A CONVERSATION WITH PETER CASE (continued)

PM: But back to Beeline, tell us something about this producer, Andrew Williams, how and when you guys hooked up, and the contribution he makes on the recordings.

PC: I hooked up with Andy back in the early 80s. He sang and played organ on "A Million Miles Away," which is my big Plimsouls hit. And he used to go out with the Plimsouls, do gigs and stuff.

PM: So he was a San Francisco guy?

PC: No, he's an L.A. guy. And he had a band with his brothers, the Williams Brothers, and they had a hit on Warner Brothers called "Can't Cry Hard Enough," and I guess three albums on Warners. And they had their own career going there for a while. That was sort of after the Plimsouls. Now he's producing records and he's been working with me. He's a close friend and a guy that I really trust to work on the records, to make sure that I'm getting a sympathetic sound and hearing from. I don't think I could just go in with a stranger and make a record. It's got to be somebody you really have an understanding with. By the time you go in to make the record, they can't be a stranger anymore. You've got to know what you're doing.

PM: Right.

PC: So he's a guy who has a deep understanding of what we're working on. He brought the drummer, Sandy Chila, to the first group of sessions that we did, back in '96 or whenever it was. And I struck it up with Sandy and then he ended up going on the road with me quite a bit, and going to Italy, and playing on the West Coast gigs with me. And we sort of worked in a whole style of drums and acoustic guitar. It was very sympathetic. On the first record he doesn't even play on a real drum kit, he's playing on a suitcase. He's got his kick drum hooked up to an old tweed suitcase.

PM: Nice.

PC: On the new record he's using a doumbek a lot. He's doing a lot of hand drums, and kick, snare, and a lot of different things. It's sort of influenced, I suppose, by Indian and Middle Eastern music and African music.

[There ensued a conversation about whether it was a djembe or a doumbek.] I don't know, he's got both of them. He's playing a number of different hand drums. He plays bongos, too.

PM: That's what I like, bongos. Let the guitar be the bottom end, and let the bongo be in the middle, that's nice.

PC: And we got a bass player that's worked into the group now, too. Dave Meshell.

PM: Where's he from?

PC: He's from L.A. but he's been all around. He played in Shelby Lynne's band for a while. He's played in a lot of different punk rock, jazz and all, and country bands. All sorts of stuff. But he's with me now. He's going on the road with the tour.

PM: Great. And is that your son on the record?

PC: Yeah, it is, actually.

PM: Joshua Case.

PC: Josh, yeah. It's the first time we've made a record together. He's been on tour with me a lot over the years.

PM: How old is he? And what is meant by "electronic guitar"?

PC: Well, it was sort of a taken from Brian Eno's credit on the first Roxy Music record, which is "Electric guitar and tape sounds."

PM: Yeah.

PC: But on this record it's "electronic guitar and computer sounds," because what's going on is that the guitar is being turned into loops, electronic loops. Josh is making loops on the guitar and then chopping them up and putting them back in. Some of it he does in real time and some it we did in the studio. He's going to go out on the road, though, and do it.

PM: What's he going to use to do it in real time?

PC: He's got a rig, a workstation where he'll sit there. It's a sampler.

PM: So it's not like one of those Boomerang pedals.

PC: He's got one of those too.

PM: Oh, man, maybe I could talk to him sometime. I want to get into some of that stuff.

PC: Yeah, you can talk to him any time you want. He's way down with it all. He's got this whole thing going on. He's kind of known as a computer whiz down in Austin, Texas.

PM: Really?

PC: He was on the road with me for several years. We learned a lot about music from each other, I guess. continue

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