THIS CD COMES FROM MY TIME AT A NATIONAL RADIO NETWORK WHERE I WAS THE MUSIC AND PROMOTIONS DIRECTOR FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS. A RECENT FIND FROM A BOX IN MY STORAGE UNIT.THIS IS A PHOTO OF THE ACTUAL ITEM FOR SALE, SORRY IF THE PICTURE(S) ARE A BIT BLURRY. I HAVE OTHER ITEMS FOR SALE, CHECK OUT MY OTHER AUCTIONS, THANKS!

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BOB

ARTIST: CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN & CRACKER

TITLE: “THE VIRGIN YEARS” 16 TRACKS

TRACK LISTING (SEE PHOTOS):

LABLE: VIRGIN RECORDS

CAT.#: DPRO-14129

YEAR: 1994

CONDITION: THIS IS OPENED BUT UNPLAYED IN MINT-/NM CONDITION. ALL INSERTS ARE IN NM/NM- COND. PRINTED ON THE CD ARTWORK AND BACK INSERT IS “FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY-NOT FOR SALE”. HYPE STICKER ON FRONT FOR CRACKERS THEN UPCOMING ALBUM.

MORE INFO: THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT. FROM THE MUSIC LIBRARY OF A NATIONAL RADIO NETWORK. NOT SOLD TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

ARTIST INFO:

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN BIO/INFO-

“I think a friend named the band,” I’m sitting backstage at DC’s iconic 9:30 Club chatting with Jonathan Segel of Camper Van Beethoven, one of the bands that truly defined rock music of the 1990s (and one whose cassette tapes I wore out from playing Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart on repeat).

“It was originally called Camper Van Beethoven and the Border Patrol,” explains Segal. “The name’s based on a type of poetry that rests on a fulcrum [the fulcrum (also called pivot or volta) is the place where the poem shifts meaning from one tone or idea to another] and it’s sort of out of balance. So ‘Van’ can go with either ‘Camper’ or ‘Beethoven’, but as a fulcrum, it never quite balances.”

Camper Van Beethoven is celebrating thirty years of creating truly unique  rock and roll. The band started in Redlands, California in 1983, releasing their first three albums within a year and a half (Telephone Free Landslide Victory, II & III and their eponymous album).  Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart was released in 1988 and included their popular ‘Eye of Fatima’, which is still often performed at their live shows. Their debut single “Take The Skinheads Bowling” became their biggest hit, resurfacing years later when Michael Moore used Teenage Fanclub’s cover version as the title track of his documentary Bowling For Columbine. Currently consisting of band members David Lowery, Victor Krummenacher, Greg Lisher, Jonathan Segel and Frank Funaro, Camper Van Beethoven has been touring to promote their current album La Costa Perdida playing to full clubs and sold out shows.

“Everything’s really good; we’re doing the same kind of run between Christmas and New Year’s that we do in San Francisco, Petaluma and San Diego. Our record came out in January of last year, so we did a lot of shows up until September, then we did our Camp Out festival, which is in Pioneertown near Joshua Tree.”

The Camp Outs started in California nine years ago and have been very popular with fans. This year, Camper and Cracker (David Lowery’s other band, formed in 1991 with guitarist Johnny Hickman) will be hosting a Camp In at Athens, Georgia’s famed 40 Watt Club January 23-25. “The Camp In is a club festival,” says Segel,” The last time we did one was about two years ago. Camper played one night, Cracker played the next and I did a little show of electric guitar improv next door at the Flicker Bar. David teaches at the University of Georgia and his wife books the 40 Watt, so he spends a lot of time in Athens. We’re mixing the new album there at Chase Park, so it’s very convenient for us to do the festival there and this year Camper and Cracker will be playing both nights.”

Camper will be performing at Philly’s World Cafe Live with Cracker tonight at 8pm. “We’ve played there many times now and they’re great! We’ve also been on their radio show. The sound is really good, it fills up and there’s always a great audience that comes out. Philly is one of the early hot spots for us from back in the mid 80s and we still have many friends there.”

