The Nerves gigged relentlessly, helped other groups gain fame, and wrote a song that gave Blondie a signature track. Now, a deathbed wish may finally bring the band the recognition it never received.

The Nerves should have had success. Formed in 1974, the trio of Jack Lee (guitar, vocals), Peter Case (bass, vocals) and Paul Collins (drums, vocals) wrote catchy melodies and rehearsed and performed intensely. The band did not see itself as punk and rejected the label “power pop.” It aimed to pack ambitious ideas into short, energetic songs of about two minutes.

When the music industry ignored them, the Nerves released their own EP and booked a demanding nationwide tour. They shared stages with Devo and the Ramones. The band split in 1978. Soon after, Blondie's third album, Parallel Lines, opened with a cover of the Nerves' song “Hanging on the Telephone.” The song had been a Nerves calling card, and Blondie's version overshadowed the original.

Early Years

Paul Collins, speaking from his New York home, recalled his early hopes. “I figured it would be two weeks, or a month tops, before we were famous,” he said. Collins had studied at Juilliard and dropped out to head for the West Coast. “I was barely 18, I had 80 bucks in my pocket and I was scared to death,” he said. Within three days of arriving in San Francisco, he found an advert on a record store wall. It led him to Jack Lee, who had moved there from Sitka, Alaska.

Peter Case was harder to recruit. He left school at 15 and moved from Buffalo to San Francisco. He played blues and country standards on the street to earn money for food. “I slept in a beat-up van parked down by the water,” Case said. “It wasn't even my van.” Lee and Case became friends when Case was busking. When Collins joined, the band began to take shape. “You just couldn't find people that wanted to do something that was that out of joint,” Case said. “There was nobody else like Jack around, someone who had a vision, wanted to go with it and could write.”

The band rented a three-storey flophouse and held practice sessions that could last up to 16 hours. “It was like being in boot camp,” Collins said. “My snare drum would be covered with blood because we were playing so fast. It was three people acting as one person, and it was a 24-hour endeavour.”

Struggle and Setbacks

Despite their effort, the band had limited prospects. Their peers were few, and they mostly played to small bar audiences. After Lee recovered from a near-fatal stabbing, the group moved to Los Angeles. There they connected with local figures, including Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer. They also arranged early shows for the punk bands the Germs and the Weirdos. “It turned out to be a bitter pill to swallow, because they instantly became much more popular than we did!” Collins said.

In 1977, the band organised a national tour that lasted 71 days, included 39 gigs and visited 16 cities. During the tour, they met the Dead Boys and Cheap Trick and played several dates with the Ramones. “The Ramones' work ethic was even more stringent than ours,” Collins recalled. “They'd be practising before the show, and afterwards they'd go back to the hotel and work on songs.”

Not every encounter was friendly. “We played Boston, and when we were loading in, there were these four guys completely dressed in leather,” Collins said. “One of them goes, ‘What the fuck do you think you're doing? You're touring all over the country. 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.’ So we look at them and say, ‘Yeah, well what's the name of your band? The Cars? What a stupid name…’”

Constant travel and last-minute bookings took a heavy toll. “It's like a plant,” Collins said. “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.”

Later Careers

After a period in the Breakaways, Collins and Case formed the Beat and the Plimsouls. Both bands achieved the success the Nerves had not. Lee worked on a solo career and funded two albums himself. His song “Come Back and Stay” became a hit for Paul Young. Meanwhile, “Hanging on the Telephone” was covered by many artists, including L7, Def Leppard and Girls Aloud. The Nerves, however, remained largely unknown.

A New Anthology

A new anthology may now draw attention to the band. Lee's daughter, Cynthia Cook, is behind the project. “My dad tasked me with this on his deathbed,” she said. “His dream was to be on Jack White's label Third Man Records.” Cook grew up writing songs with her father. Their first song, “Rock'n'Roll Rabbit,” was written when she was five. However, she said the music industry was not her usual field. “My dad was all about the long shot,” she said. “You know, I'm a mom who works in real estate … but I should go get a deal with Third Man.”

Cook is now sorting through a large archive of her father's work. “I have cassettes from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s,” she said. “There's about three albums' worth of releasable material.” Her discoveries so far include a MySpace recording that a fan had saved and a live tape. The tape was recorded by an off-duty waitress at the Whiskey a Go Go and was found in a closet 50 years later.

Legacy

The surviving members reflect on the band's legacy with measured views. “It makes me realise that we did everything wrong in certain ways, and everything right in others,” Case said. “It didn't work out well at the time, but the music is here now, 50 years later. Who would have ever thought that?”