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January 23-29, 2003 music Back to the Future
Cracker hasn't crumbled, but David Lowery says Camper Van Beethoven makes sense right now. Long before there was alternative music, modern rock or MTV's 120 Minutes, there was Camper Van Beethoven. In its seven-year run, the five-piece outsider outfit from Santa Cruz, Calif., covered ground as diverse as country, ska and world music, seamlessly blending it all together into a unique amalgamation of mutt music. By the decade's end -- before frontman David Lowery went on to form the much more commercially viable band, Cracker -- CVB rose to the surface as perhaps the most inspiring movement to eke out a spot in the '80s post-punk landscape. They popped up on college radio with songs like "Take the Skinheads Bowling" and "The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon." Now a dozen years after its cessation, Camper Van Beethoven is mounting a comeback in conjunction with the release of its box set, Cigarettes & Carrot Juice: The Santa Cruz Years, a collection of out-of-print albums and previously unreleased tracks. "The reason we've never done a pure Camper Van Beethoven show before was we just thought it might be too much like some sort of weird museum piece," Lowery says, speaking on his cell phone from Sound of Music, the studio he owns and runs in Richmond, Va. "We didn't want it to be like we were just pulling out something from 12 years ago, dusting it off and propping it up." Not long after CVB hung it up, Cracker made its self-titled debut in 1992. Since then, Lowery has churned out six releases with that band and lent his production skills to the likes of Joan Osborne, Counting Crows and Sparklehorse. But working in the studio always makes him restless to play his own music. "It's kind of hard being a musician making a living. You got to, like, do stuff all the time," he says. "But I'm kind of into this trip now with, like, staying out of the studio. I just need to kind of do things like where I'm playing and I'm an artist and stuff." He maintains that the biggest obstacle in the way of a full-on CVB reunion had always been nothing more than getting everyone together in the same place at the same time. It was a rift between Lowery and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel that originally ended the group's run, but the two have long since patched things up. In fact, on several different occasions Segel has worked with Cracker both on the road and in the studio. But it was after the string of Cracker dates in 2000 -- where Lowery called upon CVB bass player Victor Krummenacher to fill in -- that the idea of a formal reunion began taking shape. With Krummenacher officially signed on in Cracker's ranks and Segel in close contact, the three decided to pull together the Traveling Apothecary Show and Revue as an opening act for the tour. To round things out, they enlisted fellow CVB alum Greg Lisher, who had been working with Krummenacher in the offshoot Monks of Doom. The sets were a mix of the old and new, with each member performing solo numbers between CVB classics, new interpretations of Cracker favorites and a handful of Monks of Doom tunes, too. "What happened from those shows is that we started thinking that the Camper stuff was, oddly enough, relevant," Lowery says. "Our sort of garage-punk-ska-alt-country experimentalism really matched what was going on at the time, what with indie rock and the outer reaches of alt-country." He explains that with the current economic woes, the threat of war and with the Republicans at the helm in the nation's capital, these troubled times are awfully reminiscent of CVB's heyday. "A lot of our songs had a little bit of political and social commentary in them and, oddly, we kind of feel like we've ended up back in the same time," he says. "With all this hyper-patriotic jingoism, and xenophobia masquerading as patriotism, it's like we're in this sort of imperial Rome sort of phase in this country right now, much like we were in the late '80s." Relevancy, Lowery says, is the key to whether or not CVB will continue to carry on after this round of outings. He believes that without the release of the box set and the long awaited exhumation of the fabled Tusk recordings -- a song-for-song interpretation of the Fleetwood Mac classic -- CVB wouldn't have a reason to be touring. At the same time, he says, no one is ruling anything out either. "We're going to see if we can write some new songs," he says. "But it's got to somehow make sense. We always want to be creatively in the right place, but very few bands re-form and put together a record that anyone regards as good. It's just a really tricky thing to do." Camper Van Beethoven will perform Fri., Jan. 24, 9 p.m., $20-$23, The TLA, 334 South St., 215-336-2000. 
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