When I'm in chaos

For a recent road trip from Illinois to Maryland and back I put together a 740+ song playlist of Detroit and Detroit-area rock and roll. The Paybacks' three superb albums were on there, of course, and muscled their way up through shuffle-play with ferocious tenacity. I fell in deeper love with Wendy Case's songs on that trip. The Paybacks were one of the great rock and roll bands of the aughts, and the tuneful roar of their songs has weathered the fallout from that era well. Two tracks in particular, "If I Fell" from the band's debut Knock Loud (released in 2002) and "Can You Drive" from their second album, Harder And Harder (2004), struck me again with their powerful blend of swagger and vulnerability, a poignant, paradoxical itch in the human condition that Case excels in scratching. Much has been written about Case's extraordinary voice, which can travel the long road from hoarse and raw to honeyed and nuanced, sometimes in the same line. A powerful, explosive singer, she can howl like a guitar cranked through an overdriven amp, the rawness of it all especially moving when she's singing about emotional spaces where she's been left surprised and unguarded.

"If I Fell" sets the stakes: if I fall for you, will you fall for me? A hedge against lowered defenses. That's the game, and the guy she's singing to is firmly in her sights, and possibly up for it. She persuades him that though this is dangerous stuff, it's worth it to be singed rather than duck for cover. "Say my name," she sings to him in the song's hottest line, "you're gonna do it anyway." She knows he wants to try it, but he ain't convinced yet, so she offers:

Love is like strip poker

and you never know what cards you're going to draw

until you get it, and you might live to regret it

but it's better not to fight the only game you can never win

Who knows if her amped seduction works as last call arrives, but to my ears it would seem awfully hard for him to resist, given the singer's sexy playfulness, her cajoling insistence that he must want her, too, and her willingness to fall with him. The great Jim Diamond produced Knock Loud with Steve King and the band—joining Case on guitar are John Szymanski on bass, Marco Delicato on guitar, and Mike Latulippe on drums—which provide the raw, pummeling soundtrack to Case's winking pitch.

~~

Case had a raucous past, and she's been honest about her drug and alcohol abuse. Asked in an interview with The Center for Punk Arts about lessons learned from her early rough days, Case responded, "Lessons huh? Well... let's see..."

I learned how to run scrips on Chinese pharmacies, I learned how to break into a hotel room with a knife or a laminated bus pass and I learned how to tell when you are under surveillance by the man. I learned how to shimmy down drainpipes and fire escapes and I learned that jail sucks. What did it mean to me musically? Not much... I didn't start writing good music ’til I stopped doing drugs.

The astonishing "Can You Drive" (co-written with Delicato) sounds like a missive from those days, a desperate song about the limits of friendship, and how those limits can be tested under the duress of need. Here, the truths feel harder-won than on the edgy if comparatively upbeat "If I Fell." The singer's had a few beers and she needs a place to crash, so she asks him for help. They can walk. Or can he drive? "I'm just keeping it alive," she confesses to him. 

That "it" is the song's central mystery—the night? her high? her life?—and Case sings as if she needs the song to keep moving forward, or else. He's a got a girlfriend, but she could care less; she doesn't want to hear that noise, she came to play with the boys: she just needs a ride, the one thing that will keep it alive. In the song's middle—it feels like we're in the car now—things get gentler, and Case's vocals are just a marvel: shrugging in her beer, she sings that she thinks he'll do alright, whether that means getting her safely to wherever they're going, or something else, it's unclear, until the next line, where within a sliver of vulnerable candor in the dim interior light she admits that he looks good in the night. The way she sings the word "night," beginning with a growl and ending with a soft vibrato, is everything that's sensational about Wendy Case. Her band on this track (Syzmanski and Latulippe again, with recently departed Delicato returning to pitch in on guitar) knows enough to dial back the decibel levels and let Case work her way through the surprise on that ride. "In the night," she repeats again and again—before a powerful guitar solo takes the song to its end—while looking through that windshield, blurry with drink, aroused by the circumstances, at something maybe unexpected

It's an amazing song, one of Case's best. A decade ago she spoke to Beer Melodies about songwriting. “The best ones happen in a rush in about five minutes," she said. "Lyrics and music come together at once. It’s pretty awesome when that happens."

I just wish it happened all the time. Sometimes I’ll start with nothing but a song title and build on that. I only really write anything decent when I’m in chaos. So I wait around for the other shoe to drop ‘cause when I’m happy I write retarded cute happy songs. There’s got to be genuine passion.

In Case's hands, backed her extraordinary band, the passion in "If I Fell" and "Can You Drive" is as genuine as that often overwhelming feeling can get in rock and roll. Turn it up and learn something.

The Paybacks

~~

After the Paybacks called it quits a decade and half ago following the release of the terrific Love, Not Reason (which I hope will be reissued on vinyl one day), Case stepped away from music. She's reunited the band to play live on several occasions, and has been writing and recording new material recently with Brian McCarty in Royal Sweets. Different vibe. Same truths.

Middle photo of Case via Dick Altavista (flickr)