kleph
26-03-2006, 10:32 AM
First time I saw these guys the lead singer, David Lowery, started the show by stepping to the mike and simply stating "We're Camper Van Beethoven. We're from California. We're on acid." They then spent the next two and a half hours proving it.
Coming out of Santa Cruz in the mid-1980s this five-piece band offered up a bizarre style of music that nobody really knew what to do with. They called their music "surrealist absurdist folk,” and that was a good a description as any. Their early work traipsed gleefully across styles and musical genres carrying absurd lyrics and bizarre guitar and violin solos along with them. They gradually coalesced into a more unified whole by the end of their strange trip but never lost that affinity for the odd.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/cvb001.jpgThe heart of the band was David Lowery, who later went on to some renown with Cracker, violinist/keyboardist/auteur Johnathan Segel, guitarist Greg Lisher, bassist Victor Krummenacher and drummer Chris Pedersen (although the lineup changed a bit over the life of the group). The genius of the band was their complete awareness of how inbred and idiotic the alternative scene was despite its continual protestations about how it was above the mainstream music industry’s commission of those same sins. They poked fun at all of it with gleeful abandon.
Throughout their career, they continually earned comparisons to the Grateful Dead for their pseudo-hippy laid-back organic style but they had reams more personality and a sense of humor, to boot. Because a lot of folks have tried to read between the lines of the Campers work and I have always suspected that is a failed endeavor. The real point of the enterprise is to have fun, to make good music and to help everyone else have a good time as well. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty intensely hippy standard to hold.
To get a sense of how far afield their styles would range just look at the covers they committed to vinyl: Sonic Youth's “I Love Her All The Time,” Dock Boggs’ “Oh Death,” Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” Black Flag’s “Wasted,” The Kinks' “I'm Not Like Everybody Else,” The Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” Hank Williams Sr.’s “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),”and Ringo Starr's “Photograph.” They even recorded Fleetwood Mac’s album Tusk in it’s entirety and released it (albeit years later).
The mad trip started in June 1985 when Camper Van Beethoven unleashed their unheralded debut album Telephone Free Landslide Victory on the unsuspecting world. It had the glorious “Take the Skinheads Bowling” on it that we all fell in love with immediately but there was a lot of strangeness going on throughout the rest of the disk. Somehow this unholy union of ska, polka, punk, folk and God-knows-what-else became a compelling tour de force for a band no one knew how to describe. The skewed lyrics and bizarre instrumentals of this record were somehow fused together with the off-beat sense of humor that permeates every song.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/no15.jpgThe general feeling was that this was a wacky one shot but the Campers had different ideas. Their next release, “II and II” added the rubric of country, power pop and even a little bluegrass to their repertoire but that was just warming up for the alternative tour-de-force Camper Van Beethoven. This third album meandered its strange way across a landscape of folk rock, punk and country like the previous offering but also boasted a surreal psychedelic sheen the others lacked. (The liner notes describes it as 16-tracks of blazing duck decoy music then warn; “stay away from lakes.”) It's the aural equivalent of a Dali painting if the Spaniard had an affinity for jangly guitars. Until this point, Camper had been pretty much considered a novelty act but there was a strange acid-fried vision here that made people reassess the band.
The album ranges from simply whimsical "Good Guys and Bad Guys," to is the surreal monotone road trip of "Peace and Love," through the bizarre cover of a bizarre Pink Floyd song "Interstellar Overdrive," to the straight up rocker "Shut Us Down." A good example of what this album is like is the incomprehensible but intriguing "Five Sticks" that is actually just the "Ambiguity Song," from their first album in it's entirety backwards. This is a kind of experiment that could fall off the edge into parody but the sheer musicianship and honesty to this strange vision make the record transcend its eccentricies and become something simply sublime.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/no75.jpgAfter their first big-label album, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart this band lost one of it's founding members Jonathan Segal and most of us thought that was the end of a great original voice in alternative music. Instead, these addled freaks got a new violinist and went an entirely different direction and gave us Key Lime Pie. It was a more somber and reflective album and everyone hated it... but me. I listened to this CD endlessly that summer and it was a revelation each and every time.
It certainly doesn't have the quirkiness of the earlier records by the group but there is a soulful poetry to the album most of us didn't expect at the time. If this band had only recorded the glorious “All Her Favorite Fruit” they would have been a complete success. Some critics have described the sense of this album as disillusionment, I prefer to think of it as melancholy. They seem to know they have reached the end of the wonderful road they have been following and there is a sense of accomplishment as well as sadness.
The band kind of fell apart after that and the various members went their different ways. Lowery formed Cracker and a few of the others went on to record as The Monks of Doom. A few years ago the original lineup got back together and have recorded a new album These Roman Times. It’s an interesting work and a pretty good listen but it’s a different band. Fifteen years later these aren’t the absurdist prodigies anymore, they are professionals and the music they produce show it. And that is rather different than what the original Camper Van Beethoven was about.
