#camper van beethoven

[cure-smiths-headrest]

My ship will take me very far.

So that I can rest among the stars.

But it’s not goodbye,

it’s just my time

-to finally shine.

Hey, Space Cadet - Car Seat Headrest | Space Travel is Boring - Modest Mouse | Lassie Went to the Moon - Camper Van Beethoven | Yellow - Robert Service | A Dog Has Died - Pablo Neruda | Beach Life-In-Death - Car Seat Headrest

just some Laika appreciation

[adhdkiramman]

record store cd finds while out with my partner today <3 being away from our apartment and back in our shitty hometown for the holiday makes it feel like we’re lovesick high schoolers again, going on dates to the same 3 places and making out in the back of my car.

anyway, here’s my cd haul + a cassette for my walkman:

i’m most excited about the arrested development cd because it’s one of my favorite albums, but super happy with all of them!! i also got i love rock and roll by joan jett and the blackhearts on vinyl and a camper van beethoven promo record !!!

[rastronomicals]

7:10 AM EST January 21, 2025:

Camper Van Beethoven - "ZZ Top Goes To Egypt" From the album II & III (January 1986)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[mudwerks]

(via Opening Theme - Camper Van Beethoven (1989)

[sinceileftyoublog]

Cracker Interview: Telling the Band's Story

Photo by Jason Thrasher

BY JORDAN MAINZER

"Sometimes, nowadays, you don't have control over what you're promoting and marketing."

Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven front-man David Lowery, speaking to me over the phone from his hometown Athens, GA, was referring to songs going viral on TikTok when you least expect or even desire it, something that's happened to artists from Duster to Faye Webster. But control is exactly what Cracker have been seeking for the past two decades. In 2006, a day after their previous label Virgin Records issued a Cracker greatest hits record without the band's permission, Cracker released their own, Greatest Hits Redux, via British independent label Cooking Vinyl. More importantly, the songs on Redux were rerecorded, meaning Cracker owned the masters, and the band priced them on iTunes for less than the versions on Virgin's collection, resulting in greater sales for the Redux versions. Plus, if you were a Cracker diehard or completist, wouldn't you have wanted to nab the technically "different" versions of these classic songs?

In November, Lowery and company called back to their previous middle finger to the music industry, releasing Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective, also via Cooking Vinyl. The compilation contains the Redux versions of the band's most popular tunes as well as their past collaborative rerecords with Boulder bluegrass jammers Leftover Salmon, live recordings from Madrid and the German TV show Rockpalast, deep cuts, and previously unreleased material. Lowery, also a Senior Lecturer in Music Business at the University of Georgia, is as privy to anyone to the general listening habits of Gen-Z, knowing that music listeners increasingly favor playlists over albums. Consider Alternative History Cracker's official band playlist.

In fact, some of the versions on Alternative History have become canon in the ears of fans. If you've caught Cracker performing "I See the Light" live, the spritely ending here (originally on Redux) should sound more familiar than the comparatively slower outro from their self-titled debut. The jaunty barroom pianos of the Leftover Salmon collaborative version of "Sweet Potato" breathes new life into the Kerosene Hat standout. Leftover Salmon also help Cracker get to the point on "Eurotrash Girl", the arrangement carried by Noam Pikelny's banjo rather than dripping psychedelic guitars.

Of course, Cracker hopes that Alternative History becomes anything but alternate--if not definitive, that it stands on its own. It provides Lowery the opportunity to tweak his vocal performance and banjo playing on "Almond Grove", and for the band to remix, ever so slightly, even recordings released a mere few years ago. The compilation ends with "Ain't Gonna Suck Itself", the band's infamous dismissal of Virgin Records that appeared on 2003's Countrysides. It was the only non-cover song on that album, and ironically, wasn't rerecorded when it appeared on Redux. Here, we see the now indie rock band dangling a carrot over the heads of major label executives, cheekily asserting the control they continuously fight to keep.

Cracker's currently on tour in support of Alternative History, and on Sunday, they stop at Old Town School of Folk Music for two shows: an afternoon unplugged set and an evening full band show. Below, read my conversation with Lowery, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Why did you decide to release this alternative history?

David Lowery: Students who would take classes from me would dig through my catalog and discover Cracker through these algorithmic playlists that the streaming services generate, which are sort of weird. Obviously, the hits are at the top of those playlists, but [sometimes,] something [gets traction from] someone else's playlist, like "Greatest Hits of the 90's" or "Songs From The Television Show Californication." Playlists are sequenced badly, because they're by popularity, and I was kind of tripping on the fact that if somebody wants to get into a band, there's a better way to do it. [Plus,] our Greatest Hits Redux was only our first 10 years of the band, so we needed a new one. We needed a new retrospective.

