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David Lowery on 30 Years of Camper Van Beethoven
Well, there are good guys and there are bad guys
And there are crooks and criminals
There are doctors and there are lawyers
And there are folks like you and me
So, let's get high while the radio's on
Just relax and sing a song
Drive your car up on the lawn
Let me play your guitar
???Camper Van Beethoven, "Good Guys and Bad Guys"
see the whole picture, we have to travel back
in time, and many miles away. California's
Inland Empire in the early '80s was a hardcore
haven???not the sort of place you'd expect a
bunch of cagey, cultish pop-rockers to flourish. Camper Van
Beethoven is often cited as stylistic forbear of what would
come to be known as "indie" or "college rock," but the termi
nology is less significant than the attitude.
"It [was] sort of a joke, but sort of not," says the band's
frontman, David Lowery, perched in front of a computer in the
den of the historic Cobbham house he shares with his wife and
manager Velena Vego. "Camper Van Beethoven was a very odd
band to be in in 1983."
In person, Lowery exudes a certain jaded awareness, the
same brash and cloudy self-satisfaction that is at the heart
of his music. His wordy lyricism has often bordered on the
banal (see the beloved "Take the Skinheads Bowling") but has
also always seemed weirdly sagittate, aimed at some partially
obscured (internal?) target.
"Even at their most lysergic... they were always pretty
studently," wrote Jon Dolan in a 2003 Chicago Reader article.
"When indie rock rolled around, we'd call it 'snarky,' but
Lowery's mean spirit seemed to come from a real sense of
disappointment; he could poke fun at hippies and punks and
pseudointellectuals all he wanted, but he was staring in a
mirror."
The band's quirky, literate rock bore signs of ska and world
music but was grounded in a decidedly Californian jangle???
think a marginally more polished Pavement, years before that
group cheekily debated the merits of having "Two States"???and
Camper, in the mid-'80s, churned out ultra-weird, insta-classic
records at a steady clip. Consider Telephone Free Landslide
Victory, a scrappy pop album that appeared amidst a sea of
blistering West Coast punk and whose first song was called
"The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon."
The just-released La Costa Perdida, Camper's eighth offi
cial studio album (its first since 2004), is perhaps the most
straight-up record the band has ever made, a 10-track mixture
of earnest, melodic love songs ("Come Down the Coast") and
classic CVB cheek ("Peaches in the Summertime"). It is a fine
addition to an enviable discography, and Lowery is quick to
compliment his cohorts.
"Those guys are really good, quick, fast players," he says
of his bandmates. "What they have up here [pointing to his
head], getting it into their hands, that's the good thing about
Jonathan [Segel], Victor [Krummenacher] and Greg [Lisher]
La Costa Perdida sounds, too, like a band revitalized by
the realization of its own influence. Vego recalls that, prior
to returning to the stage in 2002 after a decade of inactivity,
Lowery fretted that perhaps Camper had been abandoned to
time. A string of sold-out shows???and the support of modern
indie masters like Modest Mouse???proved otherwise.
The approval of Lowery's fellow artists clearly means
something to him. He is enthused about the new album, but
he's equally jazzed to discuss the highlight reel. Throughout
our conversation, tales of early successes???opening for
Minutemen, for Dead Kennedys, for R.E.M.???abound, as do
memories of networking in a pre-Internet age.
"One of them, I don't remember who, wrote a review for
Maximumrocknroll, basically making it cool for the punk rock
kids to like us," he recalls. "These are the small things???you're
like, wow, if we hadn't had that, I don't know if we would've
gotten our chance."
L owery recalls the first comment that appeared under
"Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered," the
most-viewed post by far on his Trichordist blog.
"We're gonna turn you into Lars Ulrich," the comment
read, a reference to the Metallica drummer who took on then-
filesharing giant Napster and quickly became Internet enemy
number one.
ICYMI: Last June, White, a young NPR music intern, wrote
a blog post about having no connection to physical music and
innocently proposed a "universal database," where "everyone
would have convenient access to everything that has ever been
recorded."
Lowery's unsolicited response was a passionate, pedantic
indictment of the system ("the new boss," as he likes to call
it), that murky, quasi-legal miasma of online streaming and
sharing that has led to a dramatic decrease in artists' revenues.
His letter lamented the "fundamental shift in principals [sic]
and morality... about who gets to control and exploit the work
of an artist." Controversially, Lowery linked the new boss in
no uncertain terms to the recent suicides of two longtime???
and debt-burdened???musician friends, Mark Linkous and Vic
Chesnutt.
The response was swift, a barrage of online attacks from
tech folks and free culture adherents???"Freehadists," as Lowery
not-so-subtly calls them???who took issue with his comments
and aimed, not so subtly, to take him down.
Many painted a picture of Lowery as a bitter, vengeful fail
ure. "Why don't you face it. Most people don't want to hear
16 FLAGP0LE.C0M-JANUARY 23, 2013
JASON THRASHER