And yes, it’s a benefit for your beleaguered tho’ resurgent ‘n re-emergent jazz ‘n literary lounge, so bring yr checkbook! Whether it’s $10 you can contribute or $100, be the icing on this particular little birthday cake… Bird & Beckett’s music programming is 21 years old this year!

Peter Case lit out from Buffalo, New York in 1973, age 18, in a blizzard, on a midnight bus headed west. That spring in San Francisco, you’d find him among the brilliant street musicians of the city, day and night, wailing on his guitar, singing with a voice that ricocheted off the storefronts and across the traffic lanes. You’d see him and hear him all over town, in the Mission, in the Tenderloin, and for a good, long stretch on the southeast corner opposite the Condor and City Lights every night of the week, busking alongside scuffling players and sterling veterans like Mike Wilhelm of the Charlatans and folk guitarist Tom Hobson. In 1977, he hooked up with a coupla guys and formed a punk band, The Nerves, that played like demons, pissed off the squares with their music and pissed off their peers with the three-piece suits they sweated through ’til the stitches dissolved.

The Nerves got a 7″ single onto KSAN the very day they lit out for Los Angeles to make it big, New Years Day 1977. They broke apart down there within a year, when that hit earned one of them, not Peter, plenty big dough after Blondie made it a coast-to-coast hit. You might have heard it — “Hanging on the Telephone.”

Peter didn’t stop reaching for rock ‘n roll stardom. He formed the Plimsouls in 1979; they headlined everywhere, got a contract with Geffen in 1983, scored big when Peter’s song, “A Million Miles Away” made it onto the “Valley Girl” soundtrack. The Plimsouls broke up the same year. Peter stayed on Geffen Records, though. For a while.

But he wasn’t interested in anything then but crisscrossing the country playing guitar and singing his songs like a legion of blues players had done for generations. His first solo record–“Peter Case”–made the top of the NYT’s 10-best albums of the year in 1986. Your Bird & Beckett proprietor bought it on cassette, played it ’til the tape stretched and snapped. 16 more records as a solo artist. 35 years on the road.

Tonight, he plays our piano and sings for a roomful of us at Bird & Beckett, the songs from his new record, his 16th as a solo artist, called Dr. Moan. Maybe he’ll bring a guitar, too.

He’s playing to raise us the final piece of change we need to feel secure.

Honor his offer!

Come out, listen, donate!

Click here for a video interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine on Peter’s solo career, keying back to the teenager hearing Lightnin’ Hopkins, just the bluesman and his guitar, in a Boston theater… Then check out this one, with Peter talking about hanging in City Lights Books, busking on the corner there… him and Crazy Horse Danny and this guy, Allen Ginsberg sitting in…