Camper Van Beethoven
There’s a ton of places you can go from that realization, and Camper found ’em all. “Border Ska,” country, unsentimental roots psych, classic-rock revivalism. A Balkan Van Beethoven folk Black Flag spoof here, a little broke-down roadhouse whimsy there. Covers of Fleetwood Mac, Sonic Youth, “Oh Death,” Ringo Starr. Titles as bright eyed as “Ice Cream Everyday” and as grad-school arch as “(We Workers Do Not Understand) Modern Art.” With multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segal’s violin cultivating miles and miles of windswept noplace and Victor Krummenacher’s guitar unspooling a spaghetti-western response to Bob Mould or Greg Ginn, they were as musically all over as American postpunk got.
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Camper Van Beethoven couldn’t escape that received 60s pull toward the communal as an escape from the wide-open claustrophobia of the physical and cultural landscape their generation inherited–subculture just wasn’t what it used to be. So what they couldn’t find in the world outside their front porch, they made up. “So just get high while the radio’s on / Just relax and sing a song / Drive your car up on the lawn / And let me play your guitar,” Lowery implored on 1986’s “Good Guys & Bad Guys,” a song about dashboard escapism for “folks like you and me” in the face of cosmic futility and impending nuclear nihil. The band’s connection to the “folks” in question was pretty theoretical, and maybe that was OK. (Reality was a bit harsher: in 1986 the band got booed opening for R.E.M.; one of the Campers shot back, “C’mon, my mom was on the space shuttle.”) Yet the impulse toward creating an imaginary utopia where we could all relax and sing along only got stronger, if weirder. And as the band matured, their concept of other people’s hell got sweeter even as their outlook moved increasingly toward hell-is-other-people. “How can you believe that everything in this world is going to be fine?” Lowery was asking by 1987, while also declaring, “Life is grand / And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor / From those of you / Who have appointed yourselves to expect me to say something darker.” This dialectic has motivated wide-eyed cynics from Mark Twain to Randy Newman, and while it might not win over a Bright Eyes fan as fast as “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” it gives the band their forlorn soul.
