From ANDRAS JONES: PETER CASE joins us for this Pop Oracle session with DEAD ROCK WEST from the streets of Portland hanging out before one of his shows. Peter produced their album “Bright Morning Stars”. He’s another one of those songwriters, like Jeffrey Gaines or Dan Bern, who travels close to the ground. Of course, to me he’s always going to be a rock star. His early solo records (produced by T-Bone Burnett & Mitchell Froom) were formative for me as a songwriter, and that was after the success of his band The Plimsouls and before that, The Nerves. I feel like I’ve spent my entire music career, such as it is, looking up to him, and here he was hanging with the riff raff and gabbing with us about fake news, Buffalo ’66 and “Red Barchetta” on Radio8Ball. It was a good day.

We missed ’em on the show but I find some pleasant synchronicities that are worth mentioning here. The session begins with Frank and Peter riffing about meeting on the side of a freeway (“the James Brown Freeway”) and the song that answers Peter’s question about “fake news” is called “Hwy 1”. What do I make of this? Well, it kinda depends on whether Frank and Peter actually met the way they claim or if their “joke” is now a story we are supposed to take as true. That’s one thing. Then there’s the difference between the fictional FREEway where Frank and Pete met over a shared crow bar experience and the HIGHway in the song. When we consider the difference between being FREE and being HIGH we may gain greater insight into the nature of our relationship to “fake news” in that one sign of a free society is a wide range of opinions and points of view. All media has a bias and we’re high if we think any news is capitol T true. There’s also the idea that the cognitive dissonance created by the racist drug war that followed segregation and, before that, slavery (our second great national sin – after the native American genocide) may give us insight into how we got into the “fake news” pickle. I could actually keep going this way for a while, exploring the numerological significance of the number 1, the geography of Malibu, and the evolution of technology from letters to phones to, well, to this.

Hwy 1

It’s been a little while/since you flash that California smile/it’s been sometime since you touched that telephone dial

I got your letter/it would’ve been better to call but I know it’s not your style

Do you still drive up Highway 1/going way too fast racing with the sun/Do you still sing that same old song/ forget the past/ just move on

It’s been too much time/to be without/you’re still on my mind/last night I dreamed/that you came back/I couldn’t speak

I sent your letter/it might’ve been better to call/but you know I’m just a child

Do you still drive up Highway 1/going way too fast/racing with the sun/do you still seeing that same old song/forget the past just move on
Just move on