On the basis of fairly extensive experience with Santa Cruz, California, I report that the students of the University of California there can be divided cleanly into four distinct groups. In steeply descending order of group size, they are: those who like it there and take drugs; those who don’t like it and take drugs; those who like it and don’t take drugs; and those who neither like it nor take drugs. The first group comprises the vast majority of the student body; the last is almost nonexistent. The groups can be identified with some confidence because of the student body’s tendency (which I believe is unique among the nine campuses of UC) to identify themselves in these terms on first meeting. “God, I hate it here but at least I can take drugs” and “Isn’t this place fucking great? Do you want some pot?” are among the most common utterances on campus, heard almost as many times as “Did you find a parking place today?” is heard at UCLA.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask why not.
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I go into such detail because to understand Camper Van Beethoven you have to understand Santa Cruz, their hometown. Not that the band’s five members proportionally represent the makeup of the student body (though there’s no reason to think that they don’t); it’s just that they, like you or me, are a product of their environment. So if it seems sometimes as if they are doing things that don’t quite make sense, or are somehow referring to a joke that you’ve never heard, or maybe forgot, that’s probably why.
And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor
I think this is the Campers’ best album because it dramatically delineates the limits of the absurdism in which the band has trafficked since its earliest days. To many, the quintessential Camper Van Beethoven song is “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” a single from their first (1984) album. It’s both jaunty and disturbing; with its rollicking beat, call-and-response vocals, and not-quite-nonsensical lyrics, it represents, after a fashion, the outer limits of Top 40 in our time. (Not that it ever made the Top 40; but it referred directly to the aesthetic of disposable pop, and it did make it into heavy rotation on about every college station in the land.) But songs like “Skinheads,” whatever their pleasures, are a dead end; do too many of them and you start to become a novelty band, which is what the Campers nearly became as they moved through II & III and 1986’s Camper Van Beethoven. Although each of these records represented a major step forward, to me the group’s rationale was coming into question. Is a cover of “Interstellar Overdrive” (an early Pink Floyd fave) really funny? Isn’t heavy-handed absurdist social commentary (“Joe Stalin’s Cadillac”) still heavy handed? Weren’t the records starting to sound rinky-dink?
The shows major disappointment for me–and this goes back to the emotion-injection I talked about–came on “She Divines Water,” the high point of Our Beloved, played at the Metro for the first encore. Lisher’s guitar was too loud, drowning out the others, and no one did anything about it. OK, that’s just sloppiness. But the whole song was a run-through: they seemed to be playing by rote. When the climax came, in the last few lines, it called for the four front men to sing together, as they do on other numbers. Lowery just sang it alone, perhaps because the others were getting ready to do a live approximation of the backward-tape tomfoolery that ends the album version. To hear it at the Metro, you wouldn’t have known it’s Camper’s best song. On the record it starts out quiet, with a classic three-chord progression. “How can I believe that everything in this world is going to be fine?” asks Lowery. The question doesn’t seem rhetorical, nor, for once, absurdist. “When I lay down to sleep I shiver and shake / Tell me you love me,” he begs. Then, in a beautiful, soaring buildup, with Segel playing one of the great rock violin lines, dissonant and gorgeous all at once, Lowery describes an elaborate dream about “a world-famous actress in a pink limousine.” Things get obscure after this, until the climax, where Lowery and (on the record) what sounds like an electronically treated chorus sing the title line: “She divines water.” I can’t discern any more of the words, but it sounds respectful and awestruck; it sounds, that is, like a love song–a first for Camper Van Beethoven. I think the group stiffed this song live because they were awed by the implications: if they rocked out to a great song, would they risk cracking their cool intellectual reserve? But to refrain from kicking out the jams when you do your best song live is not absurdist or clever or anything of the sort; it’s just dumb. When the Campers learn that, they’ll become the world-class group live that they are now on record.
