#91 Mom, I’m Living the Life
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Packed up my clothes my acoustic guitar
In the trunk of the Ford Galaxy
My father came out checked the oil and the air and said
Son you can always come home
My mother made a
Joke about being far away
Like i was soldier
Away at the war
Acted like I didn’t notice
When she brushed away a small tear
Said son you’ll be fine
This is another song that does a pretty good job of explaining itself, but I will supplement this with a little more background.
The song opens with the quintessential scene of a young man leaving home, a familiar trope in movies, TV shows, and novels. He packs his belongings as his parents watch, preparing to depart for a job, military service, or college. In my case, it’s college. Specifically UC Santa Cruz. I briefly touch on this in the song, with my mother acknowledging the cliché, yet both parents are visibly saddened by the moment. Typically, my father was the more emotional one, while my mother maintained her classic English stiff upper lip. However, in this instance, they switched roles. My father offered practical advice and took action, while my mother revealed her emotions through a joke about the situation. She essentially said, “It’s a sad moment, but you know what’s really sad? Sending your son off to war. Haha, this isn’t that, but yeah, it’s a little sad.” To be clear, this is not my invention or some poetic license here. This is exactly what my parents did. This is them in a nutshell.
Found the worlds tiniest beach bungalow
In the San Lorenzo tidal flats
The sea here is always so cold and so grey
The sun it doth rarely shines
During my time at UCSC, I lived in several places, but the longest and most productive stay was in a tiny two-bedroom bungalow, roughly 400 square feet. This bungalow was part of a complex built in the 1950s as beach rentals. With the rise of air travel, summering in Santa Cruz became less popular due to the typical water temperatures in the high 50s or low 60s. The bungalow was just a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean to the south and the San Lorenzo River to the east. The area, known as “Beach Flats,” was where my roommate and I often joked about being the first to go in a tsunami or flash flood. It was also deep in Santa Cruz’s fog belt, where the fog took a long time to burn off each day, sometimes not at all. While it might be sunny at the campus, I’d return home at 3 in the afternoon to find it foggy and gloomy. Despite this, it was a place that allowed me to get a lot of work done, away from the student-populated areas and associated distractions. Except for the start and end of the school year, it was a ghost town by the beach. My roommate, Paul MacKinney, another math major, would finish his homework before me and stand in my doorway, drinking a beer. He’d often hold another unopened one, teasing me by keeping it out of reach until I finished my proofs. Paul was a natural mathematician. I was not. I always had to struggle more than he did. Next door was a tienda selling Mexican specialty food items. Most residents of Beach Flats were Mexican immigrants working in hospitality, and the tienda served them, as well as me, Paul, and his girlfriend who lived above the store. The perks included fresh tortillas and pan dulce. Another benefit of this living arrangement was that Paul would eventually go to his girlfriend’s apartment, giving me the bungalow to myself in the evening to record melodies and songs on my 4-track. Paul and I even had a brief stint in a band called The Jaws of Life, where he played drums. The idea of playing “Wasted” by Black Flag, slowed down and with a hippie vibe, was Paul’s idea, which later inspired Camper Van Beethoven’s version.
I’ll study hard
Get a good job
Come and meet my girl
She might make a good wife
Or daughter in law
I’ll study hard
Get a good job
A technology company
Out somewhere near Moffet Field
I graduated with a Math degree in the fall of 1983. I don’t mean to brag, but it should be noted that I graduated with highest honors. Not bad considering I was in at least two bands and worked around 30 hours a week delivering produce. I drove a big box truck (as opposed to a tractor-trailer). Some of my shifts were overnight because the wholesale produce markets in Oakland and San Francisco were open from about midnight to 8:00 AM.I always thought it was funny that there was this secret world of late night wholesale produce markets that normal folks knew nothing about.
I had a lot of time to think during these drives. Eventually, I discovered I could write melodies and lyrics while driving. I did this by recording cassettes of the music I’d created and playing them on a boom box. I’d try to come up with lyrics and melody, and when I hit on something, I’d pull out a voice memo recorder and sing the melody and words into it while the boom box played the backing tracks. It took a lot of coordination to do this. I’m probably pretty lucky I didn’t crash, as Highway 17 through the Santa Cruz mountains is treacherous enough already. I can’t tell you how many Camper Van Beethoven songs were written this way.
