Peter Case
Cactus Cafe
Friday, May 8
From his earliest gigs in upstate New York to the present, the intersection of hook-laden pop tunes and narrative-rich folk songs has proven to be a poignant touchstone for Peter Case.
“I’d go out on Saturday night and I’d play in the Unitarian Church basement with my folk guitar and oftentimes, I’d run over later that night and play at the Friar Hall or something with my electric band,” Case recalls. “The two strains of music always ran through my work.”
Within the past year, Case has released superlative works showcasing both the pop avatar and folk vagabond aspects of his songwriting. Though no American label was smart enough to release it, the 1997 Plimsouls’ reunion album Kool Trash (Musidisc-France) picks up with big beat urgency right where 1983’s superb Everywhere at Once left off – and with Clem Burke on drums, no less. More recently, Case’s sixth solo album, Full Service No Waiting (Vanguard), has been acclaimed for being perhaps his most evocative and emotive outing to date. The singer-songwriter, who fancies himself a four-piece band with guitar, voice, harmonica, and stomping foot, also considers Full Service his most fully realized work.
“I feel like I took some of the things I really love – country, blues, Celtic music, and rock & roll – and was actually able to make something sort of fresh or new with it,” he says. “It’s a sparse but colorful kind of record, and it just seems like it has a lot of what I love and what I’m about live.”
The songs themselves are mostly autobiographical in nature, and much of their appeal lies in Case’s intriguing life story. For starters, he dropped out of school at 15 and caught a bus to San Francisco where he busked on the streets and lived in an abandoned truck. What really distinguishes Case as a songwriter, however, is his ability to create autobiographical songs that could just as easily apply to any number of life stories out there. And although Case doesn’t rule out another Plimsouls reunion (“I don’t see any sense to breaking a band up twice”), the one-man, four-piece band is his true calling.
“Sometimes, it seems like the band is a huge wall between the audience and the performer in a way,” he says. “I felt very naked when I did my first solo shows, but I’ve come to love that feeling. It’s my favorite thing, really. The spontaneity you get from being able to play and perform solo is something I really value. And the contact and the use of the imagination. You’re painting or you’re making a movie and you’re showing them what’s behind your closed eyes.” – Greg Beets
This article appears in May 8 • 1998 and May 8 • 1998 (Cover).