I Hate This Part of Texas

Camper Van Beethoven have been back together longer than they were the first time. Is New Roman Times the greatest reunion record ever made?

Multiple choice question: which of the following rock’n’roll battle-axes would you shell out 15 bucks for?

A) The Concept Album… or its close sibling, the rock opera.

B) The Protest Album… made only in the event of a Republican administration, natch.

C) The Reunion Record… after 15 years apart.

D) The Prog Experiment… a.k.a, “broadening the sound.”

E) All of the above.

Wait, you were expecting “none of the above?” Now you can truly appreciate New Roman Times (Pitch-A-Tent/Vanguard), Camper Van Beethoven’s first album since 1989. It’s a concept album. It’s an anti-war and anti-corporate manifesto. It’s a reunion record. And the prog, well… that was always there.

As punk-inspired pranksters in sensamilla-and-granola haven Santa Cruz, CVB — vocalist/guitarist David Lowery, guitarist Greg Lisher, violinist/keyboardist Jonathan Segel, bassist Victor Krummenacher and (among others) drummer Chris Pedersen — moved merrily between hardcore and hippie, world music and country, self-indulgent psychedelia and self-disciplined pop. If Camper Van Beethoven hadn’t existed, the Bonnaroo Festival would have had to invent them.

“We sort of made this cool music by not being able to accomplish what we were trying to do,” says Lowery.

That may have been true when the band formed in 1984, but Camper quickly established both a sound and a dynamic. Two decades later, that dynamic can’t be killed — and few bands can say that following a long hiatus.

The typical reunion is about passion and nostalgia, except when it’s about money. Bands return to what’s familiar and beloved, and fans don’t want it any other way. Nobody wants to hear the tunes from right before the break-up. Nothing is more dreaded than the sentence, “this is a new song.” It’s all about the greatest hits, played just like you remember. The music’s not a living organism.

Camper’s chemistry still bubbles. The joy is in the way they play together, not just that they’re doing “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” In fact, the CVB set list tends to feature more songs from their two Virgin records, 1987's “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” and 1989's “Key Lime Pie,” than their three earlier indie efforts. “New Roman Times” picks up right where they left off.

“We didn’t want it to just be an exercise in nostalgia,” says Lowery. “Very few bands come back together and make a record that critics regard, or fans regard, as being as good as the original recordings.”

As the 43rd President of the United States might say, “mission accomplished!”

But we’ll save the politics for later.

It’s remarkable to realize that five records in five years was the entire Camper ouevre. But then, most bands that give us five good records either need more time to do it, or go on to make five lousy ones. Camper went away before their time was up, as a polished and proficient unit who never let increasing musical ability snuff out the band’s original anarchic spark. If that seems like an ordinary feat, don’t forget we’re talking about indie-rock.

“That drives me completely crazy — people who are like, ‘oh wow, you guys are too good!,’” says Krummenacher. “Compared to who? What do you like to go see? Me, I like to see Richard Thompson, or Los Lobos, or X. People who are pretty fucking good. We didn’t worship amateurism. That’s one of the things that always brings me back — at least we can play.”

Not bad for what was originally a side project, one where all the members took up instruments they didn’t know. Lowery was the bass player in a well-known local band called Box of Laffs. Segel, though a music composition student who now plays half a dozen instruments, was mostly a guitarist. Camper was intended as a party band, the idea being, in Krummenacher’s words, “to play music that nobody else was going to play. David and I had been in punk rock bands. We thought, fuck, man — the football players are doing what we used to do!”

Krummenacher had already had his “little nihilistic dressed-in-black-mind” opened up to jazz and country– the latter being his Missourian grandfather’s favorite, much to Grandma’s disapproval (she considered it low class). Segel was the internationalist, the man behind ethnic influences like Caribbean or klezmer, which he ascribes to “the accidental world culture of growing up in the latter half of the 20th Century. We’re exposed to so much. Like, you probably know what Afghani music sounds like. How is that? And could you make some Afghani music even though you’re not Afghani? Yes.”

