Something 4 The Weekend # 252

Camper Van Beethoven:  II & III:  "(We're A) Bad Trip"  [mp3]

Imagine eight to twelve young stoners sitting around a large coffee table in the living room of a Victorian house on Milwaukee's east side circa 1988.  As you might imagine, every last one of those stoners arrived at that powwow with a disposable lighter on their person.

The circles in which I travelled liked to play a game we simply called "The Lighter Game".  The object of the lighter game was to come into possession of somebody else's lighter without their immediate knowledge.  This meant until that person asks "Who's got my fucking lighter?", or until that person left.  As you can imagine, with bongs and pipes being passed around, there was also the tendency for lighters to travel as well.  And of course, being stoned made it more likely for us to forget we've handed off our lighter.

We played this game within the confines of these stoner circles, and at larger parties, where there were many people who had no knowledge of "The Lighter Game", and so the winner of that night's lighter game might have as many as six or eight lighters rattling around in the pocket of their Levis 501 buttonfly jeans.

Anyways, that was kinda our version of CVB's "bad trip".

Hotcha!  Hank

No One Ever Conquered Sideways Maneuver From The Left or From The Right

Within 24 hours of fucking a rough'n'tumble rodeo clown named Connie in a tent on the outskirts of West Yellowstone, Montana, I listened to Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart on the tapedeck in the Taurus stationwagon in which I was tooling around the western states that summer of '89 with Hodgney and Haas...

True story...

All things considered, I still believe that we did indeed conquer Wyoming from the right to the left...We weren't quite cowboys, but I have to admit, there was some acid involved...

Hotcha! Hank

Take The Sideways Maneuver Bowling With The Skinheads

This is from a 2008 Camper Van Beethoven show in Truckee, California...I've been to Truckee...It's near the site where the Donner Party got stranded and cannibalized itself...

Also of note, I never fucked a rodeo clown in Truckee, but I did eat a Reuben sandwich at a place called Fat Randy's Diner...I'm sorry to report, according to my notes, that their Reuben was dry with slightly burnt bread, and only rated a 4.8 out of a possible 10...Fat Randy's no longer operates, which is probably for the best...

I also cannot say with any certainty that I listened to Camper Van Beethoven within 24 hours of eating that sandwich...

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 118

Camper Van Beethoven: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart: "Turquoise Jewelry" [mp3]

Well, now we're getting somewhere.

It took almost 800 posts here at HOT POOP!, but I'm finally getting around to Camper Van Beethoven...

First of all, if I discount local bands and friend's bands, it's 99% certain that I've seen CVB in concert more than any other musical act. I've seen them so many times that I can't give an accurate count except to say that it's double digits, and possibly 11...Including once as R.E.M.'s opening act on their Pageantry Tour, and twice in their hometown of Santa Cruz, way back when "Take The Skinheads Bowling" was still new, still a novelty...And then another 8 or 9 times between 1985 and 1990...

But this isn't about silly numbers, stupid math...This is about the sad fate of Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, one of those albums that has drifted just outside and off my Desert Island Discs list, hovering there at, like, #12 or whatever...And it's a shame because it's really a rather remarkable album, a collection of 14 very good songs that adds up to a nearly flawless longplayer...One of those records you listen to straight through, and maybe one or two songs knocks you completely off your feet, but mostly, you just get to the end and you realize how those 14 very good songs have resulted in a possibly flawless Album.

An album that's seemingly got a taste of everything - Psych Pop, Indie Rock, Folk, Country, Ska, Polka, Mariachi, Bluegrass, Reels, and weird, Acid-tinged Gypsy music, and it all culminates with "Life Is Grand", easily the most straightforward song of the bunch, a song that takes a stand against the dark vibes of the era...I mean this was '87/'88, and all eyes were on L.A. really - hair metal was running on fumes at that point, but Guns'n'Roses had emerged from that housefire as probably the biggest band in the world...And then there was Janes Addiction, who were like, G'nR's doppelganger in a slightly different reality- the biggest band in the world to the slightly subbacultcha'd...

Meanwhile, up the coast, Mudhoney, Soundgarden and the Melvins were getting that whole Grunge thang going...This was year of Superfuzz Bigmuff, Ultramega OK and Gluey Porch Treatments, respectively...And I don't need to get into the shit happening on Touch'n'Go...My point is - there was a whole lotta dark and heavy music riding hard over the nation at the time, and then there was Camper Van Beethoven...

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart certainly got a bit dark and heavy at times, but David Lowery always kept his tongue firmly in cheek while addressing pop culture and the general state of modern life...Always deadpan, never sour. Life is grand..."Take off that jumpsuit, you look like Grace Slick!"

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart is such a undeniably stellar Album, that I had the toughest of times trying to decide which song to stream today...Like I said, every last song is Very Good, if not quite as Great as the album as a whole, so here we are..."Turquoise Jewelry", as track #7, sits at the halfway point of the LP, and as such kinda encompasses little bits of everything around it - some blues harp, some stanky brass of possible Mexican lineage, some of the heaviest guitars in the band's catalog, Violin as Feedback Machinery, a Ska thing happening in the verses, and some fat-ass bass just doing it's own high energy thing underneath it all while still holding down the groove of it all...Of all that other stuff going on..."Ah you bring me everything!"

Hotcha! Hank