Splitting the bill
Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker bring dueling aesthetics to Phoenix
David Lowery comes to town to perform with both of his bands, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. But he is also using the show to introduce a solo album, “In the Shadow of the Bull.” “These songs are a little different than what I normally do,” he says of the intimate disc. “It’s like my ‘Nebraska,’ basically.” We’re intrigued.
Not everyone who fell under the spell of David Lowery in the ‘80s when Camper Van Beethoven were taking college radio by storm came along when he formed Cracker with his childhood friend, guitarist Johnny Hickman, after Camper’s 1990 breakup.
After all, as Lowery notes, those first two Cracker albums are “essentially” Americana records, compared to Camper Van Beethoven’s eclectic brand of “psychedelic world surf,” as Lowery calls it.
“It would have been jivy for Johnny to try to play the Eastern European fake violin stuff that Jonathan (Segel of Camper) had studied in college,” Lowery says.
“So we didn’t do that. But Johnny’s a good country picker who had some familiarity with bluegrass and American roots. And he’s a fine blues-rock guitarist too. So these are all elements that were not really emphasized in Camper. Camper kind of emphasized ... I don’t know what it is exactly. Faux world music or whatever.”
Still, there is a fair amount of overlap between the fans – significant enough that for the past 10 years or so, he’s been touring and hosting an annual music festival in the desert near Joshua Tree with Cracker and the reunited Camper on the same bill.
And the fact that some fans do prefer one group’s aesthetic to the other?
“That’s why when we do both bands together, we get more people,” he says, with a laugh. “It would be a bad thing if we doubled our expenses but our income was the same.“
Either way, he likes to say, they’re both still college bands.
It’s just that now their fans are college faculty and staff.
Two bands, one leader
The first time Lowery’s twin aesthetics shared a bill, he says, was a short run of dates surrounding New Year’s Eve 1999.
Cracker needed a substitute bassist. “So I called up Victor (Krummenacher) from Camper to come in and play three or four shows that we had lined up around New Year’s,” Lowery says. “Then we’re like, ‘Well, let’s just add (lead guitarist) Greg (Lisher) and play some Camper Van Beethoven songs.” Then Jonathan was like, ‘I’ll play some Camper Van Beethoven songs.’”
And with that, they set off on the Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven Traveling Apothecary Tour, a title Lowery says was “sort of riffing on something that a lot of people didn’t know about at that time but the Rolling Thunder Revue.”
That tour was “sort of ” what brought Camper back together after sitting out the ‘90s. There was also the matter of unfinished music, which they “essentially patched up,” he says, and released on a compilation called “Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead. Long Live Camper Van Beethoven.”
Lies or performance art?
They also recorded a version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” in its entirety and lied about it, telling everyone it had been sitting in the vaults since 1980-something.
“There’s this sort of Andy Kaufman performance-art element to the band getting back together,” he says, with a laugh. “Most people get the band back together and make a big deal about it. They do a reunion tour and all that stuff. We did the opposite. We got the band back together and didn’t tell anybody, and managed to put out two sort of fake unreleased oddity records before anybody realized we’d gotten the band back together. It’s completely the wrong strategy.”
Why “Tusk?”
“We needed a good story, right?” Lowery says, with a laugh.
Having decided to re-record an album “to sort of get our chops back,” the idea was hatched to pretend it was something they’d recorded in the ‘80s, at which point the question then became “What album would we have been most likely to have re-recorded in, like, 1986?”
Segel successfully lobbied for “Tusk” because as Lowery says, “it would have been supremely uncool for hipster indie rockers in 1986 to embrace ‘Tusk.’”
Lowery takes great joy in pointing out that Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac not only heard their take on “Tusk” but brought it up in Rolling Stone a year after their version hit the streets in 2002.
The interviewer asked him “What’s the strangest thing in your CD player these days?” to which Buckingham replied: “The ‘Tusk’ album redone by Camper Van Beethoven. I thought it was great. They took many, many liberties, which is as it should be, considering we were taking liberties of our own back then.”
As Lowery says of Buckingham’s review, “That was kinda cool. Mission accomplished.”