I ask Segel how they come up with a set list every night when they have a catalog of over 173 songs (I counted). “We get into veins of doing specific groups of songs and that changes night to night. We try not to do the same set list every show, but we get into grooves. Like, we’ve opened the show with the same two songs for the past two shows (“Waka” and “Pictures Of Matchstick Men”), then it diverged.”

Segel is an impressive multi-instrumentalist. I counted a guitar, violin, mandolin and keyboards the night I saw Camper perform. Segel was obsessed with the electric guitar when he was young, then took up violin when he was 10 years old, dropping it for a short while, only to pick it back up again when he joined the band after moving out to Santa Cruz to attend college. I’ve always been impressed by Camper’s ability to weave diverse genres of music into their rock songs (“O Death”, for instance, is a traditional American folk dirge).

Citing The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Beatles as examples of bands that incorporated various ethnic sounds into their music, Segel explains, “As Camper continued, we mostly just thought, we’re a rock band and rock bands can put any kind of music they want into their songs. For instance, our song “Peaches In The Summertime” is a version of  “Shady Grove”. But how that developed musically was more from listening to Turkish music. As artists, you’re a filter, so everything you hear comes out somewhere. We all have wide-ranging tastes in the type of music we listen to.” Intrigued, I ask Segel what’s on his iPod and discover everything from Bach to Brian Eno and some bands I had never heard of before (and am now enjoying) such as The Bye Bye Blackbirds and Game Theory.

CRACKER BIO/INFO-

Members include guitarist David Lowery (formerly of Camper Van Beethoven), guitar; Johnny Hickman (formerly of the Unforgiven), lead guitar; David Lovering (formerly of the Pixies), drums; and Bruce Hughes (formerly of Poi Dog Pondering), bass. Addresses: Record company--Virgin Records America, 338 North Foothill Rd., Beverly Hills, CA 90210.

With a few simple, twisted lines like "Here comes ol' Kerosene Hat / With his earflaps waxed / A'courtin' his girl," Cracker frontman David Lowery can conjure up more images in one song than many of rock's current young songwriters can paint on entire albums. The laid-back alternative band reaped much success after it arose in 1992 from the ashes of college radio favorite Camper Van Beethoven. In that time, Cracker released its self-titled debut on Virgin Records and the smash follow- up Kerosene Hat a year later and has moved ploddingly but steadily through the alternative rock consciousness teetering on the mainstream.

But Lowery's bands have always defied labels as well as convention. He calls Cracker "weirder than alternative" and fails to see how a band like Cracker, which can sandwich a straight-ahead country ballad in between a couple of semi- thrash numbers and look good while doing it, can be lumped in with alternative bands ranging from Afghan Whigs to XTC. Cracker has used the alternative outlet as a springboard to methodically achieve mainstream success, with Kerosene Hat going platinum in early 1994. There are those who have called his former group, Camper Van Beethoven, the prototypical alternative band; for Lowery, the term is quite nebulous and ultimately meaningless. "I remember first seeing that word applied to us," he told Rolling Stone. "The nearest I could figure is that we seemed like a punk band, but we were playing pop music, so they made up this word alternative for those of us who do that."

It's that kind of small-town California straight talk that infuses Lowery's music with refreshing observational wit and endears it to fans both white and blue collar, both alterna- hip and backwoods wise. Lowery was born in Texas, the son of a U.S. enlisted man and his English postwar bride. He was raised in Europe, but ended up spending his formative teenage years in Redlands, California. He began his musical journey like many others--by making experimental guitar noises as a teenager. Lowery went to college in Santa Cruz, where he formed Camper Van Beethoven and recorded their music on his own label, Pitch-a-Tent. His bandmates included drummer Chris Pederson, violinist Jonathan Segel, bassist Victor Krummenacher and guitarist Greg Lisher.

The Campers followed the classic route to alternative stardom: putting out their own independent tapes, gaining a cult underground following, and riding the mid-1980s college radio explosion. They followed on the heels of contemporaries R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Husker Du, and the Replacements, winning scores of fans with their eclectically quirky blend of everything from European folk to ska to hardcore punk to reggae. "Take the Skinheads Bowling," from 1985's Telephone Free Landslide Victory, became a college radio staple. Though the group sold over 100,000 copies of their first three indie records, and moved on to record two major-label albums on Virgin, it was the Campers' unpredictable live shows that made the music world stand up and take notice.

