Definitely Not Selling Out:
Camper Van Beethoven Re-Unite Kinda Like KISS Did
by Dean “Gonna Bowl, Once I Shave My Head” Bonzani
8.11.04
It’s been more than 14 years since they officially broke up, and Camper Van Beethoven, whose members have performed together randomly since the split, is officially re-united and on tour to support the upcoming October release of their first album since 1989’s Key Lime Pie, a sprawling epic entitled, New Roman Times.
The album, released on Pitch-A-Tent/Vanguard, features the original members of the band, and is being billed as a rock opera of sorts. New Roman Times is the story of a delinquent young man from Texas who joins the military and serves in a war, but according to CVB frontman/guitarist David Lowery, the story is a virtual one, set in a fictional time and place.
“This story isn’t really supposed to be about Iraq, Afghanistan, or even war,” Lowery explains in a press release. “It’s actually about the deep gulf between the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ parts of the country. I made it a sci-fi alternative reality so that I could exaggerate teh differences. Plus, I could make things lighter and more tongue-in-cheek.”
Lowery interviewed military personnel now serving in the armed forces, to give his stories a more authentic voice.
Three cuts from the coming album are available as downloads from Apple’s iTunes Music Store: “That Gum You Like Is Back In Style,” “51 7,” and “White Fluffy Clouds.”
Fans who have mourned the passing of one of the most redeeming weirdo bands of the 80’s post-punk era will be thrilled by the new material, having had to make do in the interim with 2002’s Cigarettes And Carrot Juice: The Santa Cruz Years, a thoroughly archival, limited-edition five-disc box set with extensive liner notes that spans the band’s output from release of their first album, 1985’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory, to it’s follow-ups, 1986’s I & II, 1986’s Camper Van Beethoven, and1988’s EP, Vampire Can Mating Oven, and includes as bonus material 1993’s previously unreleased Camper Vantiquities, , and an unreleased live album, Greatest Hits Played Faster. Diehards have also added to their collections a posthumous release of the four-track-recorded cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk album (in its entirety) that the band produced in 1987, with its sitar and dropped-tuned guitar-soaked title track stretching a respectable 10 minutes and 52 seconds long. (The nightmarish, broken amusement ride feel of that cut could easily cause the most dedicated self-chemist to abandon all future dabblings.)
When CVB first rolled out of the Bay Area in the early 80’s, their irreverence and free-wheeling experimentation breathed fresh life into a musical dead zone. Combining disparate acoustic and electric elements (after a fashion like acid-rock bands of the 60’s) with mind-whapping studio diddling, their slap-happy ska/folk was dunked in Middle Eastern and Eastern European scalar doodlings and sent out to play in the yard. Sharing a scene with the likes of pioneers like Eugene Chadbourne, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, and The Dead Milkmen, Camper Van Beethoven blazed a strange trail, and left a stranger legacy.
Now they’re back to pick up where they left off.
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Camper Van Beethoven, Thurs., Aug. 26th, at The Orpheum Theater.
©2004 by Dean Bonzani, All Rights Reserved