I started talking to Cooking Vinyl about it, because a lot of our catalog is licensed by them. What we were gonna do was license key tracks from the Universal Music Group and Concord catalogs, but That started to seem expensive. One of the good things for Cracker is that through the years, we've rerecorded a number of our hits and key tracks for licensing. One of the reasons you do that is if somebody wants to come for a commercial, film, video game, or streaming license, you can offer them this other track at a slightly reduced price and keep all the money. That was very helpful for us. There were a lot of rerecords of our hits, and they're very well done. Movie directors are super picky. They want a particular recording of a song, so the rerecords have to sound just like it. There were also various collaborations we did over the years, like with Leftover Salmon and Drive-By Truckers, and because of the constraints of licensing, we started looking at this like, "What if we did a retrospective, but did all re-records, outtakes, B-sides, and live recordings, and tell the Cracker story that way?" I just thought it was more interesting, and in a lot of ways, a more accurate telling of the band's story.

SILY: Some of the versions on here are the ones your fans prefer. Also, it seems like once you release a song and play it live over the years, it takes a new shape and often becomes the definitive version. Do you agree with your fans in that regard?

DL: Certain songs, the beauty of the recording you get in a studio can't be matched. But "One Fine Day", which over the years has evolved into a Crazy Horse-esque, 8-minute-long song, that's just a better version of the song. We had a really good recording of that from the German television show Rockpalast. "Gimme One More Chance" from that same show is a good one. There's a stripped down, slower, more quiet version of "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey" from when we were on tour in Spain a few years ago. That's a different interpretation of the song, but it's cool. It works really well. In some cases, these other versions we did of the song, the live versions, maybe, were better than the original recordings, because [at the time of recording,] the songs were new and we hadn't played them that much. There's also just weird stuff, like the fact we found a demo of "Merry Christmas Emily", which I did as a rock rave-up, a roots rock version from forever ago. The original demo of the songs was completely different, and I had forgotten about it. [The version on Alternative History is] not the demo of the song, we just recorded it as we would have if we had changed the song to more of a rock song. It's almost like a different song with the same words. These things are important for people to hear, almost like an alternate reality.

SILY: There are a couple songs on Alternative History that aren't even rerecords, you've just reintroduced them because they were from a record you didn't think enough people paid attention to, like Greenland and the song "I Need Better Friends". I was also happy you included alternate versions of songs from Berkeley to Bakersfield, which is my favorite Cracker record. How does your relationship with your songs change over time? Do you still identify with the person you were when you wrote them?

DL: Most of the time. There's a certain level of professionalism you have to have. I've played "Low" 5,000 times, but I have to play it like it's our new song. I get myself in that mindset. It's a challenge with older songs we've played so many times. But we have such a large catalog, we can always mix it up. We'll play our 5 hits, but every other song in the set is different than the last time we played that city.

SILY: Do you ever think you'll do a live tour of alternate versions?

DL: We used to do a Cracker duo tour, and that evolved into a trio when we borrowed a pedal steel player. That's what we did for a while. There was talk of us releasing an album of it, but we never really got around to it.

SILY: You could get Leftover Salmon to join you. I love your collaborative version of "Eurotrash Girl" with them--it's concise and compacted.

DL: There was a 20th anniversary of that [album, Oh Cracker, Where Art Thou?, in 2023], and we talked about trying to do some shows together, but we couldn't fit it into our schedules. Those songs are important to our career and catalog. A lot of our fans know about them, but a lot of the general public doesn't. I love that version of "Eurotrash Girl". It was done in a single take. We were talking about how to do it, and [Leftover Salmon's] banjo player at the time suggested we do it as a waltz. We were noodling around and got it going, and that's the take, from conception to printed recording in 30 minutes.

SILY: Are the Madrid songs on here the same you shared on Bandcamp in 2023?

DL: Yeah. We did that as a limited edition CD, only 600 copies. A couple of them are slightly remixed, because in between the time we released the Madrid shows and the release of this record, the stuff we call "AI," which is really just very intelligent signal processing, has gotten so advanced, we were able to rebalance those recordings a little bit, where, [for instance,] the vocals were too quiet. The [songs are] slightly different. Someone with a fine ear will notice the instruments are balanced better, because you can literally take a two-track live recording and remix it down, and it has no artifacts. It's bizarre.

SILY: It's been over 10 years since Cracker's released a new record. Is there anything next for you?

