The History Of Peter Case Part 1: The Nerves

Originally published in Teenage Kicks #1 (Summer 1997)
By Devorah Ostrov

The "hopelessly rare" 4-song Nerves' EP (self-released, 1976)

It was the dead of night, in the middle of winter, and a raging blizzard was dumping several inches of snow on upstate New York. Meanwhile, a teenager from the suburbs of Buffalo named Peter Case was on a bus to Chicago, guitar in hand, living out his personal version of On the Road.

"I would hitchhike all over the East Coast, play folk clubs, see how far I could get on $10," Case recently reminisced about the inconspicuous launch of his musical career in the late '60s. He would go on to become one-third of power pop trailblazers the Nerves and leader of the Plimsouls, for which he wrote the hit "A Million Miles Away," before revisiting his roots as a solo artist.

Much like the heroes of On the Road, Case's Midwest chapter was only a stopover on an ultimate journey to the West Coast — albeit lacking in Kerouac's romanticism. "I got drunk in a bar," he laughs, "and bought a train ticket to San Francisco!"

Why San Francisco? The reason, says Case, was simple: "I wanted to get as far away from Buffalo as I could, and I didn't want to go to Los Angeles." And it didn't hurt that Case's sister, ten years his senior and a key influence on his musical upbringing (it was her record collection which instilled Case with a passion for '50s rock 'n' roll as well as '60s folk, to which he added his own leanings towards country-blues and American garage-punk), had lived in the City during the glory days of the 1960s, returning home to fuel her little brother's imagination with "amazing stories."

Case arrived in San Francisco during the strange post-hippie/pre-punk year of 1973. He took to playing guitar and singing on the street for spare change. "I didn't even have an apartment," he emphasizes. "I just lived on the street and wandered around."

L-R: Paul Collins, Peter Case & Jack Lee

Jack Lee, a fellow itinerant musician, caught one of Case's street corner performances and inquired, "How much you makin' out here?"

"Fifty dollars a night," Case exaggerated.

"I'll double that if you join my band," boasted Lee.

It didn't take Case long to surmise that Lee had perhaps misrepresented the situation. "Jack lied about everything," chuckles Case. "He didn't have a drummer. He didn't have any gigs."

Still, Case decided to stick it out with Lee and the two soon roped in Paul Collins, another ex-New Yorker, to fill out the trio. "Paul didn't know what he wanted to do really," muses Case. "He joined the group... but he didn't know what he was getting into."

In 1975 with Case on bass, Lee on guitar, and Collins on drums, the newly christened Nerves began playing Friday and Saturday nights at a seedy bar in the then no-man's-land South of Market Street. "I remember one time the owner gave us free drink tickets to get people to come in," says Case. "We couldn't even get winos to come in off the street. That's how bad it was!"

The group's earliest sets consisted of mostly covers. As Case recollects: "We used to do 'Howlin' for My Baby' and 'Hitch Hike,' weird blues and Motown, a lot of soul, country, rock 'n' roll..." But by the summer of '76, they'd worked up enough strong originals to think about putting out some vinyl.

At the time, the major labels were too busy with chart-toppers like Wings and Elvin Bishop to care about the stirrings of the Bay Area underground. Signing locally with Berserkley Records, which was having some success with Jonathan Richman, the Rubinoos, and Greg Kihn seemed like a good idea — until Lee and Collins got into a shouting match with label president Matthew King Kaufman.

In the end, they agreed a DIY EP was the way to go, becoming the first of the soon-to-be Mabuhay scenesters to issue product. (Crime's debut single, considered to be the first true SF punk release, followed by a matter of weeks.) 

L-R: Paul Collins, Jack Lee, Peter Case
(photo for the 2008 One Way Ticket retrospective)

The EP's unpretentious black and white cover photo showed three clean-cut young men. And judging by the just visible wide lapels, they had already taken to wearing the snazzy three-piece suits for which they'd always be remembered, fondly or otherwise. Case stresses that the suits were "just a gimmick when we thought we needed a gimmick," and further insists that they weren't powder-blue and doesn't know why everyone thinks they were.

