Peter Case & Sid Griffin in Carrboro, NC, 3/19/2025

I flipped through the pages of time last night, the glossy paper slipping from my fingers when I reached 1985. In April of that year, as I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I was 19 and living the commuter-college life in suburban Philly, where I worked full-time hours for part-time wages more weeks than not at a mall-based department store. (I arranged my class schedule around work, not the reverse.) On the way back from daiquiri-drenched dinners at Friday’s with like-minded (and equally underage) coworkers, I often stopped at the overly bright Listening Booth—a record store—to browse through its racks in search of treasure. It was there that, over the course of one week that month, I picked up two monumental albums in my life: Lone Justice’s debut and the Long Ryders’ Native Sons.

Sad to say, however, time and circumstance kept me from catching either band in concert in the months and years that followed. I was lucky to see Lone Justice’s mercurial lead singer, Maria McKee, on a half-dozen occasions in the decades that followed, but the Long Ryders’ occasional reunions always coincided with economic downturns in my life. (C’est la vie, am I right?) Still, I enjoyed the Long Ryders’ Sid Griffin’s other band, the Coal Porters, on CD—and, back in the day, that meant purchasing pricey imports—and consider his 1997 solo set, Little Victories, an under-appreciated gem.

Last night didn’t set things right, but it was a helluva good time all the same. Peter Case’s solo acoustic Sings Like Hell tour stopped at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room in Carrboro, NC, with Sid Griffin as his opening act and, for two songs, mandolin player. (The two have been friends since meeting at an L.A. punk club some 50 years ago.) 

Griffin began his 45-minute set  on banjo, cajoling the sparse audience to sing along on the Ryders’ song ‘“Looking for Lewis & Clark” from their classic State of Our Union album. He also performed several songs from his recent The Journey from Grape to Raisin album, including “I Want to Be the Man (My Dog Thinks I Am),” “The Last 10 Seconds of Life” and sweet “Son, Won’t You Teach Me to Waltz?” The first was inspired by his son, whose autism-related stress was lessened once they got a dog, while the last, a sweet song sure to bring a tear to one’s eye, was inspired by his mother. Also on tap: the Long Ryders’ “You Just Can’t Ride the Box Cars Anymore,” also from State of Our Union, and “Molly Someone,” from their Psychedelic Country Soul comeback set. The Coal Porters were well-represented, too, with “The Day the Last Ramone Died” and other tunes.

In between songs, he told quite a few stories, including a comical one about his early years in Kentucky, when he and some pals decided to put on a show on the back of a pickup truck. While driving to the field where the show was slated to happen, a tarp they’d planned to use as a backdrop ballooned into the air and parachuted onto the windshield of a VW Bug driven by a pastor. Funny stuff. 

I am not as well versed on all things Peter Case, though Diane and I—on what may have been our first-ever concert together—saw him one late Wednesday night in 1989 at J.C. Dobbs, a beer-soaked Philly club located on the hippest street in town, i.e. South Street, when he was touring behind his The Man With the Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar album. Prior to his solo career, he was part of the Nerves, a punk-styled band whose “Hanging on the Telephone” was covered by Blondie, and the Plimsouls, whose shimmering “A Million Miles Away” is one of the great songs of the early ‘80s. Not that he performed either song that night—or this night.

He played for 90-or-so minutes, sprinkling some rip-roaringly funny stories into the set, which spanned his solo years, from “Two Angels” on the Blue Guitar album to 2023’s Doctor Moan. Diane was especially entranced with his cover of John Coltrane’s “Naima.” One funny story related to his 2021 The Midnight Broadcast album, about how one often has to be in the right mood for a song to connect with you. The first time he heard Neil Young’s “Keep on Rocking in the Free World,” he said, he didn’t think much of it. The next time, after an especially dispiriting experience following a festival appearance in Scandinavia, it hit home. Sid joined Peter for the two final wild songs of the night, playing mandolin.

The only thing that annoyed me during the show: the lack of seats. Those of us in the sparse audience, which couldn’t have been more than 75 people in total, ranged from 60ish to 70ish years of age, with quite a few—after several hours standing on the unforgiving concrete floor—feeling our age. While the pages of time were stuck in the ‘80s, our bodies were not. One couple shared one of the few chairs, for example, while others knelt during some numbers. Given the venue knew how many tickets had been sold, it should have—as has been done for other shows I’ve attended there—brought out the chairs from the storeroom.

(The photo above, snapped by Diane, is of me watching Sid.)