Peter Case (Nerves, Plimsouls)

"I was always sort of not interested in what my generation was doing," former Plimsouls and Nerves member Peter Case told me the first time I met him. He was flipping through Louvin Bros. reissues at a suburban bookstore in Sugar Land, Texas, surrounded by car dealerships, business parks, and seamless lawns. The skinny, five-o'clock-shadowed, gumption-filled rocker had a poise that reminded me of a cinema of solitude. "Yeah, I liked that one Velvet Underground record, the one with 'Heroin' on it," he murmured before venting about rock'n'roll's infantile, cream puff, lackluster edge. His bluntness was indelible. After he sang "Space Monkey" by John Prine, striking chords like he was chipping away at heaven, to a confused, grassy-haired five-year-old, I gave him a tape of Texas yodeler Don Walser's broken-down drive-in, Indian Country tear-jerkers.

"Thanks" fell from his lips, and over the last decade we have continued to trade music, play a rare gig together, and even write a book together. I still stand by a line of prose I first scribbled in ode to him: "Case knows you have to unhinge memories and know where to fall down. You have to die a little to remember anything at all."

In the early 1970s, you were actually going against the grain of popular music.

I had this girlfriend, and she really liked me and started taking me to concerts all the time. Every weekend, she'd take me to a different one. I wasn't going to many myself, but she started carrying me to those things, She'd win tickets in a contest, or this, that, and everything. I was the only guy at the Led Zeppelin show in 1969 in Buffalo who wasn't digging it, I just thought it sucked, It was so fucking boring, Ten Years After was not good.

Because it was all so bombastic?

No, it was just really boring, It was like really long, drawn out, and excessive, Even the singing wasn't right.

So, in a sense, you were already in the punk vein, which you pursued with the stripped-down Nerves style?

I was already a fan of things that were really good, but I was a real choosy fan, I was really into Lennon's first solo record, but I knew when Imagine came out that it wasn't as good, I knew "Crippled Inside" was not really a great song, just a piece of humor, Or Randy Newman's third record, too, People think I'm nuts, I knew by that record that he was no longer cutting edge, You could just hear it in there, It had become a formula already, and I quit listening to him, I love Arlo Guthrie for Alice's Restaurant.

But everything following was a disappointment?

I wouldn't say it disappointed me; I just never listened to the records, He was a complete genius in my pantheon, but that was it, He never let me down because I never got into the other records, Other people too would win your attention, and just lose it, Like the Doors, whose first two records were great, but I knew by the time Waiting for the Sun came out that it was bullshit, So, I didn't go for Grand Funk Railroad.

You told me once that Creedence Clearwater Revival was bubblegum.

People put me down and called it bubblegum, I liked "Born on the Bayou," That thing killed me, It was a really great brand of bubblegum, the great American bubblegum that Elvis made too.

Jack Lee from the Nerves found you playing on the street?

I had been playing on the street in San Francisco for about two years, The whole period of playing on the street was very exciting because it was almost the last gasp of the 1960s, Patti Smith has referred to 1974 as a huge energy year, and it was, There was an explosion in the folk clubs and poetry places, During 197374, I was on the street corner every night, from about 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. on Broadway and Columbus, right across from City Lights Bookstore.

Did you both decide to make the Nerves a different kind of pop band?

The original concept was that we were going to write these songs and play them on the street and be the first band that blew up right off the street, We were going to do what the Beatles did, but our strip bar was going to be the street. We were fashioning a whole new approach to music. It was punk for us. Jack was the real prolific writer. I was a performer and wrote some of the lyrics, but I didn't have it together. I was recreating myself and learning a lot about music. I was low man on the totem pole, driving the car, and playing rhythm guitar. I was not a leader. I could have been, but Jack was way ahead of me. He had a mad vision and was kind of on the run, and Paul Collins was an enthusiast. We were going to use amps that had batteries and rock right on the street, go to jail, and get really famous. But the problem was that the streets dried up after the winter of 1974. The energy dissipated over that winter and never came back. That vibe was gone, and we entered into a period of attrition and went into the clubs. It was like, "Where is my generation?"

Did the generation of 1975 supplant the one you were already familiar with?

For a while, there was no generation.

A real Generation X?

It was lonely, and we were just busking around doing our own thing. It felt really bad. But we started crossing paths with bands like Crime, who were really ragamuffins. A lot of the punk rock people from San Francisco I knew from being on the street. We moved down to LA even before the Mabuhay started having shows and put on the first punk rock shows there with the Weirdos and the Germs. We had seven hundred bucks and rented a hall and invited everyone to play. Then we became the opening act for the Ramones on their tour.

By van?

No, by station wagon, actually, my first car ever in my life because I left home before I could drive Dad's car.

Did you know you were on the cusp of something, or do you see it as an accident?

