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Camper Van Beethoven

Certain Songs #172: Camper Van Beethoven – “All Her Favorite Fruit”

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Album: Key Lime Pie
Year: 1989

The most serious – i.e. the only serious – album that Camper Van Beethoven made, for the first side, Key Lime Pie is also the best album they ever made. While their trademark psychedelic absurdity remained, it found itself serving songs with actual specific politics – left-wing, thereby surprising no one – attached.  Though, naturally, Camper Van Beethoven couldn’t be bothered to write their anti-Reagan song (a staple of the 1980s indie scene) until after he left office.

Sadly, side two of Key Lime Pie didn’t hold up, and even the Status Quo cover that topped that alt-rock charts that year just left me cold. That said, smack dab in the middle of a sea of songs I haven’t played on purpose in 25 years stands “All Her Favorite Fruit,” which is my favorite Camper Van Beethoven song.

Slow, majestic and brooding, “All Her Favorite Fruit” was a twisted love song featuring a gorgeous guitar hook (that kinda reminded me of early U2 at the time) snaking around a soaring violin, as well as one of my favorite Lowery lines:

And I’d like to take her there, rather than this train

Thinking about it now, it’s not early U2 that “All Her Favorite Fruit” reminds me of, it’s Pavement circa Wowee Zowee, where the tempos have slowed, but the guitar hooks you can sing along with still remain. If you think hard enough, you could hear “All Her Favorite Fruit” easily share space with “Grounded” or “Father To A Sister of Thought”

Of course, in 1989, Pavement was in about the same place in their development that Camper Van Beethoven were during the Telephone Free Landslide Victory, but I now wonder if  Camper Van’s later days was any kind of example for their fellow Californians.

Certain Songs #171: Camper Van Beethoven – “Life is Grand”

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Album: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Year: 1988

It’s entirely possible that there were more unlikely major-label signings in the late-1980s than Camper Van Beethoven, but none come to mind. And not that I cared: my philosophy is that an artist can make great music just as easily for a major label as they can for an indie, and I’ve heard as many tales of artists getting fiscally screwed by indies as I have of artists getting screwed by majors.

And yeah, there’s always the “meddling record company” aspect, but it seems to me that any artist who lets a record company fuck that much with their music probably wasn’t fully committed to it in the first place, and it’s entirely possible that I might not have liked them on an indie anyways.

And in 2015, with the major record labels essentially hollowed-out husks of what they once were, I’m guessing that it’s a distinction without a difference to a lot of young people – maybe even for the hipsters who buy the vinyl where you can still see the actual physical manifestations of the labels.

Anyways, this is a roundabout way of saying that there was definitely an effect of recording with a major-label producer: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart definitely sounds better than the earlier CVB records.  But luckily – with its twisty songs about acid-eating cowboys, Patti Hearst and Death – it remained uniquely weird. It still sounded like no one else in the universe.

And I loved the bouncy “Life is Grand,” which confronted our generational cynicism head-on with a perfect combination of bouncy music and optimistic lyrics:

And life is grand
And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor
With those of you who have appointed yourselves
To expect us to say something darker

And love is real
And though I realize this is not a deep observation
To those of you who find it necessary
To conceal love or obscure it, as is the fashion

Coming out during the onset of what I still consider the worst summer of my life, I didn’t particularly believe “Life is Grand”  – especially that verse about love – but I was sure glad that it existed. Even in the existentially dark mood I was in, I could appreciate what Camper Van Beethoven was trying to say, and actually hoped that I would eventually agree with it. Which, of course, I do.

“Life is Grand”

Certain Songs #170: Camper Van Beethoven – “Abundance”

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Album: II & III.

Year: 1986.

I remember three things about my on-air interview with Camper Van Beethoven at KFSR in 1985:

1) I accidentally taped over the Paul Westerberg interview I had done only a couple of months prior. This is still the single stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t cause any physical or psychological damage to anyone else.  Oh. I then lost the tape of the Camper Van Beethoven interview. Look, I got out of the 80s alive, that’s all that matters.

2) Then, for some reason, I compared the sound of Telephone Free Landslide Victory to that of The Basement Tapes. I think that I was reacting to the lo-fi-ness of it all – not to mention the “we’ll try anything” spirit – but in retrospect, this is a pretty stupid observation, because the only electric violin that Bob Dylan had on any of his records until Desire was in the lyrics of “Desolation Row.”

