The Nerves - One Way Ticket ( Alive, 2008 )
If Debbie Harry’s declaration in “Hanging on the Telephone” that “I can’t control myself” has always struck you as a little too coolly delivered to be credible, you owe it to yourself to hear the song’s writer Jack Lee go totally apoplectic in the original version by the Nerves. Yes, like Gloria Jones or Big Mama Thornton, the Nerves are destined to be “the band that did the original version of” someone else’s signature tune—but they’re also recalled as the almost-legendary ur-trio that launched the careers of LA mainstays Paul Collins and Peter Case (of the even nearer miss the Plimsouls). The bare-bones anthology One Way Ticket scrapes together the band’s entire released output (four songs), plus unreleased singles, offshoots, live tracks, and demos—all told, 20 two-minute tracks revealing where power-pop came from and where it was going. And it reveals, in Lee, an unjustly forgotten missing link in American music history.
As its title implies, “One Way Ticket” is a song in the shadow of Alex Chilton: “Gimme a one-way ticket” replaces “Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,” and the reckless romantic energy pays tribute to the Big Star founder’s early pop hit. The song, a Case joint, was recorded as a single but Case and Collins split from Lee before its release; its flipside is “Paper Dolls” by Lee, and features the guitarist doing some very pre-Peter Buck jangling to go along with his raspy vocals.
All three of the Nerves wrote songs and sang; “Hanging on the Telephone” was one of Lee’s two contributions to their self-titled 1976 EP. His “Give Me Some Time”, along with “When You Find Out” (Case) and “Working Too Hard” (Collins) are all in the same very British Invasion-influenced vein: Corny and straightforward relationship-driven lyrics, harmonies, chiming guitars, and rubbery, bluesy bass.
Each of the members gets a post-breakup number. “Walking Out on Love” is a sweet-natured Collins rave-up recorded with Case and a new guitarist, and “Thing of the Past” is an early, sweaty live Plimsouls track, but pay special attention to Lee’s “It’s Hot Outside.” Put it in an echo chamber and it could be a filler track on the Replacements’ Tim—say, “Dose of Thunder.” This isn’t surprising—nobody loved power-pop more than the band that gave the world “Alex Chilton.”
Speaking of which, the CD collection closes with three demos from “early ’76,” the earliest songs on the disc. The demos are very much in the Big Star mode, if far less polished: A Nuggets-style mix of bubblegum teen-pop and a fuzz that comes equally from psych-pop and the proto-punk raw power of live-in-the-garage Middle Americanness.
A number of live tracks from 1977, though, are rougher, sloppier, a little more unstable. Take the band out of LA—away from skinny-tie studio accessibility—and they’re a completely different act. In fact, they’re an act about exactly halfway between Big Star and the Replacements. Not coincidentally, almost all the live songs are Lee’s—he’s the hero of the anthology, despite having mostly dropped off the face of the earth until resurfacing on the nostalgia circuit very recently. Case and Collins, though, stayed in Los Angeles and kept the beat, only to see the Knack—even hookier, even more professional—burst through the door they’d knocked down with “My Sharona” in 1979. From there, trace power-pop into its eventual convergence, along with most other late-’70s/early-’80s genres, in new wave: The backup singers of Tommy Tutone chanting a phone number in 1982 and the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away” on the Valley Girl soundtrack in 1983. While meanwhile, at the roots of the Mississippi, a bunch of teenagers who didn’t know nearly so many chords whaled away at their own doesn’t-know-its-own-strength power-pop.
- Mark Asch
The Nerves - One Way Ticket ( Alive, 2008 )
Surprise: The longest-awaited album of the season is not Chinese Democracy. In fact, it’s not even the most extensively delayed album by an L.A. band. That honor goes to the Nerves. After nearly 30 years of being transmitted in the form of bootlegs and mixtapes, of being covered by other bands, of becoming the stuff of rock & roll legend, the Nerves’ four-song EP has finally seen a proper reissue on Alive Records’ new One Way Ticket — along with unreleased tracks, demos and live cuts. And guess what? It’s better than Chinese Democracy, and cost $13 million less to record.
The Nerves were the trio of guitarist Peter Case, bassist Jack Lee and drummer Paul Collins. The band orginally formed in San Francisco and eventually moved down to L.A., where they recorded an EP and cultivated a small scene of like-minded pop acts with tiny budgets. They supported the Ramones, and managed to shore up enough bread for a national tour. That lone recorded document of their brief career ended up being regarded as a hallmark of what was eventually termed “power pop.”
The Nerves’ EP is one of those items — like a bootleg videotape of a rare kung fu movie — that gets passed around between friends to get people in the know. “Oh, you like Guided By Voices? Well, wait’ll you hear the Nerves!”
It contains four numbers: “When You Find Out,” “Working Too Hard,” “Give Me Some Time” and “Hanging on the Telephone.” The last track probably looks familiar, and it should: While touring in Japan, Blondie heard the song in their limo and covered it as the opener on their now-canonical 1979 album Parallel Lines. Their version was released as a single and charted at No. 5 in the U.K. The song would be reinterpreted by a number of artists down the line — including Cat Power and Def Leppard — and, like most songs referencing phones, it landed in cell-phone commercials.
Anyone hearing the Nerves’ original recording of “Hanging on the Telephone” might be surprised. Blondie embellished the song with so many new-wave accoutrements (frilly organs, laser-guided guitar parts) that it was rendered into a blanched version of the original. The minimal instrumentation of the Nerves’ version, with the hoarse howl of its vocals and brisk pace, sounds more like the youthful vigor of early Beatles than the stylish sheen of new wave.
The remaining three tracks possess the same jaunty rhythms, deft instrumental interplay, bottled-up enthusiasm, sharp vocal harmonies and unflappable hooks that characterize the first Beatles singles.
But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Shortly after their tour, the Nerves disbanded. Case and Collins attempted to re-form the band with a new guitarist under the moniker the Breakaways, but that turned out to have an even briefer life span than its predecessor. Lee penned a couple more songs for other artists before vanishing from the music industry. Collins went on to form the Beat, while Case carried on with the Plimsouls before creating a rather successful solo career for himself (even garnering a Grammy in recent years). Although these later careers eventually bore more monetarily successful fruits, on purely musical grounds their accomplishments are dwarfed by the influence and ingenuity of the Nerves’ four-song EP. It will endure long after Chinese Democracy is finally buried.
- TAL ROSENBERG