We were disappointed because we were there, fostering this whole new thing, then watched it take off in commercial terms, but we were left standing in the station with a suitcase in our hands. The thing that we started and had a vision for didn't include us commercially.

Like Blondie covering "Hanging on the Telephone"?

There's something about Blondie, something they got, maybe their frontper-son. The whole period with the Nerves was like being in the Merchant Marine for me, like going around from city to city meeting people. It was very exciting meeting people like Pere Ubu and Devo. Yet, I still have never felt like I've been a part of any of the waves that have gone out, It hasn't been my experience, for some reason, Perhaps because of my restlessness, which pulls me out before things pop.

The Plimsouls had the hit "A Million Miles Away."

We probably broke up before we had major success, At the time, I did what I had to do, and decided either the Plimsouls were going to do it with me, or I was going to leave them and go do it myself.

At after-hours parties at hotels, you often ended up playing acoustic guitar and blues songs you grew up with?

I was doing this jug band, with the Plimsouls roadies, I was doing it after the gigs, and it soon became more important than the gigs themselves, It was crazy, but that's what was happening with me.

On stage at your own shows, did you feel like saying, "This sucks"?

It was actually in Lubbock during the 1981 Plimsouls tour, I just suddenly woke up and said, "I can't keep on doing this, I've got to take it to another place," It was just a command.

You've never told me how you met Paul Collins.

Well, he met Jack, Jack was trying to audition drummers, and I was off on some adventure, so Jack comes up and says, yeah, I got this guy, he's really good, Paul just showed up at the door, and that's how he got in it, I think Jack put an ad in Don Weir's Music City over in North Beach, I think he auditioned fifty guys, and Paul was one of them, He auditioned by playing a beat on a phonebook.

How did you, a guitar player, end up playing bass, and Paul playing drums?

Well, Paul was already a drummer, He'd never really sung before, He wasn't originally a singer, Me and Jack were, Jack is a really good bass player, and I'm a better guitar player than Jack, so why I ended up on bass and Jack on guitar, I can't really remember [laughs], Jack just wanted to be the guitar player, and he was ahead of me, so if I wanted to be in the band, I had to pick up the bass, Jack's a really good bass player, though, I had played in a few bands, Much later, Jack said, "We really fucked up; you should have been the guitar player, man," I was like, "Well, it's a little too late for that," But I just got into the bass, I love playing bass.

Tell me about the Hollywood Punk Palace gigs.

We got to LA in January of 1977 on January 1, We drove down on New Year's Eve and got into Hollywood and just got off on the first exit, like Vine Street, and checked into the first hotel, called the Vine St, Lodge, basically a brothel, We checked into that place, a horrible hotel, We started going around town, The first thing we did, on January 2, 1977, we went to the Whisky to see what was happening, and fucking Van Halen is playing, There were like sixty people there, I was like, "What the fuck, they're still playing this kind of crap? This is ridiculous, how could you still be into this dinosaur music? What the fuck, man, this is horrible," So, we leave, The next night, I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and we liked them a little bit more, and there were like fifty people digging the show, It was empty at the Whisky, pretty much, for all these bands, We tried to get a gig at the Whisky, and they'd go, "Nah, we don't really want your type of band here, forget it," They wouldn't book us at the Whisky, We said, "Fuck it, man," The first thing we did was rent out this place called the Punk Palace, and we asked the Screamers to play, We met them, but they didn't want to play because they weren't ready yet, and we just tried to get people to play, The first gig was weird.

This glam rock band from outer space called Zolar X all lived in an apartment, and they all wore space suits around town, like to the grocery store, They were a pretty famous band in LA, like Rodney and everybody knew who they were back in 1977, We were driving down the street and we saw Rodney and Kim Fowley walking down the street by Denny's on Sunset Strip, and we were like, "Fuck, that's Rodney Bingenheimer," so we just hopped out of the car, We pulled over and I go running over to him and say, "Hey, man, we're running a punk rock show down on Sunset Blvd, Would you guys host it?" They were like, "Yeah, sure" [laughs], They started hosting the show, and the fire marshal came, too, and we got into some trouble, That week right before the show we met the Weirdos, They were using rehearsal rooms in what used to be the Columbia Pictures lot, right off Sunset Blvd, at Beechwood, an old movie lot converted into a bunch of small rooms where a few bands rehearsed, We just thought they were great, and Cliff Roman still has this tape of our first meeting with them when we told them, "Man, the Whisky is never going to book you guys, If you guys wait for that, you are going to be old men and still never have played anywhere, You just got to go for it, We've been doing these punk rock invasion shows, Just do the show with us," They finally said, "Okay, but we don't have a drummer," And I go, "Just play the show, and you will have a drummer," And that's what happened.