When spring arrived, the university had recruiters from companies like IBM, GE, and various other large industrial and defense firms visit the campus. I suppose since they were already over the mountains at Stanford, they decided to pay a visit to UCSC as well. Given my academic success, my professors encouraged me to attend. I remember not having a proper suit, only some thrift store suits that I wore to parties or gigs, doing a sort of punk rock/mod thing. I didn’t even have a tie because I didn’t know how to tie one, and I had broken up with the girlfriend who did. As a result, I stuck out like a sore thumb when I showed up. Despite UCSC’s student body leaning hippie-alternative-punk-rock, all the other job seekers seemed to have appropriate suits and sartorial guidance—the benefits of upper-middle-class upbringing, I suppose. One of the recruiters even made a snide comment about my suit.
However, there was one recruiter from an “operations research” company who seemed friendlier. He was dressed more like an Ivy League college professor in a sweater and tweed jacket, or at least what I imagined an Ivy League professor would wear. I thought he might be an ex-hippy. Later, I learned he was wearing the classic late ’70s intelligence community uniform, which explained why he mentioned needing a security clearance to work for them. He seemed impressed that I had excelled in courses like Graph Theory and Abstract Algebra and had written a thesis on Matroids. “Any computational linguistics?” he asked. Sadly, no. In retrospect, I understand why he was asking; computational linguistics is fundamental to probabilistic translation, information search, machine learning and AI. I’d be Silicon Valley rich now if I had pursued it. Regardless, I never received any job offers from any of the recruiters.
When I went to go do my first job interview
Knew my suit it was cheap and out of style
And The man looked at me like I was
Trailer trash and I considered proving him right
The sea here is always so cold and so grey
And The sun it doth rarely shines
Found a job working down
Watsonville way on a farm
Packing produce in trucks
That was kind of okay. If I’d gone down that path, I probably never would have pursued music, and Camper Van Beethoven would have likely faded out. I wasn’t really worried because, by this time, the farm where I was delivering produce had made me the Production Manager. And however modest the salary I was happy with it as it was more than my father made. The owner, a recent transplant from Silicon Valley (though I don’t think we called it that back then), promoted me because I was pretty good at managing the daily production schedule. More importantly, I had enough programming background to operate and program the computer system he had cobbled together from some Altos MP/M machines and an early Apple Macintosh.
Why would a farm need computers? Well, we did grow some crops in the soil, but most of our operation was indoor farming of various kinds of sprouts—Asian-style bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, daikon, and others. We had all this lighting, temperature control, sprayers, rotating cylinders, and racks, and the whole thing was automated. We also had semi-automated packing equipment. It was more of a manufacturing facility.
Depending on the type of sprout, it could take 3-8 days to harvest. They grew quickly but spoiled easily.
So, the computers handled the usual business tasks like payroll, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. But they also had to help match our short-term harvests with predicted orders. We were modeling a just-in-time delivery system. We built this model across several machines, using an early spreadsheet program (VisiCalc?), dBASE II, and whatever the owner was running on his early Mac.
I met a girl and got her a job on the farm with me. It was nice; it always felt like spring. We lived and worked in paradise—a narrow valley surrounded by redwood forests with a little stream. There were honey bees in the raspberry vines and on the cold mornings the smell of sweet basil and rosemary drifted in from the fields. The light was always a golden green. I had a pretty comfortable groove there for a while. Sure, I got up way earlier than most of my musician friends, and I stayed up way later than any of my co-workers because I was always rehearsing, recording, and gigging with my bands. It was one of the happier times of my life.
In late 1984, we recorded Telephone-Free Landslide Victory with Camper Van Beethoven. In June of 1985, Independent Project Records in Los Angeles released it on vinyl. One day, I got a letter from my cousin in the UK; he had just heard our song on a BBC program. I was overjoyed by this, but as days went by, I began to feel unsettled. In some way, I had always thought of Camper Van Beethoven not as a joke, but as a sort of outrageous experiment—a kind of hail mary. The fact that it seemed to have worked unsettled me. The expression “careful what you wish for; you just might get it” stuck in my head.
I met the boss
He was a geek
We got along
Soon he had me writing
dBASE routines for the farm
I had a band
It was joke
Then it was not
We got some real gigs
In San Francisco
Went next door to
Old the grocery store
Bought some refried bean
And fresh tortillas
Heated them up on the
Flame of the stove
Whispered mom I’m living the life
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David Lowery: vocals and guitars
300 Songs 
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