Peter Case + Ashton York

$25 Same price online and at the door. Doors at 7:30pm. Show from 8:15-10:30pm with one intermission Peter Case I was born in Buffalo, New York in 1954, the youngest child in a family with two teenage sisters. The house was filled with music: Rock ‘n’ roll, Rhythm & Blues, jazz and folk; Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, and as the Sixties got underway, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and that gang. As a little kid I played piano, ukulele, and harmonica; I took up saxophone in school, began playing guitar in 1965, and wrote my first song, “Stay Away.” I continued writing songs and playing in rock ‘n roll combos at dances in the area while listening to Dylan and the Rolling Stones and following the roots of their country, blues, and early rock ‘n’ roll origins. In 1968 I started playing coffeehouses while also continuing to perform with dance bands: this went on for a number of years. At the beginning of my 16th year, I left home, moved in with musicians, and began to travel – New York, Washington, Boston – still listening to music and playing, learning from the musicians I met along the way. In 1973, I left Buffalo in a blizzard on a midnight bus heading west. That spring in San Francisco I became a street musician, playing solo and busking with different players, including blues and rock ‘n’ roll hero, Mike Wilhelm of the Charlatans, and folk guitarist Tom Hobson. I was the main subject of a film that year, Night Shift, about SF street music, directed by Bert Deivert. I wrote about this period in detail in my book, As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport, which tells the story of a street-singing trip from Northern California to Mexico. After beginning a collaboration with Jack Lee, a songwriter who’d just landed in California from Alaska, the Nerves were born in late 1974. The following year, Paul Collins joined the band; we played locally and recorded the “Hanging on the Telephone” EP, which was released in 1976. On the first day of 1977, the band relocated to Los Angeles and began performing and promoting LA’s first punk rock shows – including Hollywood’s Punk Rock Invasion featuring the the Weirdos, the Zeros, the Dils, and the Germs in their debut appearances. The Nerves were the first independent unsigned band to go on a national independent tour of the USA (plus Toronto) in the spring and summer of 1977. Playing our own brand of stripped-down, driving, melodic teenage rock’n’roll, touring with the Ramones, and sharing bills with Devo, Pere Ubu, and Mink DeVille during the first wave of American punk, we returned to LA to perform at the newly opened Masque. After racking up 28,000 miles on our Ford LTD, in early 1978, after playing one final show at the Whisky a Go Go, we broke up to pursue different directions. That year I woodshedded, wrote songs, and put together the Plimsouls. We debuted January 1, 1979 in El Monte, CA and picked up where the Nerves left off adding maximum R&B and folk rock influences to the mix. Once we made our Hollywood debut on June 11, 1979, we immediately attracted a following. The Zero Hour EP was released on Long Beach’s Beat label and became a local hit on KROQ ‘s Rodney Bingenheimer show; then came the recording contract with Richard Perry’s Planet/Elektra label. Picking up fans from coast to coast, we toured nationally throughout 1981. We recorded the independent single, “A Million Miles Away” in the winter of that year and it was released in 1982 on the band’s own Shaky City label, in conjunction with Greg Shaw’s Bomp Records. The song was our biggest hit: a national college radio smash and international power pop/garage band classic. The Everywhere At Once album was released by Geffen Records in early 1983 and the band developed strong followings in Atlanta and Detroit, and throughout Texas and California, establishing a reputation for dynamic and wild live shows. We played our last gig on January 1, 1985. The Nerves and the Plimsouls were always about putting songwriting first, and by 1983, my songs started reaching new places. Story songs started to come to me and I began to rediscover my roots as a musician. I moved to Texas and finished writing the Peter Case album which we began recording in Fort Worth with T Bone Burnett, then soon moved to LA and finished with Jerry Marotta, Van Dyke Parks, Roger McGuinn and others at Sunset Sound. I’ve been told the album had a big impact on musicians and listeners around the country – the opening salvo of a new singer-songwriter movement that would become known as Americana – and I was the first songwriter of my generation of musicians to turn from rock toward an acoustic sound. New York Times critic Robert Palmer called it the best album of 1986 and it got a five-star review in Rolling Stone; I toured extensively in the US with Jackson Browne and throughout Europe with a band, and received a Grammy nomination for the song, “Old Blue Car.” The next album, 1989’s the man with the blue postmodern fragm

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