A CONVERSATION WITH PETER CASE

Peter Case: Yeah, I checked out your site. It looked really interesting with all those different interviews.

Puremusic: Thanks. We've been at it about two years. No advertising, just kind of a labor of demented love.

PC: Right. Cool.

PM: So we think Beeline is fantastic.

PC: Great, man. That's good to hear.

PM: You know, I think your work over the years has been remarkably consistent. I don't have every record, but I have a number of them.

PC: Right.

PM: How long did Beeline take to make and mix?

PC: Well, I think it was a couple of weeks. We do them real quick. The way we do records these days is like at guerilla rate or something. I've learned to make that work for me. It's not slick. We're making them almost like jazz records or blues records, a lot like the records that I loved when I was a kid. And that I still love. It keeps a lot of spontaneity. The tracks are cut very live. There's not like a huge layering thing going on. It's just musicians playing. You hone down your ideas so that when you go into the studio you're just going right for it. There's not a lot of wasted time.

PM: Yeah. So along with Beeline, what other Case CD would you recommend as a good intro to your work for newcomers?

PC: I like the one called Full Service, No Waiting.

PM: Ah, yeah.

PC: Flying Saucer Blues was a little bit slicker, maybe, but not too much.

PM: I got Flying Saucer, I thought that was great. I don't have Full Service yet.

PC: Those three albums are like a trilogy, in terms of the band and the production. The producer is the same guy on all three records. And the drummer is the same, Sandy Chila. And by Beeline we've really worked into a thing where it was like a band.

PM: And what about the record in the middle of those that was self-released, Thank You St. Jude? What's that about, and why was that self-released?

PC: It's a folk singing record. It was basically a document of a tour I was on with a fiddle player named David Perales. We were out on like an 80 city tour. And we had had a couple afternoons off in San Francisco before we went back to L.A. at the end of the tour. So what we did was, we just went down to a studio and made a record. The songs on that record, a number of them are songs from the Geffen years, songs on records that have gone out of print.

PM: Which Geffen records are out of print?

PC: I think all three of them.

PM: And one of them is Blue Guitar, right? Damn, that was a good record.

PC: Blue Guitar was the first one they ran out of.

PM: That was an unbelievable record, I thought.

PC: Thank you, yeah. Of the Geffen records, that seems to be the most popular one. And people are constantly asking me where can they get the songs, can they buy it at the gig, or whatever. And I'd have to always just tell them it was out of print, until now--you can get the songs on Thank You St. Jude.

PM: Now I'm doubly glad that my sister said on the phone the other day, "Well, we still have the tape of Blue Guitar that you sent to us." I said, "Well, don't lose it. I may need to bump that thing." Because yeah, I lost my copy.

PC: Right.

PM: And so it never came out on CD?

PC: Well, it did, actually. Blue Guitar got put out on CD, but then they sold through it just a little while ago.

PM: Okay. But it's probably on Ebay somewhere. I mean, one can find it.

PC: Yeah. You can get them from Japan for like $30 a copy.

PM: Thanks a lot, right.

PC: So it's out of print until somebody re-releases it. But the songs are available. Some of them, I think, are superior versions--better than the Geffen versions, though they're very stripped down. It's just me on guitar and a fiddle player live.  continue

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