3) At some point in the proceedings, one of them – let’s just assume it was David Lowery, because why not? – grabbed my sheet of the questions I’d prepared in advance and said, “Let us ask you the questions!”  Which led to this following exchange: 

DAVID LOWERY: “Why do you write so many instrumentals?”
ME: “Because we don’t know how to write lyrics.”

Luckily, being good sports, they all thought that was a hilarious answer.

And, of course, the first couple of Camper Van Beethoven albums were chock full of instrumentals, my favorite being the song that led off their second album, II & III, “Abundance.”

A near-psychedelic melange of sawing violins and big drums (augmented by some kick-ass tambourine), “Abundance” has always been my favorite of the Camper Van Beethoven instrumentals, because it sounds like they weren’t trying to do any kind of particular style, but rather combining everything into a totally unique whole.

I’m also pretty sure that they gave KFSR (or one of our DJs) a tape of “Abundance” a few months in advance of II & III, because I’m almost positive there was a cart (a special 8-track-like tape for radio stations that always circled back to the beginning of the tape after the content was over) of it that we played before the album came out. Not that there was a huge gap between records.

Video for “Abundance”

A List of All of The Songs I’ve Written About

Certain Songs #169: Camper Van Beethoven – “Take The Skinheads Bowling”

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Album: Telephone Free Landslide Victory

Year: 1985.

While every musical artist is at least somewhat a result of the time and place from which they appear, some artists could be doing that they do pretty much anytime in the past few decades –  Drive-By Truckers or Oasis or Courtney Barnett – and it wouldn’t be radically different at the root. Other artists, however, are totally and completely specific to their time and space. They literally could only only arisen from whence and where they arose.

Like Camper Van Beethoven, who could have only come from the college scene of the 1980s.  If punk rock changed our lives – and it did in two ways: 1) reminding us that anyone could play music and 2) do it yourself, you idiot! – then the American indie scene that spontaneously arose from sea to shining sea was the actual manifestation of that change.

Get some beer, get some instruments, get some weed, get a space, steal some electricity, start playing and see what happens.  Because we all could be nuked any day now anyway. And, of course, eventually everybody figures out their style. They’re hardcore, or ska, or experimental, or country, or R&B, or folk, or even rock.  Well, almost everybody. Not Camper Van Beethoven.

With the exception of R&B, Camper Van Beethoven, played just about everything under the sun. Sometimes all at that same time!  And it was all natural, not calculated. It was just what they did, dude! If someone tried this now, it might be great, but it wouldn’t feel half as natural as their folk-rock Black Flag cover did.

As a proud 1980s California Bohemian (retired), it’s my duty to argue that the “everything but the kitchen sink, oh what the fuck include that too!” approach of fellow Californians Camper Van Beethoven is epitome of the 1980s American indie spirit, and not just because they seemed to love Fresno (or at least the girls in Fresno) enough to play for us several times (including a house party of which I have zero memories beyond them playing it).

Oh yeah, “Take The Skinheads Bowling,” a song with a catchy enough tune that it probably didn’t matter what David Lowery actually sang, but of course the fact that it seemed like he was making fun of skinheads or maybe just having fun with skinheads that made it even more catchy.  And it featured one of my favorite bits of call-and-response ever:

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes 
(Got big lanes, got big lanes)
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same
(Look the same, look the same)
There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything
(Anything, anything)
I had a dream last night, but I forget what it was
(What it was, what it was)

Staying just on the right side of novelty song with the absurdist lyrics (novelty songs have a lyrical point) and straightforward music featuring Jonathan Segel’s violin hook (yes, I said “violin hook”), “Take The Skinheads Bowling” became an unlikely underground hit, and a fun cover to do when I was playing drums in Blackbird Stories.

“Take The Skinheads Bowling” performed live at Amoeba 2013

Video for “Take The Skinheads Bowling”

23 Musical Moments to Die For, Part 2

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NOTE: Because of a godsdammed bug between Flash and Firefox for Windows, I’ve had to break this up into two parts in order for the players to work for those with that particular configuration. Stupid internets.

If you’re running Firefox and get stuck on “buffering,” restarting your browser should work.

[Read more…] about 23 Musical Moments to Die For, Part 2