DL: My 3 solo records [that came out since COVID] all come out as a box set with even more songs on it in May. It started before COVID, but that project was supercharged by COVID. It's super cool, because it's kind of somewhere between Camper and Cracker. Some of it is stripped down, and some of it has a string section. I've been doing solo shows--not a ton of them, because I've been waiting for all of this to come out as a box set--and it's started to become a pretty popular show for me. I sold out 2 shows in Atlanta. That's kind of where my focus has been. I imagine we'll make another Cracker record. I'd hoped Camper would make a record for our 40th anniversary, but I don't think we'll have time to make that happen, so instead I think me and Chris Molla, one of the founders in the band in the early years, are thinking of making a recording of our band that preceded Camper van Beethoven but shares a lot of the same songs. I got a lot of stuff going on; I'm not sure if it's a Camper record or a Cracker record just yet.

SILY: Right before COVID, I saw the Cracker-Camper Van Beethoven tour at Lincoln Hall in Chicago. For some reason, my wife and I had watched Bio-Dome earlier that day, and there's a Camper song in that movie that you played later that night (“Good Guys and Bad Guys”). I had totally forgotten about that. It was such a weird cosmic connection, experiencing a movie and song I hadn't in years on the same day.

DL: There's a certain kind of B movie that gets played over and over again that generates a lot of performance royalties for us, and that's one of them. Another one is Year One. We had two songs in Sharknado, another weird sleeper that just keeps getting viewed and viewed. It's interesting when songs go into those films; there's a certain B movie that has that weird long life.

SILY: Is there anything lately you've been listening to, watching, or reading that's caught your attention?

DL: The Penguin, which is not a superhero movie, but a mafia movie from the Batman universe, is super well done. If you're ever into science fiction, The Three-Body Problem is a mind-blowing trilogy, and so is The Expanse series. I've gotten back into sci-fi because one of my sons is really into sci-fi and space shanties. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of John K. Samson's solo records. He's put out a number of solo records that are outstanding writing. In some ways, there's something about him that I think people hear Camper in, in a way, but that's not really why I listen to him. I just think it's outstanding writing and storytelling.

[1spy]

1995 | Pavement - "Father to a Sister of a Thought"

I was helping my brother move in 1995, driving his Chevy S-10 pickup, when I finally made friends with my favorite album of all time. It had taken me long enough to come around on Pavement. When I sampled Slanted and Enchanted at Sound Warehouse, I thought it was annoying and unlistenable, the treble from the guitars making my ears hurt. And sure, I had seen "Cut Your Hair" on MTV. It was okay, but I wasn't in a hurry buy their second album either.

And then, my pal Marshall Sanchez, whose mom worked at Pavement's label, Matador Records, gave me a cassette of Pavement's third album Wowee Zowee. Marshall knew my favorite band was Yo La Tengo and we were both huge phans of Liz Phair. So he gave me an envelope that had Yo La Tengo stickers and an advance cassette of Liz Phair's Whip Smart. I hadn't asked for a promotional copy of the new Pavement. But Marshall insisted to me that it was incredible and I should give a listen.

I didn't give it a shot until it was summer, and the album had already come out. But when I shoved it in the cassette player on that drive to my brother's new place, Pavement finally clicked for me. __________

Music critics love to compare albums to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. They've been doing it since Exile came out. They use it as shorthand for albums that are sprawling and inspired, albums that have songs instead of singles, albums that have detours; that are messy and flawed, but whose flaws reveal layers of intricate sonic detail and, I'm gonna say it—genius. Music critics love Exile on Main Street, and that's why Liz Phair's decision to name her debut album Exile in Guyville and to frame it as a song-by-song response to Exile on Main Street was so inspired. Critics ate that shit up. Like the Stones' classic, Phair's debut had exactly 18 songs whose different modes and moods matched the scope and breadth of the original Exile.

Pavement made no mention of Exile on Main Street when they released Wowee Zowee, but their third album also has 18 tracks. It's also much messier and more jagged than Phair's debut. But it's the record's sweeping scope that amazes me. Whenever I recommend Wowee Zowee to a new listener, I talk about how it seems to be the perfect apotheosis of mid 90s indie rock, capturing the whimsy of Beck ("Rattled by the Rush") and the swagger of the Beastie Boys ("Serpentine Pad"). The detuned guitar heroism of Sonic Youth ("Flux = Rad"). The wracked and wicked guitar bends of Blues Explosion ("Best Friend's Arm"), and the tuneful, wandering lyricism of Guided By Voices (the Spiral Stairs jams, "Kennel District" and "Western Homes"). The dense, pot-headed production of Flaming Lips ("Motion Suggests Itself") and Ween ("Brinx Job"). Then there's songs where you can hear the sad bastard streams cross themselves, like "Fight this Generation," where the band starts singing a ballad they stole from Mercury Rev before rousing themselves into a Slack Motherfucker fighting stance and finally, vibe shifting into a jazzy denouement. There are 18 songs on the album, but it feels like more because so many of the songs shift into something else once or twice or thrice. “Half a Canyon” starts with a straight-up Stones imitation a la “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’”, builds into an intricate, melancholy guitar bridge—mocking hippies on the way—before launching into a 3-minute guitar and organ jam session with bits of Stereolab and Krautrock buried just underneath the surface. They aren’t a jam band, but as guitarist a singer Steven Malkmus proved in his solo career, they easily could have been. There’s a reason Phish loves to cover Pavement.

