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Wednesday, January 22, 2003

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

With songs about cowboys on acid, skinheads going bowling and Lassie going to the moon, Camper Van Beethoven was lovably strange, oddly psychedelic and only getting better when the whole thing imploded in 1990.

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There really wasn't anyone on the college rock scene to replace it. No one else was going to combine punk, ska, jazz, country, Appalachian and something that could loosely be described as Turkish in quite the same sarcastic, slapdash manner.

A few years ago, the members converged for concerts that combined Camper with Cracker, the more straight-ahead band that frontman David Lowery went on to create.

Now, Camper is doing a full-fledged tour for what is looking more like a full-fledged reunion, playing songs that gleefully defy the aging process.

"I think we were very forward- thinking, and I think we're reaping the benefits of not getting tied into any one thing," says bassist Victor Krummenacher. "You can only get so nostalgic with us, because none of us like to stand still. Everybody gets bored really quickly."

The raw material for Camper's reunion can mostly be found on the five-CD boxed set "Cigarettes and Carrot Juice: The Santa Cruz Years," which arrived in November. In picking back through the spoils, Krummenacher says the members found much to choose from and can now bring to it a lot more musical maturity.

"The thing is, we play better than we used to, so even if it seems kind of weak on the record, we can sink our teeth into it in a different way," he says. "At least on the record, they were good ideas that were reasonably or poorly executed. Now, it's much more alive. The songs change from night to night; we're kind of sloppy but kind of tight at the same time."

Camper's way of fusing various cultures -- propelled by Jonathan Segel's unorthodox style on violin, keyboards and mandolin -- was never done with any shred of authenticity, making it a perfect match for Lowery's surreal wit.

"People thought that was really strange, and to us it's really natural," Krummenacher says of Camper's sound. "We didn't really try to do it right; for us it was like TV culture. It's kind of like topical exposure, like going to Mexico for five days and trying to play Mexican music, instead of going to live there and studying with the natives. We're living in a time now when American society has gone from being really homogenous to having a huge Asian influx, the Hispanic population is diversified, and there are a lot more east Indian, Middle Eastern people. That's the kind of world we always wanted to reflect."

The band recorded five albums before splitting after its best, "Key Lime Pie," with Lowery moving on to Cracker and three members forming the Monks of Doom. Krummenacher, who recently earned a Ph.D in composition at Mills College, went on to also record four solo records in a more singer-songwriter vein.

Looking back over Camper's breakup, he says, "We'd just been on top of each other when we were young and stupid, and we didn't know how to communicate, and we melted down. There are 25 band biographies that read like ours, at least. Young and stupid is the best way to sum it up. I don't really regret it. Maybe we could have gone on and made a lot more money; maybe it coulda killed me, too."

Krummenacher lived to dig back through the archives years later and stumble upon a box of old tapes that included Camper's most oddball experiment: its own version of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." It came out of a ski trip in the High Sierras that the band took in 1987, ostensibly to work on new material. That became impossible when drummer Chris Pedersen broke his arm on the slopes.

"We were in the ER," the bassist says, "and I was pretty into drugs at the time. We got a bunch of Percodan, tequila, and we were smoking pot and drinking coffee. Jonathan was listening to 'Tusk' at the time and had become obsessed with it. He was playing it for me. I was like, 'God, this sucks.' And then he's like, 'Let's just cover the whole thing.' And I thought it was abhorrent enough that it would be good, and Jonathan and David thought it was a great enough record that it would be really good."

They spent a couple of drugged-out days with a drumulator and then abandoned it. Krummenacher found the tapes in an unmarked box splattered with Coke. Last year, the band loaded it into ProTools to complete it and throw it out to fans. "I don't think it came out like a joke," Krummenacher says. "I think it's a serious record in a lot of ways, and I actually like our version of it a lot. But I really still hate the Fleetwood Mac version."