It feels to me like the era of bands isn’t exactly now. This feels like a time for solo artists, solo artists who “feature” other artists on songs for reasons that have very little to do with art, but it’s not a time for bands. Why? Who cares? But there was a time when bands made more sense and they will again once the slow fire sweeps the planet clean, a time when the Russians were scary and apocalypse felt imminent, when the American president seemed like a child in the grip of infantile delusions, a time when you could hear all the best live hopes of the recent past crying as their faces were being ground under the heels of grinning rapists in garbage dumps. It was the 1980’s and the band that, for my money, most intelligently voiced the sterility and sociological dread of that moment was CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN. They made a splash in 1983 with a song called TAKE THE SKINHEADS BOWLING —
Everyday I get up and pray to Jah And he increases the number of clocks By exactly one Everybody's coming home for lunch these days Last night there were skinheads on my lawn Take the skinheads bowling Take them bowling Take the skinheads bowling Take them bowling
— a song so silly it was almost a novelty song — but like everything the band and its leader, David Lowery, had yet to create, it had its politics and its poetry and proclaimed its creators’ helplessness in the face of the moment and their own 20/12 vision with an elan that could only be called nimble. I find myself thinking a lot about CVB these days and have done since 2020, really, because how could you not when they delivered lyrics like these…?
Now do you feel that cold, icy presence In the morning with coffee and with bread? Do you feel, in the movement of traffic -- and days -- A terrible significance?
Camper Van Beethoven’s discography is wide like the Salton Sea, but all you, Virginia, you who have to get in and out of the tomb before the spirits shut the door have to consider this day are KEY LIME PIE and OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART, two perfect albums whose time is now.
Unlike that old puzzle about chickens and eggs, this is a situation where it’s possible to know which came first — it’ s OUR BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY SWEETHEART. The title refers to Patty Hearst and she’s a perfect mascot for Lowery’s project — an American media heiress who was kidnapped in 1974 by a gang of amorons (amoral morons) calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army who then, through little to no fault of her own, brainwashed as she was, poor thing, committed high crimes, robbed a bank and did 7 years of hard time — she’s a squashed bug on the windshield of history whose visible guts contain messages about capitalism, globalism, creeping evil and mystery, the green scales on that ouroboros that can’t seem to find its own tail and so eats the tails of others, knowing it’s wrong the whole time and always hungry.
There are many great songs on BELOVED REVOLUTIONARY — maybe start with EYE OF FATIMA, PT. 1, if you’re new — but the one I love the most is SHE DIVINES WATER. I’ve been listening to it for 34 years, I still don’t know what it’s about and that’s why I like it, but I TRUST it because it has a few of those things that make anything great: plainly-spoken feelings of helplessness; a sense of being at one remove from the meaning of things and somehow, if grimly, still enjoying that; a willingness to dissolve itself in chaos rather than draw pat conclusions; and a fiddle played in a way that hints at a village world before America that America is still haunted by and heralds its doom. I’d link to it here but it seems Mr. Lowery’s still squabbling with Spotify, and since Substack’s still squabbling with Apple Music, the song can’t be linked. As they say in every American preschool these days, Virginia, follow the money —
— and, ya know, the more I think about it, David Lowery’s peculiarly American dread about America is all about the money. It’s where all the juicy udders his brain nurses at are hidden. All the nervous dancing movements the magnetic filings make on the board of his consciousness can be explained by money or the neurotic pursuit thereof, all the heartbreaks, all the green hills cascading in the distance, all the rice paddies in the 110-degree mist, visible from where you swim in that cracked pool left behind by the French — you get it. It’s the algae, the quinine, it’s the post-colonial creak, the cicadas, the dread, the way you know you don’t belong here and you know they know you don’t either —
— and by “here” I mean everywhere.
I bet everything David Lowery has read Enid Starkie’s biography of Rimbaud. If not, he should. He could write a great rock opera about Rimbaud, dying of cancer in Ethiopia, selling guns by the boatload, having already written the finest French poetry ever, still ever, before he was twenty. What a story!
KEY LIME PIE is Camper Van Beethoven’s most comprehensive achievement, the singularity in which all the swirling threads of spit and blood in its water coagulate into a forbidding crimson pinpoint, shining like a red dying star, a spot you can stare at forever and never understand but always fear, always be enchanted by, always find impressive. It holds its shape in the tropical heat.
It opens with an Eastern European-sounding fiddle theme. Why? Because America wasn’t born yesterday even though it acts like it was. Because the country round these parts is full of vampires, the woods, bloody nooses — because if it started with JACK RUBY, it’d be, you know…adolescent.
I remember his hat tilted forward His glasses are folded in his vest And he seems like the kind of man who beats his horses Or a dentist who works at a bar We saw on the screen his face for a moment No time to plead or even ask why Jack Ruby appeared from out of nowhere Then disappeared in broad daylight 'cause he's a friend of that cloven-hoofed gangster the devil He's been seen with the sheriff and the police Drinking whiskey and water after hours, saying "let's do business, boys. the drinks are on me." So draw the box along quickly Avert your eyes with shame Let us stand and speak of the weather And pretend nothing ever happened on that day Grant us the luxury ('cause all our heroes are bastards) Grant us the luxury ('cause all our heroes are thieves) Of the innocence, of the agonies Now we think it's a virtue to simply survive But it feels like this calm, it's decaying It's collapsing under it's own weight And I think it's your friend the hangman coming Choking back a laugh, a drunkard swaggering to your door Now do you feel that cold, icy presence? In the morning with coffee and with bread Do you feel it in the movement of traffic -- and days -- a terrible significance?
Yes, like Rob Reiner, David Lowery worried about the Kennedy assassination and how no one worried about it enough. He also worried about modern American hubris (SWEETHEARTS), the damage stereotypes do to discourse (WHEN I WIN THE LOTTERY), and what to do with desire in a world that went so irreversibly wrong so long ago (ALL HER FAVORITE FRUIT).
I drive alone, home from work And I always think of her Late at night I call her But I never say a word I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay She serves him mashed potatoes And she serves him peppered steak with corn Pulls her dress up over her head Lets it fall to the floor And does she ever whisper in his ear all her favorite fruit And all the most exotic places they are cultivated
KEY LIME PIE — the title is perfect, referring as it does to the sweet and tart insipidity and, yes, admit it, you have to, deliciousness of the horrific post-colonial goo America IS — is worth your time. It’s healthful, like a cold plunge, to jump into the parts of the past that are so much like the present and remember what people made of the mayhem, how they weathered the storm by naming it if not taming it, how there was truth to tell, how there is.