They played the show, and Nicky Beat was there, The first bill was the Dils' first gig in LA, the Weirdos, and some weird criminals from New York City called Short Ice, But they just disappeared, The Zippers, too, They were sort of power pop, They were good and worked a long time in LA, too, They were hooked in with Backdoor Man magazine people, We played that night, too, but the big hit of the night was the Weirdos, People just went crazy, Our next show, I believe, was the Nerves, the Weirdos, and the Zeros, and we moved up the strip to this place called the Orpheum Theater, right across from Tower Records, and we put our last money on it, that's all I remember. We had like $700 or something from the band fund. We just put everything in. Though a lot of people came out that night, we were basically losing money on the whole thing, and we wanted to go on the road. Before this had all happened, we had booked our tour. So, we left, but right before we left, we turned the thing over to, I think, the Weirdos, and then the last one of this series of shows was the Germs' first gig. I used to talk to Bobby Pyn (Darby Crash) on the telephone in the middle of the night a bunch.

You were the first local Frisco band to tour nationally without a major label deal?

We were the first band in the United States to tour without a record label to support us. No one had done that before. We were the first fucking ones.

Ironically, later on, bands like Black Flag got all the credit for forging such ground in 1980s.

We were out there and played everywhere in 1977. We bought a car for 750 bucks. It was a black '69 Ford LTD, and we put twenty-eight thousand miles on it the spring/summer of '77. At times, we had all our equipment in it, and for a while, we were pulling a trailer. We just went everywhere — three people and our road manager.

Tell me about some of the bands you met.

We met Cheap Trick in Rockford, then we went over to Cleveland and met David Thomas of Pere Ubu right when we came to town, outside of Brown Stadium. He took me over to his mom's house or something, and we hung out there for a day. We met Devo, Pere Ubu, and then we went to Boston and met DMZ, and a couple of guys who were in the Modern Lovers. It just went on and on. We met the Ramones. We went to NYC and played Max's Kansas City, which we played for nearly a week at one point. We met Miriam Linna of the Cramps. In Cleveland, we met the Dead Boys, Stiv and all them. We also got fired from a few gigs, too. To fill in the spaces, we had these regular club gigs that Paul had booked at these big rock clubs. We'd go out to these places, and they'd tell us to get the fuck out. We got fired from a few, like Washington, DC. In East St. Louis, we were supposed to play for a week at this biker bar, and we got fired after the first night down there. That was a rough one. We didn't have any money We were always broke and shit. We'd go out and do these scams with cigarette machines, like pretend we'd lost our change, to get money. The whole thing was one big hustle, trying to get from town to town. We were doing scams of different sorts to get gas and just barely made it around out there, but we were on the road for a long time.

You gotta realize when we went across the country in 1977, some cities had like one band, some had no band, that were doing original material. Chicago had like no scene. There was a band up there called the Hounds. They weren't any good. Then there was like the Boys from Illinois, or some shit like that. That was about as close as you got to something that was sorta hip up there in Chicago. There was nothing up there. Cleveland was Devo and Pere Ubu. Devo was from Akron, and so was Rubber City Rebels. New York had about ten bands or something, but everywhere else they had like zero or none. Two maybe, something, it was very weird going across the country at that point. There are more bands right now on South Kalamazoo Vol. III than there were in the whole United States back then. Most apartment buildings have more bands than there were in the entire United States back then.

When you played shows, how did you get the word out?

There was like a network. Greg Shaw was our mentor and friend, in certain ways, and he gave us a bunch of phone numbers of people who would be into it that he knew. Those people included Cary Baker in Chicago, Ralph Alfonso in Detroit, David Thomas in Cleveland, Oedipus in Boston, who was a DJ. Then he gave us Jim Nash of Wax Trax records, which was in Denver at that time. That was like the first stop on the tour, so we pulled up into Denver, and the gig was, of course, associated with the Wax Trax record store, and they had a whole realm of people that frequented that store, like maybe fifty people, or hundred, that were really into it. It was more like fifty, I think. The gig was right upstairs from the record store, and then they bought a keg and stuck in front of the record store. It was just like a three-day party going on there, then the gig was around that, and we were just hanging out, played in Boulder and there. It was all under the auspices of Jim Nash and his buddies from Wax Trax. There was a following for it in Denver, and we got to Chicago and they didn't even have a local band in Chicago. So, I met Patrick Goldstein who was a rock writer up there, and Cary Baker. They would publicize the gigs a little bit. A few people would come out, but really Chicago was a dead zone until we hooked up with the Ramones, and at the Ramones gig there was only like hundred people. Or maybe 150 at their best gigs, but it was that kind of thing. Cincinnati, the same thing with the Ramones, and they were on their third album. So, a lot of places it wasn't really happening. When we got to Cleveland, the place was called Hideo's Discodrome and it was up on Cleveland Heights. It was a great little record store. The guy who ran it, Johnny, had a band too. And he was friends with Destroy All Monsters in Detroit. It was a network of people. Then there were the friends of Devo and Pere Ubu and Rubber City Rebels. Once again, that was a party of the Discodrome and everybody came out and went to the gig.