The Perlich Post: Dig Peter Case's Wig!

Peter Case photos by Ann Summa

Just seconds after Peter Case found out I was calling from Toronto for a 1989 interview about his outstanding second solo album The Man With The Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar (Geffen), he started reminiscing about making the trip from his Buffalo home to the Big Smoke some 20 years earlier to see the Yardbirds at Massey Hall only to be blown away by the local openers Luke and The Apostles. "Ever heard those guys? Man, they just about tore my head off that night! They were incredible!"
I didn't need any convincing as Luke and the Apostles' unhinged seven-inch sizzler Been Burnt was already one of my all-time favourite Canuck garage punk anthems. Right then I knew Case and I would get along just fine and I'm happy to say we've remained in touch ever since.
During that first conversation, I still recall Case talking about his rambling years during the early to mid 70s as street musician but what I remember most was the excited way he spoke about the pre-war blues that Harry Smith compiled on his groundbreaking Anthology of American Folk Music – long before it had been reissued for the digital age. Since Case's punk and mod days with the Nerves and the Plimsouls, he's been through many more changes but his feeling for the blues has never waned. That shouldn't come as a revelation to anyone whose been to one of Case's shows and heard him knock out out a near-forgotten number by Blind Willie McTell or Memphis Minnie just like he wrote the thing himself.
Of course, Case assembled the stellar Avalon Blues tribute to Mississippi John Hurt back in 2001 which wound up being nominated for a Grammy but over the years, I've always wondered why he's never really done a raucously ripping blues rock recording in the style of peak period Luke and The Apostles. That album was definitely in him, it just took a near death experience to bring it out.

To make a long story very short, back in January 2009, Case underwent successful heart surgery and has come blasting back with Wig! (Yep Roc), the sort of righteously rough-cut set of harp-wailing blues bashery (involving X drum pounder DJ Bonebrake and Gasoline Silver's Ron Franklin) guaranteed to scorch the shiny suits clean off those supper club pretenders clogging up the contemporary blues circuit on contact.
The CD and vinyl version of Wig! won't hit the streets until June 29, but you can pre-order a copy right now at the Yep Roc Records site (see link below) and get three extra songs as an early-bird bonus. You might wanna buy a duck but trust me, you'll be much happier with Case's Wig!

Peter Case talks Wig!

More about Wig! from the man himself...

"It's not just a way of life, it's an explosive reaction against the tension of living in an insane century," says Peter Case.

Case is the rare songwriter who's considered life from all its angles and hasn't flipped yet, though he'll be the first to admit that as time goes by, the weirder it gets. Call him the optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist, but if ever the three-time Grammy-nominated artist had occasion to worry it was in 2009: "A heart-surgery-freak-out cut short my touring plans for the year. I was fortunate my medical problems didn't cut short my life," he says.

Like thousands of his fellow musicians and artists in the United States, Case was uninsured. "I was told I needed a sophisticated diagnostic test and cost was definitely an issue," he says. Surviving what started as a routine procedure that turned into an emergency room cliffhanger, Case rolled with the situation and followed the orders laid down by those more in the know. "I had no idea how I'd pay for it but the doctors just took great care of me and asked no questions. I owe them my life." He was surprised and ultimately grateful that the surgeon's had the fine taste to turn up John Coltrane's A Love Supreme as well as The Ramones in the o.r. (just before they knocked him out!).

Unable to work, Case was at home most of the year. "At first I was in a very diminished chord kind of mood," he says. "I was in recovery mode most of the rest of the year. Like a wounded animal that retires to the back of its cave until its had time to heal, I laid low in my pad, tried to get into shape, listened to records and watched cowboy, dinosaur, and crime movies, occasionally banging on the piano when the feeling hit, and letting time work its wonders.

When the medicals bills came following the surgery and the five day hospital stay, a fan stepped in and immediately founded Hidden Love, an organized effort to raise funds for the ongoing cost of Peter's care. Soon benefit shows were staged in Austin, Houston and Nashville where James McMurtry, Ian McLagen and others turned up for the cause. Case's hometown club McCabe's Guitar Shop organized a three-night extravaganza featuring heavyweights like master of ceremonies T Bone Burnett and performers Loudon Wainwright III, Dave Alvin, Richard Thompson, Stan Ridgway, Van Dyke Parks and many more. "My fans and friends really bailed me out and came through...I have a lot to be thankful for," he says.

While the recovering Case was woodshedding and cave dwelling, life outside was rolling on. He was asked to prepare the reissues of albums by his early bands, the Plimsouls, the Nerves and the Breakaways (his post-Nerves collaboration with Paul Collins). "I had four albums released in the year I was off and they were all recorded from 1976 to 1981," he says. "I had to do the mastering and spent quite a bit of time listening to the old records. I really dug hearing them again--the grooves, the guitars, the songs."

But man cannot live by reissues alone and by summer, Case returned to work: "The PC Tour 2009 made three stops, one the weekend before surgery at a little joint up in the Sierra Madres, another in the late Summer at Jorma Kaukonen's Fur Peace Ranch in Ohio and a final stop at McCabe's in December," he says. It was the McCabe's show that lead to the making of Wig!

"Guitarist and singer/songwriter Ron Franklin flew in from Minneapolis and joined drummer DJ Bonebrake (X, Knitters) and me for my sold-out comeback show. The night went great, the audience was enthusiastic for the new songs, and the gig turned out to be very inspiring. Ron stayed over the weekend, and ideas began to flow. Several songs were written, more were worked up and played, I started pulling lyrics out of envelopes and drawers to match the music that was going down, and by Tuesday morning the three of us had reconvened at Grandma's Warehouse Studio, in Echo Park, near downtown Los Angeles to cut an album to analog tape. We recorded eleven songs in two days.

"I completed the live tracks (vocals, guitar and/or piano and drums) by overdubbing amplified harmonica and laying on the electric bass using a Hofner I picked up at a friend's music store on Monday. It was my first time playing bass on a record since the Nerves. All the vocals, guitars and drums are live, and everything's on two-inch tape. There's one edit on the album, and it was made with a razor blade. One other song is included from sessions in 2005 at Infrasonic Sound in East Los Angeles with Duane Jarvis and several other musicians," he says of 'Somebody Told the Truth.' It was a brand new song that day, and what you hear here is the first and only take of the number. It seemed to fit the mood of the program at the McCabe's show, so I included it there, and the studio version here.

"We got together for one more session, in April, at Village Recorder Studio B in Los Angeles, and cut three more songs, using the same style and technique of recording. 'Dig What You're Putting Down,' 'Look Out!,' 'Ain't Got No Dough.' Don't bother trying to remember these song titles--soon they will be permanently emblazoned on your consciousness."

Dig What You're Putting Down by Peter Case