"I started playing on the street... I just did it, just like that!" Peter Case Goes From Busking To The Nerves And Plimsouls In Exclusive Excerpt From Cary Baker's New Book

I'm thrilled to be able to share an exclusive excerpt from Cary Baker's new book on busking and street performers.

Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music covers a myriad of genres and is filled with vivid stories of artists who went from picking up a guitar and heading out to a sidewalk to the big-time. It's also a valuable record of the struggles of those in underground and alternative music who worked very hard to learn their craft, sometimes in full view of pedestrians and so on. What links these portraits is a love of music, and a continuum of experiences which reveal a pre-Internet world of musicians finding the most direct way to share their art.

This excerpt covers the early, formative years of Peter Case (The Nerves, The Plimsouls).

Peter Case: Nerves of Steel

SInger-songwriter Peter Case has left an indelible mark on the music scene, consistently displaying his prowess as a skilled musician and storyteller. Initially known as a member of the new wave rock band The Nerves in the late 1970s, Case went on to form The Plimsouls, a power pop quartet that achieved critical acclaim and a mid-charting pop hit.

However, it was Case's subsequent solo recording career that's showcased his musical versatility and songwriting depth. His albums blend his rock, folk and blues infuences, and underscore his ability to craft poignant and introspective songs. Throughout his journey, Case's music has continued to evolve, his life experiences and artistic growth reflected in every song. He's become a consummate American troubadour.

Though he wrote his first song at the age of 11 in 1965 ("Stay Away"), the Buffalo, N.Y. native's music career began in earnest at age 18 in 1973, when he dropped out of high school (later earning a GED), moved cross-country to San Francisco, and immediately began performing on the streets. It was a transitional time for the city San Francisco Chronicle columnist referred to as Baghdad by the Bay: The late '60s hippies had largely dispersed, and the late '70s punk scene that begat the Mabuhay Gardens venue and the 415 Records label hadn't yet taken hold. The dot-com bubble would not explode for another 23 years.

"I started playing on the street Union Square…I just did it, just like that," Case recalls of his baptism by fire. "The pushback against it from the cosmos is great, you know, when you start singing in a place where the public is, that is not really for singing. It's a trip, but there was a whole culture of street music and street performers in San Francisco when I got out here, including Shields & Yarnell, a group of mimes, and they were drawing huge, huge crowds on the street. And there were some other guys called the Broadway Strutters and they were drawn really big crowds on the street – yeah, they were like Dixieland. So I jumped into playing on the street and playing in Union Square. I met a guy who showed me some stuff, and then he took me over the we took the cable car over the hill and showed me you can play over at Fisherman's Wharf during the day."

At the time, Case was living in what he describes as "a junkyard, in an abandoned truck…I didn't own a car. Oh, man. I went to a heliport in Sausalito nearby was a junkyard. There were abandoned trucks are in the junkyard and I picked up an old abandoned bus. I moved into the bus and had a sleeping bag and a couple changes of clothes in there. You could take showers at Maritime Park down by the swimming pool."

Undeterred by his living conditions, days were spent plying his craft as a street singer in this strange but culturally vibrant city.

"You can make enough money to live," he reasoned, "and it enabled me to be a full-time musician and not have to really be part of society, accepted as a marginal character, who played on the street and I lived in a junkyard. And so I was able every day to go out and just play music all day. And I would go out at noon every day and I'd play until 2 in the morning. I would play [during] the day sometimes at Union Square, Fisherman's Wharf…I tried the Financial District and that wasn't very good. But at night I would go to Broadway – Broadway and Columbus was kind of my place. You get real strong playing on the street in a lot of different ways."

Though an outsider, Case met many entertainers of renown, who also chose outdoor San Francisco as their stage. "I remember one guy showed up and he played like this kind of Mambo blues. He was an African American guy with a steel guitar and he was just traveling through and he would play like this Mambo blues stuff that was just incredible. And then there was a guy named Coco who played a bass with a harmonica. He sounded a lot like Sonny Boy Williamson. He was an old, old man. And he was really great. There was a guy Norman Yancey, you might have heard of, and he sang Calypso, he was at the corner of Broadway and Ghiradelli Square. There was also a guy they called the Automatic Human Jukebox. I forget his actual name. I knew of him. And he lived and he was in a box all day. Like a boy do you like a pretend jukebox and put money in it and he would a window go up in the key play trumpet songs, you know?

"So I played alone on the street and then there'd be team-ups with other people."

