Singer-songwriter Peter Case returns to Marin from ‘A Million Miles Away’

When he was an 18-year-old high school dropout, singer-songwriter Peter Case bailed out of his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and headed for San Francisco, the most happening music scene in the country in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, finding his first home in an abandoned bus behind the Marin heliport in Sausalito.

He had a sleeping bag, a record player that ran on batteries, a guitar and what would be a lifelong passion to write songs and entertain people with his music.

At the time, the heliport was a rehearsal studio for many of Marin’s top bands, from Quicksilver Messenger Service to the Grateful Dead.

“There were a lot of rock stars going in and out of the heliport,” he remembers, speaking from his home in San Francisco. “But I was just a kid. They were in another world from me.”

He would join their world soon enough. After honing his chops busking on the streets of San Francisco for a couple of years, he became a nascent rock star himself, first with the punk-era San Francisco band the Nerves and then as the charismatic lead singer of the Plimsouls, one of the most instantly popular Los Angeles bands in the early ’80s, a group best remembered for its signature hit, “A Million Miles Away,” which was featured in the 1983 movie “Valley Girl,” a cult classic.

David Geffen, who signed the Plimsouls to his label, predicted that Case would be “the next John Lennon.” And then, just as his star was ascending, he turned his back on a glamourous future as the handsome, mop-haired frontman of a Beatle-esque power pop band to go his own way as a mostly acoustic solo performer, a journey he’s been on for the past four-plus decades.

“At some point, I went full circle, going back to playing solo,” he says. “And I’m glad I did because, musically, it was exactly what I thought I should be doing. It was a long time coming.”

Over his career, he’s reunited with the Plimsouls several times and performed with other bands for brief stints, but he’s always returned to the solo spotlight, seeing himself in the mold of early inspirations, solo artists such as Lightnin’ Hopkins, the bluesman John Hammond Jr., Arlo Guthrie, James Taylor and Bob Dylan. He has no regrets.

“I love performing like that,” he says. “That’s been my bag since I left the Plimsouls.”

Folk-rock hero

At 69, Case may not be a household name, but he’s become something of a folk-rock hero, his legend as an itinerant singer-songwriter burnished by an acclaimed new documentary, “Peter Case: A Million Miles Away,” which can be streamed on Prime Video and Apple TV.

A review in Variety hails it as “a highly flattering portrait of the artist as a young man who just kind of wanted to sound old before his time,” and goes on to praise him as “a middle-class musician of integrity rather than celebrity.”

Not that he’s been without his successes. Writing in the New York Times, critic Robert Palmer picked Case’s eponymous solo debut as his No. 1 album of 1986. A song from the record, “Old Blue Car,” was nominated for a Grammy. And in 1992, he scored a radio hit with “Dream About You,” a single that peaked at No. 16 on Billboard’s modern rock chart.

“It established me as a singer-songwriter, which was a hard switch to make coming off these rock ‘n’ roll bands,” he recalls of that early period of his solo career.

At the time, Case was in the vanguard of a genre that is now familiar as Americana, but was new and different back then.

‘Ahead of the curve’

“I was always ahead of the curve,” he says. “I was the first person to go in a radio station with my guitar and sing live in the studio to promote my record. That was blowing people’s minds. They had never really seen anybody do that.”

A prolific songwriter, he’s cut 14 solo albums for Geffen, Vanguard and other labels over the decades. His latest, “Doctor Moan,” on Sunset Blvd. Records, was recorded at Sun Machine Recording, a studio in Novato. Case wrote the songs for the album on piano rather than guitar during the pandemic, when he was forced to cancel a world tour and hole up in his San Francisco home with an old Baldwin upright for company.

“I got up in the morning, drank coffee and played piano,” he recalls. “At some point, these songs suddenly started to come. It was exciting to have a batch of songs from the piano because that has never happened before.”

He’ll be performing songs from the album as well as others from his long career at Nov. 5 at West Marin’s Rancho Nicasio.

When I spoke to him, Case was recovering from a bout of COVID, his first, that he believes he picked up on his last round of shows promoting the new album. After Rancho Nicasio, he goes back out on the road again through the end of the year.

It was refreshing talking to a performer who, even after decades of touring, sounds as if he’s as excited to perform for people as he was when he was an 18-year-old kid living in a bus in Sausalito and singing on street corners for tips.

“There have been difficult times and disappointments, but I’ve always enjoyed it,” he says. “Some of the traveling is unbelievably hard, but it’s always an adventure. I feel fortunate that I’m playing music, doing what I love, and that I get to approach it the way I need to. It’s a gift. And so I just keep doing it, moving ahead.”

• Details: Peter Case performs at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 5 at Rancho Nicasio at 1 Old Rancheria Road in Nicasio. Tickets  are $25. For information, go to ranchonicasio.com

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net