The Nerves’ 50-year coda after Blondie made them vanish

By Daniel Okafor

In 1977, the Nerves played 39 gigs in 16 cities over 71 days. Blondie’s cover of “Hanging on the Telephone” then sidelined the trio. The cover seemed to scrub them from history.

How did the Nerves nearly disappear?

The Nerves formed in 1974 around Jack Lee, Peter Case and Paul Collins. Lee played guitar and sang; Case played bass and sang; Collins played drums and sang. They wrote, rehearsed and gigged as if their lives depended on it. They were not quite punk and rejected “power pop” (short, melody-led rock) as a label. Their goal: “epic brilliance” in effervescent, two-minute songs.

When the music industry ignored them, they pressed their own EP (a short independently issued record) and booked a gruelling nationwide tour, sharing stages with Devo and the Ramones. The band split in 1978.

Paul Collins grew up in New York with a bohemian upbringing. He studied at Juilliard and loved rock ’n’ roll. He dropped out for the West Coast. “I was barely 18, I had 80 bucks in my pocket and I was scared to death,” he recalls.

Within three days in San Francisco, Collins found a record-store advertisement that introduced him to Jack Lee, who had transplanted himself from Sitka, Alaska. Collins expected faster success. “I figured it would be two weeks, or a month tops, before we were famous,” he says from his New York home.

Peter Case left school at 15 and left Buffalo for San Francisco. He busked blues and country standards for food. “I slept in a beat-up van parked down by the water,” Case says. “It wasn’t even my van.” Lee met him while he was busking. Collins’s arrival turned the idea into a working band.

Case found in Lee the combination the trio needed. “There was nobody else like Jack around – someone who had a vision, wanted to go with it and could write,” he says. They moved into a three-storey flophouse and rehearsed for as long as 16 hours.

The practice was relentless. Collins said his snare drum became covered with blood because they played so fast. “It was three people acting as one person,” he says. He described a “24-hour endeavour” with “no on and off.”

The trio saw no clear peers beyond the Flamin’ Groovies and the aloof, leather-clad Crime. Barflies and fist-swinging off-duty servicemen offered little promise. After Lee recovered from a near-fatal stabbing, the band left for Los Angeles.

There, they met scene figures Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer and organized early shows for the punk bands the Germs and the Weirdos. Collins calls their sudden popularity “a bitter pill to swallow, because they instantly became much more popular than we did!” The Nerves received none of that momentum.

What happened on the road?

Their 1977 national tour covered 71 days, 39 gigs and 16 cities. They connected with the Dead Boys and Cheap Trick. Several dates with the Ramones followed. Collins says the Ramones’ work ethic was “even more stringent than ours.”

The Ramones practiced before shows, then returned to their hotel to work on songs while Collins remembered a post-show meal at a large wooden table. Dee Dee asked, “May I be excused? I have to go to the bathroom.”

In Boston, four leather-clad newcomers challenged their right to tour without a manager or agent. One warned: “You don’t have a manager. You don’t have an agent. It’s bullshit. We know what we’re fucking doing. We’re going to be huge.” The Nerves asked their name and replied: “The Cars? What a stupid name…”

The Nerves traveled thousands of miles in a station wagon and booked gigs on the fly. “It’s like a plant,” says Collins. “You don’t give it water, you don’t give it sunlight, it’s gonna die.” “We couldn’t get any industry acceptance, and I think we’d taken all we could.”

How did Blondie eclipse the band?

After a stint in the Breakaways, Collins formed the Beat and Case formed the Plimsouls, with both bands enjoying the success that had escaped the Nerves. Lee pursued a solo career and self-funded two albums. Paul Young later made “Come Back and Stay” a hit.

Blondie’s hit third album, Parallel Lines, opened with the Nerves’ “Hanging on the Telephone.” The cover turned their signature song into a standard while leaving its writers obscure. L7, Def Leppard and Girls Aloud later covered it too. The Nerves never achieved the commercial reach of bands they had supported on the road.

What can the anthology recover?

Fifty years on, Jack Lee’s daughter, Cynthia Cook, is preparing an anthology (a compilation). “My dad tasked me with this on his deathbed,” she says. His dream was to release the material through Jack White’s Third Man Records.

Cook grew up writing songs with her father, their first was “Rock’n’Roll Rabbit” when she was five, and she says the music industry was never her home turf. “My dad was all about the long shot,” she says. “I’m a mom who works in real estate … but I should go get a deal with Third Man.” The long shot succeeded.

She now faces the more tedious task of sifting a lifetime’s songs. Cook describes herself as overwhelmed and overjoyed. “I have cassettes from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s,” she says. “There’s about three albums’ worth of releasable material.” Her finds include a MySpace cut the band quickly discarded and a fan preserved.

A live tape came from an off-duty Whiskey a Go Go waitress. Cook found it in a closet 50 years later.

The surviving members take a philosophical view. “It makes me realise that we did everything wrong in certain ways, and everything right in others,” says Case. The music remains, he notes, “50 years later.” The anthology offers those songs a more attentive second life, and perhaps the Nerves a less accidental afterlife.