One of the first people Case met was Michael Wilhelm, guitarist in one of San Francisco's first psychedelic bands, The Charlatans, which, over the years, also contained Dan Hicks. Case recalls their first dialogue: "He comes up to me and says: 'Hey, man…and, you know, he's all dressed look like Bo Diddley said he was wearing leather and playing on the street and doing this and he says, 'I need a singer in my band; you could be the singer?' He was playing folk clubs. He was a surviving San Francisco artist, the psychedelic era. Mike was on his own with a band called Loose Gravel but he would go out on the street. And he wanted me to possibly sing in this band. I was still at it. I was 18 or 19. I couldn't drink in clubs at that point. He took me up to this place with Coffee Gallery in North Beach right near Grant & Green; a lot of people that played in the street would also go up and play at the Coffee Gallery. It was a legendary place." Case also met beat poet, musician and satirist Bob Kaufman at the storied caffeine emporium.

"I learned a lot from all those people and I learned a lot singing on the street," he says "Like the one thing you really learned singing on the street is you get real strong rhythmically and performing-wise. And I learned how to deal with people going by too, like because crowds of people would be going by and you get on their wavelength and pull them in."

Although he would first become identified with new wave power pop via The Nerves, a more powerful pop sound with The Plimsouls, and later the full range of singer-songwriter sounds as a solo artist, Case came to San Francisco with a very different musical palette.

He explains: "I played two different strains. I play a lot of different music just like I do these days. But like, I always love blues music, you know, so I was playing some songs by Lazy Lester. I did Elmore James material. knew a lot about Mississippi John Hurt, but you couldn't really play that on the street. But I did play Elmore James on the street. So my repertoire would be those kinds of things.

"I also did things that were more classic that people will relate to on the street like 'Kansas City,' the Wilbert Harrison record. I used to do a Jackie Wilson song. I used to do 'Save the Last Dance for Me' and stuff like that." He also performed the Kingston Trio's "Scotch & Soda," embellished with his own re-write of the song.

Peter then met an older street singer from Texas named Crazy Horse Denny, who was a fan and friend of Houston psychedelic band the 13th Floor Elevators. The two developed an entire set of 13th Floor Elevators material. "And that was pretty weird, but he was really weird, and we really enjoyed it." Eventually Tommy Hall, an original 13th Floor Elevator, migrated to San Francisco where he lived in yet another street singer's basement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district for a while.

***

Among the people Case met while performing in outdoor San Francisco was his future bandmate in The Nerves, the late Jack Lee. By now, it was 1974, a few years before punk and new wave indelibly re-shaped the musical landscape.

"Jack would walk by every day when I was playing on the street," Case says. "I never really saw him play on the street [himself], but he I guess he did once; I think it didn't go that well for him. But I was out there every day for a few years. [Jack] had a place to live. This other guy that was his buddy, though, is Pat Stengl, and he was one of the original Nerves. [Pat] was a busker. So The Nerves were me and Pat and Jack for a while. Jack wasn't that much of a busker, but he was very friendly to it. At one point, we were even considering having The Nerves break out on the street, as buskers, like having a thing where we played [at] lunch time. So one of our concepts was to like have the group start like a busking mania thing right off the street."

Case used to station himself not far from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore, which is why he wasn't entirely shocked when beat poet Allen Ginsberg crossed Columbus Ave. one day in 1974 and sat in with Peter and his accompanists. He tells the story: "He comes across the street. He's like, 'Hey, you guys. My name's Allen. Could I sit in with you?' I'm like, 'Sure, whatever.' We introduce ourselves and he goes, 'You guys play some country blues?' So we started playing it. You just start making up songs like people walking by this."

"And people were just walking by; nobody really picked up on who he was at all. It was like tourists, girls going into work of the Condor Club [a legendary North Beach striptease bar], street winos and Marines. You know, just all kinds of people walking back and like nobody picked up on and he's out there singing, 'Stay Away from the White House.' He was really fun to play with. We even asked him for a name for our group and he looked across the street and there was a sign that said Roaring 20s so he said 'the Rockin '20s' It was great hang with him. It was very cool. It was like he just was doing it for the love of the game; he just liked to be out there."

Case took full advantage of his frequent proximity to the West Coast's most famous bookstore: "I used to every day go into City Lights and basically read my way through the store. You know, I dropped out of high school. So that was basically my education. I ran into Ferlenghetti on the 60th anniversary of the store; I used to actually go in and during the day sometimes asleep in there, when my head down on a book, you know, they would just let me hang out really and I just read my way through a lot of different sections of the store. And I thanked him for that….Bob Kaufman was a literary figure and he'd be out on the street and Dan Hicks would come down and get my face like 'let's hear something good' and then he'd go, 'I don't wanna hear that a minor [key] crap.' He was a really weird guy. And he used to make fun of my hush puppies. I had like hush puppies that I've gotten from thrift store because I was always broke.

