Camper Van Beethoven, "Good Guys and Bad Guys"
It is mid-afternoon, Greenwich Mean Time. Suddenly there appears an otherworldly power, omnipresent and manifesting to Everyone in the World, Everywhere, All at Once. Sleepers awake, workers pause, tablet and smartphone screens across the globe go blank—all attention is fixed on this mysterious figure projecting into the consciousnesses of all. This being, this god produces two fingers and snaps them. Suddenly every human being’s thoughts are connected to all others, and to the god.
All voices fall silent. All minds go blank. The Otherworldly Power produces a throat and clears it, and in this moment, all language barriers are suspended. OP speaks:
I am here to answer your call for a richer public discourse.
Well, this is a relief. Many of these gathered brains were expecting trouble—the announcement of Armageddon, maybe, or an alien invasion. Expletives issue from a handful of dictator-brains, but these are largely unheard amid the relief and applause bursting from billions of other brains. The ruckus dies down, and one thought-voice, traceable to the California Bay Area, breaks through with a question:
“Is this it? This brain-connection?”
All of you tuning into each other’s every thought? That would be a shitshow. This is just for announcements. What I bestow upon you now is a technology-supported community, by, through, and in which any one of you can post public statements to all of the others and then engage in open conversation.
The catch is, you have to keep your comments super-short, and you’ll become at least 30% more of an intolerant and insufferable asshole, whenever you’re participating.
“Isn’t that two catches?” someone in Western Europe asks.
Well, yeah. I guess.
From the Horn of Africa: “Is this the simulation we’ve been hearing about?”
Pardon me?
“Like, why would someone offer us that? Unless they were conducting some kind of experiment.”
From Sao Paolo: “Yeah, really: why do we have to become 30% more of an asshole?”
Because that’s how your brains work.
Six billion human, connected brains consider this. Murmuring, thinking out loud. In due time they quiet down again, because yeah, that tracks. A brain in the South Pacific speaks up: “That other part, where we have to keep it super-short—is that what adds the 30%?”
Otherworldly Power sighs. Do you want the deal or not?
“I’m just asking.”
Yes. That, plus your brains, is what will make you all at least 30% more of an asshole.
“But you can change the super-short part, right? That’s up to you?” From the Caucasus.
It is what it is.
“Why?”
Because I’m 90% of an asshole.
“Just 90%?”
I’ve got a buyer on the hook for the platform. Wait ’til you meet HIM.
Given this history, it should have come as no surprise to me that on a random Tuesday five years ago, I logged into Twitter and quickly found myself on the receiving end of a super-short burst of abuse from one of my all-time favorite musicians.
The context here isn’t especially interesting or important, but I’ll provide it. Bill is a law professor with earnest, thoughtful opinions about copyright law. David Lowery is a genius songwriter and college rock icon, a founding and continuing member of both Camper Van Beethoven (one of my all-time favorite bands) and Cracker (second-tier for me, but also terrific). As a career musician, David has earnest, thoughtful opinions about copyright law, too. They’re just different from Bill’s. This being Twitter, the discussion deteriorated quickly. Almost instantly, in fact.
I thought it was kinda wild that here on Twitter these two would be beefing, given Bill’s longtime love for Camper Van Beethoven and his insistence, back in the day, that I start listening to them. So I parachuted in, 30% more of an asshole than in real life, to tell David that because of Bill “I’ve spent probably $500 or more on CVB and even Cracker music, gigs, and merch.” And David answered me as set forth above.
Let’s reset. “Sweethearts” (Apple Music only), “She Divines Water” (Apple Music only), “All Her Favorite Fruit” (Apple Music, Spotify). Each of these songs is quirky and beautiful, and together they illustrate Camper Van Beethoven’s stunning musical range. And as different as these tracks are, they have still less in common with, say, “The History of Utah” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Peace and Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), “The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon” (Apple Music, Spotify), or—well, I could sit here and list songs all day and not feel like I’ve covered the waterfront of what CVB has got up to, musically, over the years.
It’s clear enough that Camper Van Beethoven’s influences are all over the map. At the bottom of the protocol stack is, I think, punk rock. Covers of Black Flag and the Clash feature on their first record, along with thrashy originals like “Club Med Sucks” (Apple Music, Spotify). But as time wore on, other sounds and styles came to the front of the mix: country waltz, surf rock, bluegrass, rockabilly, SoCal psychedelia, folk, ska. You get the sense that the several musicians in the CVB are collectors, elbow deep at all times in dusty record bins, fishing for interesting and colorful bits and pieces they can show each other in the studio. And then they stitch it all together to make songs.
Given all this, Camper Van Beethoven’s work does not lend itself to super-short description. But if I had to make a run at it on Twitter, I might just call them An American Band. Their sound is a surging, swirling mix of distinctively American genres. But more than this, the CVB oeuvre, taken as a whole, is a rich and poetic and at times downright hilarious document of (borrowing a phrase here from Salman Rushdie’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) “what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.” The fraught history, fractured culture, and larger-than-life characters, all the spent energy and silliness: America runs deep in everything Camper Van Beethoven does.
At the center of all this is David Lowery, CVB’s principal lyricist and lead vocalist— and (no surprise) a reader of Pynchon. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Lowery was one of the most gifted and accomplished lyricists of the twentieth century. And for that matter, he hasn’t let up since Y2K. Again, I’m not going to capture the depth and breadth of his genius here, but here are just a few clips:
“Oh, my beloved Tania! How I long to see your face photographed in fifteen-second intervals, in a bank in San Leandro.”
