Legendary folk-rocker Peter Case is documenting his trailblazing life in a full-length memoir. Case's bands The Nerves and The Plimsouls helped define the LA punk and alternative rock scenes, and his solo work helped usher in the Americana music phenomenon. The beginning of Case's story is As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport, which will be published in December 2006 by Everthemore Books' new imprint For Now.
The Grammy-nominated musician has written and recorded with such artists as John Prine, John Hiatt, T-Bone Burnett and members of Los Lobos. Whether he's addressing the political or the personal, Case's searing and intensely visual songs deliver a punch that is rare in today's coffee bar-crowded world of singer-songwriters. Now he's taken his talents for words and translated them into a powerful piece of prose.
"These are stories I've been carrying in my head for a long time," said Case. "When the time was right to set them down, they just poured out. Some people think it's my version of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, but it's really the anti-Chronicles--a tale of the streets."
As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport covers Case's very early days playing music from the time he left his native upstate New York and wound up singing and playing on the streets of North Beach in San Francisco. Case fans know about this period of his life through such well-loved songs as "Entella Hotel" and "Travellin' Light", among others.
John Doe, co-leader of the legendary LA punk band X, who wrote the introduction, sums up the book well here: "Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this story is that it isn't some glorified nostalgia trip starring the bohemian hero striking out to find his version of On the Road. There is simplicity of style and purposeful avoidance of artifice in his writing, so that the reader can just sit back and listen as Case and his confreres roll across the country."
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
As Far As You Can Get,
By
This review is from: As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport (Paperback)
Peter Case: As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport (For Now, 2007). Disclaimer (and it's a big one): For Now is an imprint of everthemore Books. Everthemore is the publishing arm of the bookstore where I work and pretty much live when I am not at home reading books or sitting in front of this computer thinking about books. My ability to eat and put gas in my car and buy more books (and records) depends on the sales of this book, and a bunch of other books, thank you very much. Despite all of that, I would not say this new book was great, if I didn't think it was great. I do say it is great, though there is not much to it: 51 pages. Really, it is nothing more than an article between covers. As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport is/was published and perhaps written in the tradition of all those delicious, slender City Lights paperback classics. It is as good as any of them, better than a lot of them. Appropriately enough, most of the action takes place more or less at the doorstep of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Peter Case is an extremely talented bluesman singer/songwriter, but you really don't need familiarity with his discography to read and enjoy this, his first book. The distinctive sound of his guitar comes across loud and clear and beautifully upon the printed page. It is the usual, familiar American story. A young dropout hits the road and heads west. It is 1973 and the poor sap has missed the 1960's. Punk rock is three years away, but like so many before him, he follows the westward dream, starting out with nothing but the prerequisite army-green duffle, cheap guitar and bottle of wine. The sound of the time was Exile on Main Street and The Harder They Come soundtrack album, but this book sounds more like Peter's beloved Elmore James track, "Sunnyland Moan". As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport is the first part of an in-progress memoir to-be. Yet, it works like it is as slice-of -life music on the page. - Glen Thrasher
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Street life,
This review is from: As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport (Paperback)
This chapbook by songwriter Peter Case is the first installment of a promised book-length memoir. After an opening chapter that narrates his premature departure from high school in Buffalo in 1970, a departure that may have been precipitated in part by drug-induced hallucinations, Case skips ahead to 1973, when he took a train west, toting a duffel bag and a Gibson guitar, and arrived in San Francisco. With no particular prospects or plan except to make music in the holy city of the psychedelic era, he is soon sleeping in flophouses, hanging out on the street with an assortment of winos, hippies, and buskers, and playing for coins. A black man he never meets again gives him some tips on playing the blues and helps him exchange his Gibson for something more useful on the streets. Case moves into a junkyard along the waterside, spending the nights in an abandoned school bus. Drink is his constant companion. He wakes up one morning, hungover, a bottle 151 proof rum cradled in his arms, and immediately takes a swig. Some days he hangs outside at dive at six AM, waiting for its doors to open so that he can begin his day's drinking. Eventually Case leaves San Francisco for a ragged sojourn into Mexico in the company of his ostensible manager, who at one point barters the singer's sunglasses for a couple of watermelons to slake their thirst.These pages will seem very familiar to anyone who knows Case's music. Nick the Cop strolls in from the lyrics of "Entella Hotel," and the whole book could be suitably read to the accompaniment of "Green Blanket (Part One)," from Full Service, No Waiting. What could easily have been, in other hands, an awkward, disjointed, self-justifying exercise in nostalgia instead turns out to be a clear-eyed, unsentimental, closely observed recreation of how life on the streets looked and felt to a young man in a crazy time. We see the world through the eyes of someone who, for all his rough living, was still essentially an innocent, and Case wisely leaves that young man to face the world as he was, without benefit of hindsight. Case would later beat the bottle, become a member of two pivotal bands (the Nerves and the Plimsouls), and embark on a prolific solo career. To his credit, though, he doesn't seem inclined to deplore who he was when he was sleeping rough, drinking hard, and busking for small change.
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