Camper Van Beethoven disintegrated on tour in 1989 and Lowery was left to his own devices. He moved to Virginia and eventually contacted an old California jam partner, Johnny Hickman, who had played in several bluegrass and country bands and had a disillusioning stint in the pop music business with a band called the Unforgiven. Having turned down offers to join the Campers because of previous commitments, Hickman was now ready to collaborate with his old Redlands pal Lowery. The two holed up in a Richmond apartment and turned out a 20-song demo that interested Virgin Records.

The two formed Cracker and set out on tour with an album that was more straight than Camper's music, but still laced with "crackpot humor and lowbrow wisdom," according to Rolling Stone. The album generated hits like "Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)" and "Happy Birthday to Me." It also kept the alternative label affixed to Lowery's work. "Johnny and I ... feel a little more crude, a little more crass, a little more redneck ... than our alternative brethren," Lowery told Rolling Stone. "I was sort of the 'cracker' of Camper Van Beethoven. That's where the name Cracker came from. It was a way of expressing how I feel in alternative land. I ain't got the right credentials. I like that."

Cracker wasted no time producing the follow-up. Kerosene Hat was recorded in five weeks on a deserted movie soundstage in Pioneertown, a tiny hamlet in the California high desert 150 miles east of Los Angeles. It bowed in August 1993 and built momentum throughout the year with grass-roots support and word-of-mouth. It was the album that wouldn't go away, forcing radio and MTV to eventually cave in and allow it some airtime, which gave it enough second wind to propel it to platinum. Although the slow process was a sharp contrast to the sudden success faced by Cracker's 1993 to 1994 tourmates, Counting Crows, the band was undaunted. "I like the way our career is going," Hickman told Rolling Stone. "It's not going through the roof; it's sneaking through the kitchen."

Kerosene Hat mined the same vein as Cracker's debut, though it was perhaps a little more tightly produced. The first single, the swirling "Low," started its climb up the charts once MTV began regularly airing the video clip, a black-and-white film noir piece that featured Lowery climbing in a boxing ring and sparring with comedienne Sandra Bernhard. The second track, "Get Off This," followed strongly and even received airplay on album-oriented rock stations, once off-limits to alternative bands. The album, said Rolling Stone, finds musical moods that "run the gamut from neorockabilly whoop-it-ups such as 'Lonesome Johnny Blues' to the desert-induced paranoia of 'Low' and the band's cover of the Grateful Dead's 'Loser.'"

And just to show fans that the zaniness of the Camper days still remained, the CD listed tracks 13 and 14 as "No Songs," while track 15, titled "Hi-Desert Biker Meth Lab," was a 40- second sound collage. Then they fooled with the indexing to make the disc contain 99 tracks, most of them three seconds long and silent. The reward for the shenanigans comes with three vintage Cracker tracks buried at tracks number 69, 88, and 99. And how does Lowery pull such a stunt for a major label? "You just have to tell them it's genius," he told Rolling Stone. "And generally they'll take your word for it."

The only thing that hasn't been steady for Cracker is its rhythm section. The band has been through four drummers and three bassists, including drummer David Lovering, formerly of the Pixies, and Bruce Hughes, formerly of Poi Dog Pondering, who joined the group in 1994. Whomever he's playing with, Lowery maintains his ability to deftly hit the mark on offbeat subjects like former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's Cadillac, winning the lottery, Russian cosmonauts, and Eurotrash girls without ever reverting to writing pop song cliches in the mode of "I love you, baby. Why don't you love me?" A writer for Request noted, "At his peak moments as a songwriter ... Lowery transcends his wry mannered persona, speaking (without intending to) for the suburban youth that make up modern California mall culture."

Through all the overanalysis and labeling, Lowery remains seemingly unaffected. "The longer I've been in the business," he told Request, "the less I understand about what I do, except for one thing: You can only play music for yourself. If you do music you like and you get really popular, that's great. But if you do music that you like and nobody gives a sh*t about you, that's great, too."

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