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...