A CONVERSATION WITH PETER CASE (continued)

PM: When I was looking at your website, I wished I lived in L.A. just for a minute, so I could take that song writing workshop you do at McCabe's [a legendary music store and concert venue in Santa Monica].

PC: That was pretty fun, yeah. I just got done with one about a week ago.

PM: What blew my mind was the description on the site that the workshop would "focus on creating more vivid and evocative songs." There's a worthwhile aim.

PC: Right. We're doing a lot of different things. We go into a lot of different areas. We look at the sound, and what people are doing with their work. A lot of it is dealing with people's problems, their creativity problems. The basic idea of the class is that there's nothing you can't work on. I do think that song writing and stuff comes from another place, but I also feel that you can get in the way of it with your own nonsense. So it's basically just learning how to get out of the way.

But I'm trying also to help people to get some techniques to improve what they're doing, to just be able to work on anything. You can work on your flow of your words. You can work on your imagination. You can work on anything. It's like the old quote, "Nothing is inevitable as long as there's a willingness to contemplate what's happening." And that's basically what I teach people. And the idea is that creativity is like an oven, you heat it up before you cook.

PM: Right.

PC: Or you go up a ramp, or adjust the pressure--you do something to turn it up. You turn up the heat, and it starts to go. You've got to do things to get it rolling. And so that's what we do in the class. And there are assignments. And everybody comes in every week and writes.

PM: Wow.

PC: It's been good. People seem to respond to it.

PM: And it's limited to ten or so people, is that right?

PC: Yeah. You can't really deal with any more than that. There's just enough time to hear what's going on with anybody.

PM: Some good writers in there?

PC: There are some really good writers in there sometimes. There's always a few. And there's always a couple people who may just want to meet me, because they're fans or something. And they come to one session and don't come again. There are usually a couple of real good writers, and then some people that are sort of putting it together.

PM: In the part of the your website called "pulling the threads," you mentioned that a book by Seamus Heaney called The Spirit Level was important to you.

PC: Uh-huh.

PM: What's that book concern?

PC: I like that book a lot. I like the way he writes. One of the things that's great about him is he just comes up with these amazing doors into the things that are right under your nose. He has a way of opening that up into something that's huge. Basically the book concerns a number of different things. Some of it's about spiritual things, and about getting older. And some of it's about the Irish conflict. And some of it's about his memories of childhood, growing up in a world that's gone. And it's about people continuing on their path in life in incredible solitude and loneliness, sticking to a path that ends up being a valuable path. I don't know, it's a good book.

PM: Do you personally have any special spiritual inclinations?

PC: Yeah, I have. I became a Christian around 1984, I think it was. And I've pretty much stuck with that, though I'm not like your Ashcroft, finger-pointing, pray-to-the-statue kind of Christian. In fact, I'm not even sure, really, in this context, whether I'm exactly what was originally defined as a Christian, exactly, anymore. But yeah, I do have a spiritual path, and yeah, I do believe I have God as a higher power, that works in my life on a daily basis, and totally changed my life.

PM: Yeah. Are you into the Emmett Fox stuff?

PC: I am, actually.

PM: I like him. That's in my top five, for sure.

PC: I do too. Sermon on the Mount.

PM: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. What about the early Christian gnostic stuff, and all that?

PC: Yeah. I like that book by Stephen Mitchell called The Gospel According to Jesus. That's a really good book.

PM: Right, I've heard of that. I'm going to check it out now.

PC: There's a great tape of it that I got to hear once when I was driving on tour. Really good.

PM: What are you listening to lately, and what are you reading?

PC: Well, let's see. I've been reading these books by Ed Sanders. One's called America: a History in Verse. I just read that. That's really good. Ed Sanders, he's a poet from the Lower East Side of New York. He used to be in the Fugs.

PM: I knew I'd heard his name.

PC: And he's sort of like a latter beat poet.

PM: Right.

PC: He also wrote a biography of Allen Ginsberg, in verse, which is really great.

PM: He wrote it in verse?

PC: Yeah.

PM: Holy jeez!

PC: Yeah. And they're really fun to read, actually. They're great. They're easy to read, really, and great.  continue

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