#95 We Hate You: Camper Van Beethoven Breaks Up
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We really hate your guts
And we will never be your friend again
We really hate your guts
And we will never be your friend again
The song “We Hate You” recounts Camper Van Beethoven’s final days on tour, culminating in the band’s breakup. The first verse is set in mid April 1990, during a ferry ride from Denmark to Sweden. The band likely played a show the night before in Copenhagen, as we made port in Malmö. This was before the Øresund Bridge connected Denmark to Sweden, so the ferry was a large industrial vessel, akin to a floating Greyhound bus station. It was gloomy and unromantic.
By this point, the band had been touring for about three months in Europe, or roughly eight months worldwide, having been on the road almost non-stop since the previous August, with only a brief break from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve. The novelty of traveling by sea ferry had worn off long ago, probably around 1987 during the bands second European tour. Three years later no one was looking forward to a cold early morning ferry ride across the Baltic, especially me, as I was hungover.
The ferry’s cafeteria served peculiar Scandinavian breakfast items that Chris Pederson had previously dubbed “Viking Sushi,” which may have included eel. Faced with a long line of German truckers and the unappealing food, I decided to skip breakfast and head to the duty-free shop. I picked up a carton of Marlboro Reds and some chocolate with hazelnuts, grabbed a coffee from a machine, and went up onto the deck.
The sun was particularly bright that morning, but it was cold, with ice still visible in the shallow water along the shore. A group of Swedish men, clearly returning from partying in Copenhagen, were sitting on a deck box containing lifesaving equipment. Occasionally, one of them would stand up and vomit over the railing, adding to the bleak atmosphere.
I alternated between deep drags on my cigarette and sips of machine coffee. A seagull joined me, hovering almost stationary to my left, likely hoping for food. I turned and tried to blow a smoke ring at it, but the ring instantly disintegrated in the headwind. The gull protested with a cry, then angled its wings and shot 20 feet into the air and aft, landing near another group of travelers. Maybe they had some food.
It’s a bright April morning
Looking out at the Baltic Sea
Swedish drunks are heaving
Over the rails
I’m headed down to duty free
To buy some cigarettes
Hazelnut chocolate from
Germany
I was up on deck by myself because things were really tense with the other band members. I’m sure I wasn’t pleasant to be around. I had started taking any complaints about the tour personally. Whenever someone griped about the long drives or the hectic promotional schedule, I’d snap and say mean things like, “You’d just be sitting on your asses smoking weed back in Santa Cruz.”
The ship put in at Malmö
What an ugly Swedish town
As if to make the point
A seagull crapped on the van
I know you think I’m an asshole
A thankless taskmaster
You could have stayed home in
Santa Cruz smoking weed
I felt guilty and defensive because, in a way, they were right. The touring schedule was overkill. I had pushed the band hard to go on a global tour for this record. I viewed it as our moment, both creatively and commercially.
Commercially, we were finally being played consistently on commercial radio and had made our way into regular programming on MTV. This was our chance to expand our fanbase and maybe finally make a decent living—not get rich, but make a decent living touring. Despite appearing successful to our friends, we weren’t selling many records, and touring was mostly about breaking even and generating record sales. No one made money touring, which is why concert tickets were $8. I wanted to be able to buy a car or maybe rent my own place without roommates.
Creatively, this was also our moment. There is a fair amount of revisionist history about the record we were touring for, Key Lime Pie. Although it is now critically acclaimed, the reviews were mixed when it came out. Many critics and fans felt the dark tone of the record was off-brand, as they were used to our off-kilter, lighthearted psychedelic weirdness. This album wasn’t that. I felt like this record was the one that would finally get folks to consider us a serious band. It was the next stage in the evolution of the band, and the tour was helping us reach that next stage.
The band was right—the tour was brutal. A few weeks earlier, after our Vienna show (there’s a fantastic live bootleg recording on the live music internet archive), Chris Pedersen, Victor Krummenacher, and I came down with a terrible virus. It was almost like hemorrhagic fever; our fevers were so high that our lips cracked and bled. We sweated it out during a 16-hour drive to Italy.
It was also clear that the band had begun to really dislike me. I wasn’t being paranoid; it wasn’t just everyone being tired from the tour. When we finally arrived in Sundsvall, everything came to a head. At the venue, Morgan started mildly complaining about the hotel, a Euro guesthouse with a shared bath down the hall. I lost it and threw the deli tray at the wall. The next morning, everyone was gathered in the breakfast area when I got up. It was obvious something was going on.
“What’s up?”
“We’re going home.”
“You mean the tour’s over?”
“No, the band is over.”
When I woke up that morning, I knew I needed to apologize for losing my temper the night before. I did so now, hoping it would defuse the situation, but it didn’t. I then tried to reason with them, taking various approaches. They all failed. Finally, I appealed to our sense of shared sacrifice, saying, “We have accomplished so much. This is an amazing band we have built. We can’t just throw it away.”
Victor, with his typical flair for the dramatic, put a bullet in the discussion:
“We really hate your guts and we will never be friends again.”
Well ok then.
Howie, our tour manager, eventually managed to get the guys to play one more show in Örebro because he literally didn’t have enough cash on hand to get us back to London. So we played one more show and started the three-day drive back to London. Chris, Greg, and Victor managed to get someone back in the States to buy them tickets from Copenhagen to the US. I rode in the miserable van back to London with David Immergluck, Morgan, and the crew. That was it.
When we arrived Sundsvall
You thought the hotel not good enough
I lost my shit
And clearly took things too far
Played one last show in Örebro
Blew off the UK dates
You put your tail between your legs
And headed back to Santa Cruz
We really hate your guts
And we will never be your friend again
We really hate your guts
And we will never be your friend again
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David Lowery: vocals and guitars
Luke Moller: fiddle
300 Songs 
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