Better with age
The reason for wanting to get their chops back by recording Fleetwood Mac songs was because they were already planning to record 2004’s “New Roman Times,” the first official Camper album since the 1989 release of “Key Lime Pie,” which included their modern-rock chart-topping cover of “Pictures of Matchstick Men.”
“We sort of had those songs sitting around,” Lowery says. “So this was sort of an exercise to prepare us for more serious recording.”
One thing they quickly discovered when they first got back together is that they could play their old songs better than they could back in the ‘80s.
“Or at least we were more consistent,” he says. “We just had better stamina or better focus. We’d been playing for an extra 12 years or whatever. And Camper Van Beethoven was a band that was a side project for a bunch of people that were in other bands all playing the wrong instrument. Like, I was a bass player in Santa Cruz. And I was regarded as a good bass player. So I would go and play bass in a lot of bands.”
In Camper, though, the well-regarded bassist was suddenly fronting a band on vocals and guitar.
“And Jonathan was just some dude walking across campus that I saw had a violin,” he says. “So I said, ‘Do you play that?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m learning.’ I’m like, ‘Well, that’s perfect,’ right? So that’s what that was. And when we come back, we, instead of just sort of learning to play our instruments, we’d been playing for, like 15, 16 years now.”
‘Mongrel type of music’
He approaches both groups, Lowery says, with “the same methodology” in that they’re both eclectic in their own way.
“We treat rock as a hybrid sort of mongrel type of music,” he says. “You know, you take a little this and this and that and you blend them together and see what you come up with. And you see if you can still make it sound like rock music, essentially.”
He’s recorded two more Camper albums since “New Roman Times” – 2013’s “La Costa Perdida” and 2014’s “El Camino Real” – and three more Cracker albums – 2006’s “Greenland,” 2009’s “Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey” and 2014’s “Berkeley to Bakersfield.”
There are no albums in the work for either group as they return to Phoenix.
“There’s probably some ideas laying around here and there,” Lowery says. “But it’s also extraordinarily expensive to make a record with a full band, like if you’re not going to just use keyboards, loops and synthesizers like most people use these days. And drum machines. There’s no real record advances anymore. So it takes a lot longer to build these things and find the time for everybody to work together. And to raise the funds.”
They were fortunate, he says, that 429 Records, a subsidiary of the Savoy Label Group, released the last four albums (two by Camper, two by Cracker).
The label “really stuck with us and probably lost a lot of money on those albums,” Lowery says. “Because they gave us a regular budget like we would have had in maybe not the ‘90s, but the ‘80s, right?”
He will be selling a new solo record on this tour, though — a musical autobiog
raphy titled “In the Shadow of the Bull.”
“These songs are a little different than what I normally do,” he says. “It’s just acoustic guitar and sometimes a couple other instruments, recorded on one of those little four-track portable studio things you get from Tascam at Guitar Center for, like, 200 bucks. It sounds pretty good. It’s like my ‘Nebraska,’ basically.”
It is that sparse and intimate, but the writing style is actually more Dylanesque than that, which is never a bad thing.
Each song on the album represents a year in Lowery’s life.
“I start with the first time I remember meeting my father because he’s in Korea,” he says. “And I don’t know who this guy is. That’s 1963.”
He’s rolling the project out in stages, like a movie, Lowery says.
“At first, it’s just going to show in theaters,” he says, “which is, we’re just gonna take it on the road playing Cracker and Camper shows. I’ll probably play one song each night off my new album and we’ll sell it at the shows. When that’s done, we’ll sell it off the website. And eventually, I think this is multi-disc because I’m only up to 1989 right now. But it will eventually go to Spotify, Apple, iTunes, all that stuff. That’s the way I’m approaching it.”
Selling directly to fans at the shows has the added advantage of working around what Lowery sees as a system that’s been stacked against the artist.
“It makes an extraordinary difference in the revenue it generates,” he says. “For example, we pressed up 1,000 of these albums. If we sell 1,000 directly to fans at shows, the amount of revenue we generate from that is the same amount we generate from 71 million streams on YouTube. It’s crazy. That’s how much the digital distribution system eats up. I didn’t intend this to be commentary on the system that we have right now. But in a way it ends up being that way.”