"So you know, that was the adventure of playing on the street."

It wasn't always a storybook adventure either. "Terrible things would also happen on the street. I've been coldcocked while I was singing. You know? I've had guys try to rob me, and get we'd get in brawls out here – full knives, and all kinds of stuff."

Then there was local law enforcement. In San Francisco at that time, the police generally left acoustic musicians alone. But plug in and you might be asking for trouble.


One time we were out there with an electric – it was a column Mike Matthews Freedom Amp – and it ran on like you know, an insane number of batteries," he says. "The really big D batteries into loaded up with just tons of them. And then it would sound really sound like a Marshall for about half an hour. So we're out there. We're out there rocking on this amp. But we have it set up so that looks like there's like a coat over the front of it, and the cords are going down the coat and up the sleeve of the coat, and it was hiding the car. A cop came down and asked, 'You guys aren't playing electric, are you?'

"'No, no sir.'

"It's odd that he couldn't tell that it was electric – it sounded so electric – but usually we just played acoustic back in those days. And that's when I learned to sing really loud. Like Michael Wilhelm (Charlatans, Loose Gravel) used to say, I'd be on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. You could hear me up all the way up on Grant Avenue which is two blocks city blocks away."

Case reflects on the last time he had to play on the street in order to put food on his table.

"The last time I played on the street because really I needed to was July 4, 1976," he recalls of America's bicentennial celebration. "Me and (future Nerves drummer] Paul Collins and busked in Fisherman's Wharf, and that was because we were broke and really needed to buy food or something. And that was the last time I really did it kind of desperately. I've done it a number of times since then but more just for fun."

***

At some point, Case reconnected with Jack Lee, and The Nerves were born: "Jack was just really hungry to like, make a million dollars. And, you know, he instilled that in me was like, 'We're gonna like really, we can do this.' And it was really fun and exciting while it lasted. Also, I had to focus a lot, a lot more than I had before – and actually write songs. I'd started writing songs in '65 – ragtime songs, talkin' blues, all kinds of stuff. Right up to The Nerves where we focused on two-minute songs. Those are hard to write in a way."

The Nerves released a critically acclaimed four-song EP that helped shape the American new wave. Case contributed the song "When You Find Out" and Lee's "Hangin' on the Telephone" later became a global hit for Blondie.

By 1978, The Nerves went their separate ways, and Case soon formed The Plimsouls.

"I learned a lot from [The Nerves] and to work with Jack was, you know, it was intense and crazy. But I wanted to have a band that could blow the roof off the place live – which maybe the Nerves didn't quite have the chops for. I wanted to expand the influences again. And ever since then, I've been expanding the influences that I had before I was before I was in The Nerves."

The Plimsouls played from 1978-83, breaking ground that The Nerves were never able to – including a major label contract with Geffen Records, and two albums (The Plimsouls, 1981; Everywhere at Once, 1983) which dented the Billboard charts. By 1986, the band had split (they would reunite briefly in the '90s). Case signed a solo contract with Geffen. His namesake album was released in 1986. Three years later, he released his follow-up with the intentionally unwieldy title of The Man with the Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar (usually referred to as simply Blue Guitar).

It was at the Los Angeles release celebration show for that album that Case found himself working the streets again. This time, however, the scene was the sidewalk along Sunset Blvd. in front of a sold-out headline gig at Hollywood's trendsetting Club Lingerie. This time, however, busking was borne of triumph rather than of necessity.

He recaps the moment: "The club was sold out. And they said they were they weren't letting more people in. So I went out and stood in front and played! I knew how to do that from being a street musician. In fact, a lot of things I did as a solo musician like in my early days were things I knew how to do because I was capable of playing in weird areas. I was one of the first people to walk into radio stations with a guitar and sing on the radio. Now everybody does it. So that's what we did [in front of the Lingerie]. Along with Marvin Etzioni (Lone Justice) and Willie Aron (The Balancing Act), we played on the street in front of the club and it was super fun. We did the entire concert out there. It was a great experience."

In 2023, Case's story was definitively told in Fred Parnes' documentary film, Peter Case: A Million Miles Away. Case also wrote his own memoir, detailing his life as a homeless busker. The book, titled As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport and published December 2006 by Everthemore Books' For Now imprint, featured a foreword from X's John Doe. It is out-of-print, copies commanding upwards of $100 ¬¬– if you can find it at all.

Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music by Cary Baker is out now on Jawbone Press.

You can buy it on Amazon, or via Bookshop.org.

Peter Case with Bert Deivert, courtesy Bert Dievert, circa 1973, Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco