John Coltrane is performed at the church. But now they’re located at Fort Mason, and they have a show every Sunday at 11:00 a.m. But at the time I was there, it was at a church on Turk Street, and they were looking for a piano player and somebody volunteered. And I was afraid to get in because I’m not really a jazz piano player, but I can play…I guess rhythm piano, you would call it. I had more of a Gospel approach when I first got there, but then I played with ‘em for a couple of years, every Sunday when I was in town. And that really made my playing a lot stronger, because you’d play for a couple of hours every week.

IE: So that definitely influenced this album. But there was also a piano in your living room? How long had that been there, and why?

PC: Well, it had been there for 20 years. And my first instrument, I guess, was the piano, when I was a kid, and so when you leave home, you can’t really take a piano, you know? Even though I had one. And I tried to take it for about a week, but you always had to get a bunch of guys to help you move it. So the reason cowboys play guitar, and ramblers and all that kind of stuff is, you can’t carry a piano around. So I didn’t really play that much. I didn’t really live anywhere for a long time, so I was always on the move. So I was playing guitar, and that became my main thing. But I played keyboards on early Plimsouls records, so I always played when I could. And there’s a movie coming out that a guy made that has me playing piano in 1973 — I’m playing “The Harder They Come” on piano out on the street, because there was a piano that we found. And there was a movie I was in called “Nightshift” that this guy (Bert Deivert) made in 1973, and the movie that they made now (the upcoming A Million Miles Away documentary by Fred Parnes) ended up using parts of it, and that’s how it finally ended up getting seen.

So I’ve been playing for years, you know? So I’m in a room with a piano at the start of the pandemic, and it was the perfect opportunity, even though I’d played all along. But you know how it was during that pandemic, man — it was like, claustrophobia. And then I thought that the way out would be to every day just focus on playing the piano. So it was definitely an opportunity, and really, the great thing about it was, I just started out just wandering, really, just playing. I like boogie-woogie, and I like Jimmy Yancey _____ a lot, and so I learned one of his things and I was listening to his records. And I’d been playing at the Coltrane Church, so I’d had to decode some of McCoy Tyner’s chording things. So I was learning a few standards, I was playing some blues and what I call gut-bucket jazz on the piano — it’s not really real jazz, it’s more like untutored jazz, played by ear. And these songs started to come — a ways into it, I just started getting these songs, and they were on the piano because that’s what I was doing. And sometimes, the piano would be first, and sometimes just the words would be first, and sometimes the whole thing would come at once. But I loved playing piano. And for me, it was always like a hobby. Or not a hobby, exactly — just something I did for kicks, you know? Like a relief. If I was on the road with The Plimsouls, and I went into a room and there was a room and there was a piano in there, I would always start banging on the piano —I just really loved it. And my big sister played piano, and she’s 14 years older than me. I’m the youngest kid, and so she babysat me as a kid, but she was kind of a virtuoso, so she played stride piano, and her name was Phyllis, and she was a big influence on me. She played Monk and Fats Waller and Fats Domino, their songs on piano as well as standards. And she’d play it with that left hand that you might remember from the old days, in the way that people used to play. So I’ve got that in my body, because I was just a little kid and she basically babysat me all the time. So I grew up in a house of teenagers digging rock and roll, and that’s informed a lot of the way I play.

IE: When did you first come to SF?

PC: 1973. I was on the street for a few years, and then I joined The Nerves, and it was great and really interesting. It was kind of a Wild West vibe that was still in SF then. I mean, it’s kind of still here now, but not very much — it’s just a ghost of it. But back then, it was the tail-end of the hippie era, and the motorcycle gang era — those two things, especially. But you also heard a lot of jazz on the street, and coming out of windows all the time. And there were a lot of people on the street, but homelessness hadn’t really taken over yet. But Reagan had been governor, so homelessness was about to take off. So there were a lot of kind of…loose-end people on the street, and so I was a street musician, and I didn’t know you could actually do that when I came out here. But when I got out here, I got a guitar and was like, “Wow! You can actually just make enough money to eat while playing on the street!” So that’s exactly what I did.

IE: George Thorogood said he busked in SF, too, down at the Wharf.

PC: I’ll bet he did! He used to live at my friend’s house, Mike Wilhelm. And the first day I was playing on the street, I was down in North Beach, and I had a bunch of blues songs about death — my 19-year-old blues period — and Wilhelm came up to me and said, “Hey, man! You could be in my band! I need a lead singer!” So I started working with him, and he taught me a lot of guitar. I never actually joined his band, but I played a lot of acoustic gigs with him since he was in The Charlatans and was a mentor for The Flamin’ Groovies, and I learned how to play finger-picking guitar from him. So I was playing on the street when I got here, and at this place called The Coffee Gallery, and they had a piano, so I used to play piano there. And The Coffee Gallery was a great place — it was on Grant Avenue, and otherwise, I played on the street every night. So joining bands was a whole step up for me because I was kind of living hand to mouth, week to week, day to day. So when I joined The Nerves, that was a big step up for me — they were an actual band that lived somewhere, so for me, The Nerves were like a big learning experience.

IE: But now that you’re back in the Bay Area, you’ve stayed fairly busy, especially during lockdown, right? 

PC: Yeah. And I put another record out during the pandemic, called The Midnight Broadcast in 2021). I was just listening to some radio in the middle of the night in New England, and I had to get from Boston down to somewhere south of New York to play a show there the next day at noon. So I was driving all night, and it’s something I’ve experienced a lot — cars are something like sensory deprivation tanks when you’re in them at night, and then when music comes on, it’s so moving. So sometimes where you are when you hear something has so much to do with how it affects you. So that’s what I was trying to recreate with that record — a record you could listen to at night, and it would take a look at those kinds of situations. And it even has a DJ on it, and we recorded it right before the pandemic went down. And I also did a book (of collected lyrics and verse) “Somebody Told the Truth,” and then I’m in this movie, (Fred Parnes’ exhaustive doc Peter Case — A Million Miles Away — Take Yes For an Answer), and it’s a full-length feature that’s coming out, and the guy did a great job. People who’ve seen it really seem to like it, and I’d made it to 65 years without having a movie made about me, so I was ambivalent, in a way. But it came out pretty good, and there’s a lot of cool music in it like The Plimsouls live, and they took me to Sunset Sound with a band, and we cut some new stuff. And there’s some great old footage in the movie, like that footage of me playing on the street in 1973 (for Deivert’s SF-music-scene study Nightshift). And The Plimsouls footage is really powerful. And I hadn’t thought about The Plimsouls much, but I was pretty amazed by how tight that band sounded live. So I think it’s got a life of its own, this movie, and the guy’s a really good filmmaker. So we’ll see what happens when it finally comes out.

IE: So, what life lessons did you learn during the pandemic?

PC: I did learn that life is what you focus on. And I learned the importance of attitude and staying engaged, and I didn’t want to waste the time — I learned just how precious time was. So at times it was a nightmare, but I really got a lot out of it, because this was the first time I’ve ever been able to just spend that much time and play music at home for years, without having to go out and run around the world. So just acceptance of the pandemic itself was super-insane. But in terms of my personal life, just trying to make things happen as you go along — even under the most dire circumstances, I’ve discovered — can have positive outcomes.

Peter Case appears at FitzGerald’s April 26

-Tom Lanham

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