The Nerves should have had it all. Formed in 1974 and blessed with earworm melodies, good looks and a meticulous work ethic, the trio of Jack Lee (guitar, vocals), Peter Case (bass, vocals) and Paul Collins (drums, vocals) wrote, rehearsed and performed as if their lives depended on it. Not quite punk and disdainful of the description “power pop”, they aimed to cram epic brilliance into effervescent two-minute songs.
When the music industry ignored them, the Nerves chose to take a chance, releasing their own EP and staging a grueling national tour that saw them share the stage with Devo and the Ramones. After their breakup in 1978, a bittersweet coda to their brief career soon followed: Parallel Lines, Blondie’s third hit album, opened with a cover of their song Hanging on the Telephone. Previously a calling card of Nerves, Blondie’s take seemed to erase them from history.
“I thought it would be two weeks, or a month maximum, before we were famous,” Paul Collins smiles today from his New York home. A Juilliard student with a bohemian upbringing and a primordial love of rock ‘n’ roll, Collins dropped out and headed to the West Coast. “I was barely 18, I had $80 in my pocket and I was scared to death,” he remembers. Three days after arriving in San Francisco, he found a pushpin advertisement on the wall of a record store that led him to the enigmatic Jack Lee, a transplant from Sitka, Alaska.
Peter Case proved more difficult to seduce. Arriving at school at 15 and abandoning Buffalo for San Francisco, he played blues and country standards on the street to pay for his food. “I slept in a beat-up van parked by the water,” Case said. “It wasn’t even my van.” Lee and Case struck up a friendship while the latter was on the streets. When Collins came on board, the Nerves went from idea to reality. “It was just impossible to find people willing to do something that weird,” Case recalls. “There was no one else like Jack around – someone who had a vision, wanted to follow it and could to write.”
The band set up shop in a three-story flophouse, immersing themselves in rehearsal sessions that could last up to 16 hours. “It was like being in training camp,” Collins says. “My snare drum was covered in blood because we were playing so fast. It was three people acting as one, and it was a 24-hour effort. There was no on and off.”
Despite all their commitment, it quickly became clear that the Nerves were going nowhere. Having no equal beyond the Flamin’ Groovies and the aloof, leather-clad Crime, the trio saw no future playing in front of fist-waving barflies and off-duty military men. After Lee recovered from a near-fatal stab wound, the group left for Los Angeles. There they rubbed shoulders with screenwriters such as Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer, and organized their first concerts for the punk groups The Germs and The Weirdos. “This turned out to be a bitter pill to swallow, as they instantly became much more popular than us! » Collins said.
Undaunted, the group concocted a national tour in 1977 that spanned 71 days, 39 concerts and 16 cities, during which they hooked up with the Dead Boys and Cheap Trick, and played a series of dates with the Ramones. “The Ramones’ work ethic was even stricter than ours,” Collins recalled. “They would practice before the show, then go back to the hotel and work on songs. I remember sitting at this big wooden table with them after a show, and Dee Dee would say, ‘Can I be excused?’ I have to go to the bathroom. “It was as if he were at the table with his parents!
If the Ramones were a picture of politeness, other future stars were less welcoming. “We played in Boston, and when we got there, there were these four guys dressed entirely in leather,” Collins says. “One of them said, ‘What the hell are you doing? You tour all over the country. You don’t have a manager. You don’t have an agent. This is bullshit. We know what we’re doing. Damn, we’re going to be huge.” So we look at them and say, ‘Yeah, what’s the name of your band? Cars? What a stupid name…'”
Inevitably, traveling thousands of miles in a station wagon and booking gigs on the fly took its toll. “It’s like a plant,” Collins says. “You don’t give it water, you don’t give it sunlight, it’s going to die. We couldn’t get industry acceptance, and I think we took everything we could.”
After a stint in the Breakaways, Collins and Case formed the Beat and the Plimsouls respectively, both groups enjoying the success that eluded the Nerves. Lee, meanwhile, worked on a solo career, self-financed two albums and found further success when Come Back and Stay became a hit for Paul Young. While Hang on the Telephone would be covered by everyone from L7 and Def Leppard to Girls Aloud, the Nerves remained perpetually under the radar, never achieving the same breakthrough as the bands they had served in the trenches with.
Fifty years later, a new anthology could restore the balance. “My father gave me this task on his deathbed,” said Cynthia Cook, Lee’s daughter. “His dream was to be part of Jack White’s Third Man Records label.” Although Cook may have grown up writing songs with her father – the first was called Rock’n’Roll Rabbit, written when she was five – the music industry was not her stomping ground. “My father liked long-term projects,” she smiles. “You know, I’m a mom who works in real estate…but I should go make a deal with Third Man.”
However, the long-term project ultimately paid off, and Cook seems both overwhelmed and thrilled by the challenge of sifting through a lifetime’s worth of songs. “I have tapes from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s,” she says. “There are about three albums worth of material to come out.” His discoveries to date include a quickly discarded MySpace cut, preserved by a fan, and a live tape recorded by an off-duty Whiskey a Go Go waitress and unearthed in a closet 50 years later.
As for the Nerves’ legacy, the surviving members are philosophical. “It makes me realize that we have done everything wrong in some areas and everything right in others,” Case says. “It didn’t do well at the time, but the music is here now, 50 years later. Who would have thought that?”
Gn entert