There were also elements of surf-rock, which Lowery notes “was accepted as part of the vocabulary of California punk, the way in England ska was.” But while Camper Van Beethoven were a fiercely D.I.Y. collective who covered Black Flag and got their cassettes reviewed in “Maximum Rock’n’Roll,” they also gave off a certain other vibe. Drugs. Long hair. Being from Santa Cruz. Even the name….

“We weren’t really hippies,” says Lowery. “That was sort of our schtick.” He still remembers listening to a mix tape the band’s manager Jackson Haring made, which went from Sonic Youth to experimental jazz to Fairport Convention to Grateful Dead live bootlegs. “Putting the Dead in context like that sort of opened my eyes,” he says. “Of course, it may have been the pot.”

If it was schtick, it served them well. Camper is now recognized as an influence on jam bands, alt-country types and post-punk popsters alike. Even as they went from underground college radio darlings to MTV alterna-faves, they remained completely unpredictable. “We were always getting bored,” says Lowery. “Every time we’d slide into a spot that was in the mainstream of hip music, we’d fuck it up, try to go to another place.”

Sometimes that meant playing one of their own songs backwards. Sometimes it meant dropping a snippet of “Dazed and Confused” into a middle eight. Even the bigger, cleaner sound of “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” was something of a radical artistic choice — the obvious move would have been to sabotage the major label process, or at least pretend to do so for the sake of cred.

Camper lost a bit of that with “Key Lime Pie,” not so much because they had a hit (covering Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men”), but because there was an unfamilar fiddler (Morgan Fichter) in the band instead of Segel. That brought things to an end, and rightly so.

Lowery remained on Virgin, continuing to ride the alt-rock wave by forming Cracker with his old friend Johnny Hickman. Lisher, Krummenacher and Segel took the more adventurous (and wanky) path, becoming Monks of Doom.

But over time, the members reconvened. While Segel was the first to be cast out — “there was a period where me and Jonathan actively disliked each other,” Lowery admits — he was also the first to return, and Lowery says they are the closest friends within the band. A prolific performer, Segel has collaborated with the likes of Fred Frith and also works as a recording engineer. He was thrust back into the Camper orbit as a touring member of Sparklehorse, one of several artists based out of Sound of Music, the recording studio Lowery co-owns in his current home of Richmond, Virginia.

Meanwhile, Krummenacher was playing and recording on his own as well. He and Segel had a label, Magnetic Motorworks, which has released nearly a dozen records by the two of them, solo and in various configurations. Lisher, the only native Santa Cruzan in the band, returned home to help out with his family’s business, then made his solo debut (also on Magnetic) in 2000. That same year, all three men turned up for a loosely amalgamated Cracker tour, “The Travelling Apothecary Show.” Each of the Camper guys did their own thing, then they’d play together.

That turned into a full-fledged reunion. Sure, it didn’t hurt that the band had a record to “promote,” their long-ago recording of “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac (the entire album, not just the one song). But even more than that, it simply felt right — and for reasons that went far beyond the music and the playing. Truth is, if there’s one person we can thank for the Camper Van Beethoven reunion, it’s George W. Bush. That’s because all of Camper’s songs date from the era of, as Segel puts it, “Reagan/First Bush.”

“Back,” Krummenacher says bitterly, “when we thought things were really dark and fucked up.”

This is after all, a band whose equipment trailer and instrument cases include such bumper stickers as “Who Would Jesus Bomb?,” “We’re Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them” and”Re-Elect Gore in 2004.” So when you see them on a stage it’s unavoidable — all the paranoia, satire and radical humanism, the references to Stalin and Pinochet, “everybody’s going home for lunch these days” — it all comes flooding back with fresh resonance and irony. Even “Tania,” the ode to Patti Hearst that is “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart”’s title track, suddenly feels ready-made for the age of reality TV.

What was also unavoidable was Lowery’s need to write some timely songs — and they had to be for Camper. Sure, Cracker was (and is) a continuing concern, but as Lowery said in Cracker’s best-known song, “what the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head.” What the world *did* need now (besides love, sweet love), was a Pynchonesque rock opera imagining a universe in which there’s civil war in California and a group of revolutionaries known as the CVB are in guerilla combat with a “corporate military regime” of drug dealers, weapons manufacturers and Texans. Have we mentioned that it isn’t fiction?