Meanwhile, the four songs within showcased each member's uncanny ability to write and sing short, fast, catchy tunes. There was the British Invasion feel of Case's "When You Find Out," and the classic pop of Collins' "Working Too Hard." And there were two tracks written by Lee: "Give Me Some Time" and "Hanging on the Telephone" — the latter a wallop of a two-minute ditty concerning a frazzled would-be lover, the girl of his dreams and Pac Bell, which had been part of his repertoire for awhile. (Case mentions an earlier recording of the song featuring Lee backed by some hired hands, possibly musicians from the Condor Club!)

Three thousand copies of the EP were pressed, and although it's now listed in record collector guides as being "hopelessly rare," at the time, it was a seemingly enormous amount. "I remember when the truck pulled up," says Case, "and we unloaded them into our basement on Folsom Street. We were like, 'What the hell are we gonna do with all these?' It was really hard to get rid of them."

The final Nerves' show - a Bomp! night at

the Whisky with the Fast, the Zippers, and the Zeros

In fact, SF's Aquarius Records and Berkeley's Rather Ripped — the two hip Bay Area record stores — only stocked "like five" copies each. An ad in the back of Rolling Stone helped sell "a bunch," and Greg Shaw bought the remaining discs to distribute through Bomp. Ironically, Case didn't keep one for himself!

By late 1976 things were beginning to happen. Local radio station KSAN picked up on the EP and began playing "Hanging on the Telephone." That Christmas, Case heard himself on the radio for the first time. "KSAN played us in a set with the Flamin' Groovies and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils," he reflects.

Simultaneously, the SF punk scene was gelling around the Mabuhay Gardens, with the Nerves appearing on some of the first bills. "There were a few bands before us," states Case, "but we were there early on."

But that wasn't enough to keep the guys in San Francisco. On January 1, 1977, the Nerves packed up and relocated to Los Angeles. "There really wasn't much going on in San Francisco at that point," explains Case. "We didn't really know the people that were about to start the whole scene. We were like, 'Where is everybody? Where is our generation? It's gotta be happening in LA!' We bought some LA papers and saw that there were a few bands playing around."

Not surprisingly, the LA music scene circa early '77 also left a lot to be desired. "I remember we went to the Whisky," says Case, "and Van Halen was playing. I couldn't believe that they were still listening to music that was so prehistoric. Then a week later, I saw Tom Petty play to 50 people." And LA didn't trip over itself to welcome these newcomers who, as one 'zine observed, played "crisp songs with strong melodies" but "looked more like Hoover salesmen than rock and roll stars."

"We couldn't get a show at the Whisky," Case recalls. "We couldn't get a show at the Starwood. Nobody would book us." However, as they'd proved with their EP, the Nerves were nothing if not self-reliant.

"Ramones meet Merseybeat"

 The Nerves in Trouser Press - September 1977

On the corner of Sunset and Gower sat the tiny Orpheum Theatre (described by one patron as "tacky"). With their last $700 Case, Lee and Collins rented the basement (described by another patron as "dilapidated"). 

They dubbed it the Hollywood Punk Palace and booked a series of shows that in hindsight are referred to as "essential." In the March '78 issue of Bomp! magazine, writer Kenneth Funsten goes so far as to say that from the Punk Palace, "L.A. new-wave was born." Perhaps more accurately, these shows, along with Rodney Bingenheimer's KROQ nights, the Masque rehearsal rooms, and several other forces helped to push along an already burgeoning punk scene.

Some of the groups given exposure at those Punk Palace gigs were the Germs, the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zeros, and Screamers — with the Nerves being featured on every bill, although they weren't necessarily the standout attraction.

Recounting one Punk Palace show, the book Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave notes: "The band of the hour was a bizarre group dressed in clothes that looked like a hellish collision between Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock. Taking the intense, bombastic stage style of Captain Beefheart and welding it to a frenzied wall of Ramones power chords, this band was called the Weirdos, and their shock rock tactics demanded you 'Do the dance, do the dance, do the dance!'"