__________

As vibe shifts go, I've always loved track eight, "Father to a Sister of a Thought." A gentle country ballad with Sweetheart pedal steel guitar whose chorus is interrupted by rude and stuttering prog rock guitar. The way the song stumbles into "Extradition" is one of my favorite sequencing transitions ever. Did I mention the sequencing? It could be 18 or 36 songs, or it could be one. Because they all sound like one organism breathing irregular life into whatever moment you're in, whatever head space you've got going on. There's no time for external worries or distractions, because you can't pause the album without ruining it. This is a pack of Parliament lights, smooth and sable, and you're gonna have to smoke the whole thing. And you can finish that sixer of Red Dog, too. You're gonna be here a while.

__________

I'm gonna leave you with with my list of favorite indie rock songs that feature pedal steel guitar:

Lemonheads - "Hannah and Gabi" (pedal steel by Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, the Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers legend)

Camper Van Beethoven - "Sweethearts" (pedal steel by David Immerglück, one of the band's several multi-instrumentalist members)

Neko Case - "I Wish I Was the Moon" (pedal steel by Jon Rauhouse, I love the overdrive / distortion on this one) 

Wilco - "Dash 7" (pedal steel by Lloyd Maines—I love how his playing here makes you feel like you're flying)

The Shins - "Gone for Good" (pedal steel by Kevin Suggs)

I forgot to mention who plays pedal steel on "Father to a Sister of a Thought"—it's Doug Easley, the owner and namesake of the studio where the Wowee Zowee was recorded. In my review of mid-90s indie rock above, I mentioned a slew of iconic bands, and almost all of them recorded at Easley's famous studios. Incidentally, that includes Wilco. Their debut album, including "Dash 7," was also recorded at Easley.

[daisiesandgiggles]

Since it's the spooky season and all.

Love this @vovat . 😍Thank you for sharing with @thedangeldorpher and I today. ❤️🌼🎶🎵

#Tuesday Tunesday #Daisiesandgiggles

[waderockett]

“Where the Hell Is Bill is probably the mother of all bust-the-balls-of-one-of-the-guys-in-the-band jokes. …we wrote an entire song about the drummer (Bill McDonald) being late for practice. While waiting for him to show up! Then when he showed up we made him not only learn the song but made him sing it. Not just that day but for the rest of the time he was in the band.“ - David Lowery

[ballroomfitz]

Instructions unclear, I took the skinheads bowling and now we're dating

[plakatierenverboten]

Cracker: Low

[bandcampsnoop]

8/20/23.

I'm a Tony Molina (San Francisco, California) fiend. Since Micah and I saw him many years ago at the Great American Music Hall, he's been a top ten favorite. We've posted about Ovens and other side projects like The Lost Days and Trainwreck Riders.

I don't think I ever posted about "Embarrassing Times" even though it is an older Molina release. I bought it on cassette years ago (same time I bought the "West Bay Grease" cassette with its stunning version of "Everything Flows" which Molina played at GAMH). "I'm Not Down" is the only song currently available and it has a decided Dinosaur Jr. feel. But Molina's electric sound always dips into Teenage Fanclub as well. And Molina reminds me a bit of Ira Kaplan in his love of covers. The Dead Milkmen, Camper van Beethoven and Roy Wood all get a Molina treatment here.

This LP reissue is being handled by Catholic Guilt Records (created in San Francisco, but apparently based in Atlanta, Georgia).

[sapphicshart]

@todestrieeeb tagged me to shuffle 10 songs and share it with y’all, thankies <3

i'll go ahead and tag @sickest-saddest-worldliest @lilachour @landlockedcorsair @callmebliss @imafuckinghostbitch @idontwannapickausername

[rastronomicals]

11:36 PM EST November 5, 2024:

Camper Van Beethoven - "(We're A) Bad Trip" From the album II & III (January 1986)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[onlizinenet]

  dig...  

  (DavidBowieOfficial)

    THETHE ANNIE LENNOX 

       STEEL PULSE F.o'SEAGULLS

          CVB. J.HICKMAN LOVE LIFE

[mudwerks]

(via camper van beethoven - Heart (1986)