“It’s basically about today’s politics,” says Lowery. “Soldiers, revolutionaries, suicide bombers, right wing fundamentalist Christians. But because we’re Camper, we have to be sort of tangential. It’s our little sci-fi thing.

“The story is, it’s the 1970s, and the map of North America looks more like the map of South America — shared language, similar governments, but different countries,” he continues. “And basically, there’s a civil war in California in which Texas intervenes, on the fascist side. And the CVB is like the Black Panther party. We tell the story through the eyes of a Texas soldier — a Texas thug.”

Remarkably, “New Roman Times” is neither preachy nor ridiculous. It’s more akin to Doonesbury’s recent B.D. storyline than anything by Michael Moore. The title track, with its childlike backing vocals, steel guitar and lyrics about apathetic wives and long-lost case workers, is truly heartbreaking.

You also get the expected dose of comedy — “I Hate This Part of Texas” is an atmospheric experimental track, partly en espanol, that references a legend scrawled on every rock club dressing room that’s *not* in Texas. Then there’s the record’s rousing climax, an epic art-rock anthem that vows, “I would die for hippie chicks!” New Roman Times is perfectly modulated between crispness and weirdness, pop craft and prog chaos — a near-perfect alchemy of what the band did in its early days and what they eventually became, a brand new sonic beast that’s moody, textured and beautiful as well as ballsy, skronkish and unhinged.

“It’s definitely weirder than anything we did on the last two records,” says Lisher. “I think it’s most similar to “Camper Van Beethoven.” Lowery echoes that comparison, if only in terms of the psychedelic jamming and tape manipulations, which were largely absent from the Virgin discs.

“We had to make sure we weren’t being reactionary,” he says. “It ‘s a hard thing to do a reunion record. So many of them fail and suck, because people either think, ‘We need to be modern and do what’s done today,’ or, ‘We gotta sound just like we used to.’ Both those choices are kind of wrong. This record’s modern, but also pays homage to how we were before.”

Original and auxiliary Campers Chris Molla, Anthony Guess and David Immergluck all put in appearances, while drummer Pedersen, who now lives in Australia, was there for most of it. “He cements the group in a completely different way,” says Segel. “Even 10–15 years later, when you get the same people playing the songs, it’s like, the cement is still good.”

Live, Frank Funaro, formerly of the Del Lords and currently in Cracker, sits in the drummer’s chair. “Once things are recorded, Frank has a really easy time pulling it off, so you kind of can’t tell the difference,” Lowery says. “If he was in the studio with us, it would come out differently.”

At a recent gig, Funaro talked about seeing a picture of the reunited Blondie. “Who are those guys?” he thought of the new members. Then he realized, to a Camper fan, “that’s me!”

Truth is, in terms of personnel there is currently very little difference between Camper Van and Cracker. Funaro’s bass drum has CRACKER in blue letters, with “AMP” taped over the “RACK” when necessary. Kenny Margolis (Lucky 7), who plays accordion and keys for Cracker, also augments Segel’s work in Camper. Krummenacher is in fact the current Cracker bassist, and Segel frequently sits in. Guitarists Lisher and Hickman are the only X factors.

But in Camper, Lowery parks himself stage right, and he, Segel, Lisher and Krummenacher appear in a straight line, four equals in complete collaboration. In Cracker, Lowery moves to center, with Hickman right there next to him. You could almost say Cracker is the more streamlined Gov’t Mule to Camper’s Allman Brothers. Or, as Hickman offers, “Cracker is from the Neil Young side of things, whereas Camper is from the Frank Zappa side of things.”

In the end, there’s just something nonpareil about the interplay of Segel’s violin, Lisher’s guitar, Lowery’s songwriting and an anything-goes rhythm. There’s never been another band like Camper. It’s about what the five members bring out in each other, for as long as they can stand it.

“None of us really gets off on the lowest common denominator,” says Krummenacher. “We’re always trying to raise the bar on each other. And then it gets competitive, and then it gets weird.”

“So after a while,” says Segel, “you learn, well, that’s just what our dynamic is.”

Who knows? That dynamic just might last another 20 years.

(Omnivore Recordings’ deluxe reissue of New Roman Times is out on February 24. This article originally appeared in Stereophile magazine in 2004.)