In May, the Nerves were on the move again, booking their own cross-country tour as well as supporting their idols, the Ramones, on a number of dates. "It was like going on tour with the Beatles for us," enthuses Case.

L-R: Jack Lee, Paul Collins, Peter Case

The initial leg of the tour began with a three-night stand at the Starwood and took in San Francisco, Denver, Washington DC, and Boston (with DMZ); while the Ramones' shows took them through the Midwest and into Texas (where they played Randy's Rodeo well before the Sex Pistols). 

When the tour ended some three months later in Chicago with Mink DeVille, they'd logged over 100 shows and put 28,000 miles on a '69 Ford LTD station wagon — "The highest-paid member of the touring organization," they once quipped. "I was the driver and the bass player," remarks Case.

Their LA homecoming was celebrated with two bill-topping nights at the Masque (support bands were the Avengers, the Zeros, and Shock). Then they disappeared. 

When a 'zine writer eventually tracked them down, Case told him: "We've just been getting oriented to what our next move is going to be. I mean, say you're a new group, you've released your own record, you've run your own club, and then you went out and did your own national tour, now what do you do after that?"

There was some talk of recording an album on Bomp Records, and a new 45 ("One Way Ticket" was even listed in the Bomp catalog as "forthcoming"). But the truth was, the tour had taken its toll. "We were just wasted," sighs Case. 

The Nerves made their final appearance during a Bomp! weekend at the Whisky with the Fast, the Zeros, and the Zippers sharing the bill. After the show, they "discussed" the direction of the band.

L-R: Jack Lee, Paul Collins, Peter Case

"Jack felt that we'd been upstaged by the Fast," states Case. "I dunno why. Their songs weren't that great, but they threw stuff into the audience at the end of the set, and Jack felt like they'd upstaged us. Jack was always paranoid about being upstaged, and he was afraid of being upstaged by punk rock. He wrote this song called 'Sex,' which was basically that word repeated over and over. He thought that would be controversial. Then he wanted to chainsaw all the equipment in the middle of the set. He wanted to have fake amps and chainsaw them! I said, 'I don't really wanna do that. It's against everything we stand for. I think we should just write really great songs and be a rock 'n' roll band.' So, we had a big disagreement, and the band broke up."

Today the Nerves are hailed as one of the pioneering originators of power pop, but for much of their short-lived career, it was an uphill battle. Case quickly (and rightly!) points out that "we had a lot of fans; there were a lot of people into the Nerves."

Yet he also admits that the group "never really fit in, except that we played really fast and hard. The power pop thing is a lot bigger now than it was back then. A lot more people are aware of it as a style. Back then, people just didn't understand."

As for the "power pop" tag, he adds, "I never really saw the Nerves as power pop. We just considered ourselves to be a rock 'n' roll band. We thought we were like the Beatles or the Stones. Power pop just sounded like a fake term to us. Punk was kinda a cool name, but power pop never sounded that good to us."

The Nerves retrospective LP (Offence, 1986)

After the split, Case and Collins continued to work together as the Breakaways, but internal conflicts led to a quick dissolution.

According to Case, the Breakaways did record a handful of songs (including a version of the Collins/Case tune "USA") but only two, "Walking Out on Love" and "One Way Ticket," made it to vinyl (both were featured on the 1996 Bomp Records compilation The Roots of Powerpop!).

At Case's urging, Collins switched from drums to guitar and formed the Beat. He reprised "Working Too Hard," "Walking Out on Love" and "U.S.A." on the Beat's debut LP. Lee sold "Hanging on the Telephone" to Blondie (supposedly Debbie Harry heard the song on a mixtape made for her by Blondie fan club president Jeffrey Lee Pierce). It was included on 1978's Parallel Lines (along with a second song written by Lee) and became a hit in Britain. Lee went on to collaborate with the Rubber City Rebels, who recorded a cover of his "Paper Dolls." He's also behind the 1986 Nerves' retrospective on the Offence label.

Case, of course, formed the fabulous Plimsouls!

* You can read part 2 of my interview with Peter Case about the history of the Plimsouls here: devorahostrov.blogspot.com/2017/01peter-case-part-2.html