Peter Case – A guitar makes a band
This is a solo album with an asterisk. Richard Thompson’s harmony vocal and counter lead guitar on “Every 24 Hours” lifts a standard round, and there are other guest contributors including pedal steel player Norm Hamlet of Haggard’s Strangers and Los Angeles veteran Carlos Guitarlos, former leader of Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs. Case, who knew Guitarlos during his punk years, discovered him singing on the street. “He was going through some hard times,” Case said. “But now he’s back. He’s a great blues singer.”
Case wrote most of the songs on Sleepy John in the middle of the night. “I was having insomnia for some reason,” he explains. “I can never sleep on the road, but I wasn’t on the road, so I can’t blame it. For whatever reason, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and write. I woke up and a song would spill out. That happened with ‘Million Dollars Bail’ [a comment on the justice system] and ‘Palookaville’ [‘where you can’t tell your baby how a left jab feels’]. They just came out, fully formed. Other songs, like ‘Every 24 Hours,’ I wrote right before we went in the studio.”
Then there is “Just Hangin’ On”, a soldier’s lament inspired by the Vietnam War and relevant all over again. “I rediscovered it,” Case says. “It’s the first song of mine people kept wanting to hear, and the first one older musicians played. But I never recorded it until now.”
The songwriting process has never fallen into any reliable pattern for Case, even when he tried to make it do so. In his most inspired moments, he says, he has experienced the sensation of “someone walking with me — not like Jesus, just someone with an eye on me, helping me along, opening my eyes to things.” Mostly, his craft comes to him in mysterious ways. For Full Service No Waiting (1998), he went to a nearby town, rented a room, and recorded tunes on a tape recorder.
“Life is superjammed. Going there, I felt freed, like a little kid playing,” he says. “I worked four hours every day, from 9 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon. The music poured out. But when I tried to do my next record, Flying Saucer Blues, like that, I couldn’t. My system rebelled from that approach. I have to trick myself. I don’t like to hit things head-on. I get the willies.
“Thinking doesn’t help you write songs. Thinking about songs doesn’t help you write songs. The most painful and disagreeable thing I can think of is sitting down and trying to write a song. That’s how you get stuck. A lot of times, my best songs come when I’m doing something else. I’ve sat in a restaurant and suddenly had a song come to me in the margins of a newspaper. It’s like you’re fishing and all of a sudden you pull out a big one.”
If most folk artists pour most of their energy into writing and perhaps arranging their songs and are content to get them cleanly recorded, Case has long chased the Holy Grail of fully capturing the presence of his acoustic playing. “Peter is a folk musician, but he never played with any sort of folk piety,” says T Bone Burnett, recalling the sessions for Case’s solo debut. “I remember him assaulting that acoustic guitar, just playing the shit out of it, knocking out these unusual but completely happening chords. No one plays like him.”
“The guitar makes a band,” says Case, quoting a lyric from one of his own songs (“Hidden Love” from 1989’s The Man With the Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar). “The whole band is in there, just the way the whole band was in the piano for Art Tatum or James P. Johnson or [Thelonious] Monk. I have a way I really want to hear the guitar. I don’t want to just hear standard strumming. The way I tune, I have the high strings up and the bass strings tuned down two steps. That gives me a wider range. I lead with my fingers and play bass with my thumb. It’s gotta be a fat bass sound, a great sound.”
Years ago, Case was hooked by John Fahey’s 1967 album Requia. On the back cover, it showed how Fahey tuned his instrument. It took Case a while to try out the method. When he did, he says, “it made sense.” Using the tuning, he recorded “When The Catfish Is In Bloom” for the 2006 Fahey tribute I Am The Resurrection. His first recorded instrumental is a beauty, seven-plus minutes of “primitive” guitar bliss.
“I hear minuscule variations, different frequencies when I play,” says Case, who has long led guitar and songwriting workshops at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. “At the same time, I like to keep the music simple. It’s gotta talk to me. I’m looking for a real straight shot of soul. If it’s not there, something is missing.”
Case has had such a full career, winning so many accolades and so many friends, you’d think he would have the higher profile of a John Hiatt or a Steve Earle. And perhaps he would, had he not busted out of the Plimsouls, been a little more impressed with making it into Valley Girl, not rebelled against the Froom/Blake treatment, and generally hung out with more famous kids on his block (such as Hiatt and Roger McGuinn, who appeared on his self-titled debut, and Ry Cooder and David Hidalgo, who appeared on Blue Guitar). His Vanguard years were mostly spent with a circle of associates including producer Andrew Williams, drummer Sandy Chila, and his son, Joshua Case, a guitarist and all-around studio wiz who now teaches at the University of Texas.
But that’s neither the fate that was in store for him, nor the fate he for which he would trade what he has. He’s playing the music he loves, he’s settled into a rewarding romantic relationship after a series of failed ones (including his mid-’80s marriage to singer Victoria Williams, who co-wrote some of the songs on his first solo record) and he remains plugged into the American mythology he described in an interview for the publisher of As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport. One of the highlights of his youth, he said, was seeing workers for the annual county fair pull up in a train and then march through town. “I loved hearing traveling folksingers and ramblin’ blues singers and stories of strange and difficult journeys, hitchhikers and sailors,” he said. And: “I idolized the garbage men, enthralled by the drama on the day the truck broke down in the middle of the street out front of where we lived. I remember thinking, ‘When I grow up I want to be a bum.’ I was drawn to the drama of life on the street, and I still am.”
ND contributing editor Lloyd Sachs, a guiltless fan of the old “Hootenanny” TV series, found a kindred spirit in Peter Case, who shared fond memories of seeing the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem on the show.