Coming out of Santa Cruz in the mid-1980s this five-piece band offered up a bizarre style of music that nobody really knew what to do with. They called their music "surrealist absurdist folk,” and that was a good a description as any. Their early work traipsed gleefully across styles and musical genres carrying absurd lyrics and bizarre guitar and violin solos along with them. They gradually coalesced into a more unified whole by the end of their strange trip but never lost that affinity for the odd.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/cvb001.jpgThe heart of the band was David Lowery, who later went on to some renown with Cracker, violinist/keyboardist/auteur Johnathan Segel, guitarist Greg Lisher, bassist Victor Krummenacher and drummer Chris Pedersen (although the lineup changed a bit over the life of the group). The genius of the band was their complete awareness of how inbred and idiotic the alternative scene was despite its continual protestations about how it was above the mainstream music industry’s commission of those same sins. They poked fun at all of it with gleeful abandon.
Throughout their career, they continually earned comparisons to the Grateful Dead for their pseudo-hippy laid-back organic style but they had reams more personality and a sense of humor, to boot. Because a lot of folks have tried to read between the lines of the Campers work and I have always suspected that is a failed endeavor. The real point of the enterprise is to have fun, to make good music and to help everyone else have a good time as well. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty intensely hippy standard to hold.
To get a sense of how far afield their styles would range just look at the covers they committed to vinyl: Sonic Youth's “I Love Her All The Time,” Dock Boggs’ “Oh Death,” Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” Black Flag’s “Wasted,” The Kinks' “I'm Not Like Everybody Else,” The Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” Hank Williams Sr.’s “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard),”and Ringo Starr's “Photograph.” They even recorded Fleetwood Mac’s album Tusk in it’s entirety and released it (albeit years later).
The mad trip started in June 1985 when Camper Van Beethoven unleashed their unheralded debut album Telephone Free Landslide Victory on the unsuspecting world. It had the glorious “Take the Skinheads Bowling” on it that we all fell in love with immediately but there was a lot of strangeness going on throughout the rest of the disk. Somehow this unholy union of ska, polka, punk, folk and God-knows-what-else became a compelling tour de force for a band no one knew how to describe. The skewed lyrics and bizarre instrumentals of this record were somehow fused together with the off-beat sense of humor that permeates every song.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/no15.jpgThe general feeling was that this was a wacky one shot but the Campers had different ideas. Their next release, “II and II” added the rubric of country, power pop and even a little bluegrass to their repertoire but that was just warming up for the alternative tour-de-force Camper Van Beethoven. This third album meandered its strange way across a landscape of folk rock, punk and country like the previous offering but also boasted a surreal psychedelic sheen the others lacked. (The liner notes describes it as 16-tracks of blazing duck decoy music then warn; “stay away from lakes.”) It's the aural equivalent of a Dali painting if the Spaniard had an affinity for jangly guitars. Until this point, Camper had been pretty much considered a novelty act but there was a strange acid-fried vision here that made people reassess the band.
The album ranges from simply whimsical "Good Guys and Bad Guys," to is the surreal monotone road trip of "Peace and Love," through the bizarre cover of a bizarre Pink Floyd song "Interstellar Overdrive," to the straight up rocker "Shut Us Down." A good example of what this album is like is the incomprehensible but intriguing "Five Sticks" that is actually just the "Ambiguity Song," from their first album in it's entirety backwards. This is a kind of experiment that could fall off the edge into parody but the sheer musicianship and honesty to this strange vision make the record transcend its eccentricies and become something simply sublime.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/no75.jpgAfter their first big-label album, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart this band lost one of it's founding members Jonathan Segal and most of us thought that was the end of a great original voice in alternative music. Instead, these addled freaks got a new violinist and went an entirely different direction and gave us Key Lime Pie. It was a more somber and reflective album and everyone hated it... but me. I listened to this CD endlessly that summer and it was a revelation each and every time.
It certainly doesn't have the quirkiness of the earlier records by the group but there is a soulful poetry to the album most of us didn't expect at the time. If this band had only recorded the glorious “All Her Favorite Fruit” they would have been a complete success. Some critics have described the sense of this album as disillusionment, I prefer to think of it as melancholy. They seem to know they have reached the end of the wonderful road they have been following and there is a sense of accomplishment as well as sadness.
The band kind of fell apart after that and the various members went their different ways. Lowery formed Cracker and a few of the others went on to record as The Monks of Doom. A few years ago the original lineup got back together and have recorded a new album These Roman Times. It’s an interesting work and a pretty good listen but it’s a different band. Fifteen years later these aren’t the absurdist prodigies anymore, they are professionals and the music they produce show it. And that is rather different than what the original Camper Van Beethoven was about.