“And on a mission over China, the lady opens up her arms. The flowers bloom where you have placed them, and the lady smiles—just like Mom.”
“Can’t go left in General Pinochet’s Cadillac.”
“We are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof. We dream our dreams and sing our songs of the fecundity of life and love.”
“Allah u’akbar! Hare Krishna! Praise the Lord, and Merry Christmas!”
(A note here: all CVB songs are credited to the entire band. So I can’t say definitively that Lowery wrote every one of these lines. I can only say he’s generally recognized as the lead writer, and that’s certainly his voice singing all of this on the records.)
Camper songs most definitely hit me a certain way—i.e., the right way—because of who I am and how I think about things. A big part of their appeal is their smart-assness, and a very particular kind of smart-ass at that. They’re telling us that we live in a serious world with serious people and serious problems, and the problems would likely be a whole hell of a lot less serious if the people were less serious. You hear this in Lowery’s affected surfer voice, in his sarcastic tone, and in his lyrics. A theme cutting across Camper records is that everybody needs to settle down, and that goes double for all you self-important types. Examples:
“When the end comes to this old world, the righteous will cry and the rest will curl up. God won’t take the time to sort your ashes from mine.”
“Some of us are brown and some of us are white. Just give me some tension release.”
“Take the skinheads bowling.”
“My beloved Tania: we carry your gun deep within our hearts, for no better reason than our lives have no meaning and we want to be on television.”
Consider the burn in that last bulleted lyric, “Tania” of course referring to Patty Hearst’s assumed identity, after her brainwashing by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Lowery/ Camper’s message? All you radicals are just posturing—or worse, trying to position yourselves in a history that can’t be bothered with you.
In a certain respect, this post is Part 2, or Side B, to my last one. There are certainly moments when it is necessary, or important, or affirming, or just pleasurable, to throw your fist in the air, a la Patrick Stickles in Titus Andronicus. But maybe the better bet, most of the time, is just to step to the side, watch what’s happening, and offer wry commentary.
And so finally we arrive at “Good Guys and Bad Guys” (Apple Music, Spotify), Side A, Track 1 of Camper’s third, self-titled record. This isn’t a “banger,” as the kids say these days. It’s mid-tempo, and I can’t tell if that’s a synthesizer, an organ, or an effects-treated accordion Jonathan Segel is playing at the top of the mix. (Liner notes on the record don’t identify the equipment, saying only that Segel plays “Everything You Hear On This Record That Is Not A Guitar Or Drum.” That’s some classic CVB for you.) Whatever that instrument is, it’s loopy, pleasant and tuneful. No riots in the streets today.
And Lowery’s vocals drive that point home. Yes, there are good guys and there are bad guys… And there are folks like you and me. So let’s get high while the radio’s on. Just relax and sing a song… Relax and be yourself. ’Cause if you didn’t live here in America, you’d probably live somewhere else.
This is classic Camper Van Beethoven: the music I love, the David Lowery I need. Smart, challenging, edgy, but always in the direction of wishing everyone would just chill the fuck out.
After Bill turned me on to CVB, I spent months on end listening to their records and very little else. From there I got into Cracker, and I’ve seen both bands probably five times apiece. An important and enduring memory of fatherhood for me is sitting in the soft glow of the night lights in our nursery at 2:30 AM, singing “Good Guys and Bad Guys” quietly to my newborn baby, while I rocked him to sleep.
Lately I’ve been out of the habit of listening to CVB. I’m not sure why. My best guess is it’s equal parts (1) the music I’ve been into lately has been the antithesis of Americana, so it doesn’t really fit into the mix; (2) the grumpy old man in me is still not over that last lousy show I saw at the Middle East club in Cambridge a few Januarys ago, where the venue couldn’t get the fans into the building until CVB were halfway through their set; and (3) David Lowery really bummed me out on Twitter.
I want to set aside Reason (3). After all, John Flansburgh yelled at me once after a They Might Be Giants show in New York—entirely without grounds, I will note—and I’m over that. I recognize that every one of us is 30% more of an asshole on Twitter, and Bill and I definitely met David at least halfway on the battlefield five years ago. And you’d have to be some kind of idiot to let your sense of The Artist as a person detract from your experience of The Art.
So why am I stuck on this? I think it’s because David Lowery on social media shaking his fist at the clouds generally, and at me specifically, strikes me as so out of step with The Sense I Have of Who He Is. This is dumb, too: boiling down the character of a person from 5000 lines of poetry he’s written will produce a result about as accurate as reverse-engineering his body from 5000 nucleotides. David Lowery is as entitled to be as pissed off about things as anyone else on social media. And from all appearances it’s a disappointment to him, too, that the kids he entertained in the 1980s grew up to be smug fucking lawyers who—in his view, and I cast no judgment on its validity—don’t respect his right to earn a living.
It might just be that we’re all 30% more of an asshole on Twitter because we’re 30% more visible, and the character limits make sure the 30% we exhibit isn’t the fun and friendly part. To see that upside of a person, you have to wait in that long, crummy line outside the Middle East. Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker play the Middle East every January—at least they did last time I checked. My next chance to see David Lowery on stage is most likely ten months away. I’m resolving now to get back on the horse and catch that show, if it comes.
It would be a good thing to see David just relax and sing a song. And I’ll make it my object to do the same, right along with him.