Peter Case revels in return to McCabe’s

When an audience member asked Peter Case during his show at McCabe’s on Friday what the first song he played there 20 years ago was, the singer-songwriter thought a minute, then started into “Walk in the Woods,” his haunting tale of a journey into the unknown.

Little did Case know, when he kicked off his first-ever acoustic show at the Santa Monica guitar shop in February 1984, what a walk he was embarking on -- both in his own life and in blazing a path for others to escape the creative cul-de-sacs and business dead-ends besetting the Los Angeles rock scene.

For Case, it was the start of a new life as a globe-trotting troubadour that continues to this day.

He’d just left the Plimsouls, one of the leading lights of the early ‘80s L.A. indie world and “a perfectly good rock band,” as he put it on stage Friday. With his McCabe’s foray he showed that acoustic didn’t have to mean mellow and that the spirit of country, blues and rock roots shared much, at least in fire and expression, with punk. Soon rockers both local (Steve Wynn, the X/Blasters offshoot the Knitters) and international (Elvis Costello and R.E.M.) were to make McCabe’s a hotbed of rock-to-roots experiments.

Friday, with an audience ranging from people reminiscing about that first show to his own 13-year-old daughter, Case was loose and engaging as he recapped the two subsequent decades with songs running through his solo career, his sparkling 1986 solo debut, “Peter Case,” through 2003’s affecting “Beeline,” painting colorful anecdotal pictures of the human condition and drawing on time-transcendent music.

The opening song, “Ice Water,” sounded like John Lennon singing Mississippi Fred McDowell, highlighting Case’s formidable vocals and more aggressive Delta blues picking. More recent songs -- the 9/11-inspired “Something’s Coming,” the searching “The Dreams We Hide” -- set Case’s restless soul in blends of folk, blues and sometimes Irish sounds (“Celti-billy,” he explained), his voice sometimes soaring to a falsetto blue yodel, sometimes dipping into something that was part Blind Willie Johnson growl, part Tuvan throat singing.

Midshow he took side trips to honor blues heroes, with songs by Blind Willie McTell and Mississippi John Hurt, and later paired a moving version of Neil Young’s “Flying on the Ground is Wrong” (sounding as if it belonged on the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”) and a gorgeous arrangement of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Case’s own songs often depict journeys, be they the life narrative of “Poor Old Tom” or the nighttime stroll of “Walking Home Late.” Friday, it was clear he’s still striding steadily on that walk he started 20 years past.