300 Songs

Stream or order this album here.

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
++++++++++++
David Lowery: vocals and guitars

Stream or order this album here. 

There is a cruel trick that middle school boys play on each other. It usually involves a bully looking for an excuse to beat up another boy. The bully enlists the help of a third person to convince the victim to ask the bully, “How does your sister roller skate?” The victim usually resists because no one wants to ask the bully anything, but eventually, the victim is persuaded by being convinced that this is all good-natured and there is a really funny joke in all of this. Maybe this will produce some goodwill or a friendship with the bully, which is always handy to have when you’re a middle school boy.

Naturally, when the victim asks the bully, “How does your sister roller skate?” the bully replies with feigned outrage, “She doesn’t have any legs,” and then proceeds to beat up the victim. Of course, the bully doesn’t have a legless sister; this was all an arranged provocation to justify a beatdown.

I never had this trick successfully played on me, although I distinctly remember this little pack of assholes headed up by Alex Garcia trying to trick me into this provocation. Alex was 13, already had a mustache, and looked like a boxer. I wasn’t about to ask this kid anything. Also, I already have a sister, Sandra, who is pretty hilarious when she roller skates because she was born with cerebral palsy.

Why do I joke about that? Well, sometimes that’s what siblings do when they have a disabled sibling. You make little jokes about it. Nothing cruel. It’s sort of a way of taking the stigma away. And I mean, we would do it right to my sister’s face. Because she’s the one who most wants the stigma to be gone. I remember my sister Sandra coming to visit me at my dorm room when I was a freshman. I was sitting on the floor with five or six of my friends when she walked in, stumbled slightly, dropped her purse, and then caught herself on the door frame.


“Oh my God, Sandra, are you drunk already? It’s one in the afternoon!”

Two of my friends were in on the joke and fell back laughing. Everyone else was shocked. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Meanwhile my sister was laughing so hard she wasn’t even making any noise. I started to worry she was going to collapse onto the floor. It took her like five minutes to regain her composure and speak. Now understand, it was funny to her not because I was comparing her unsteadiness to being drunk, but because there was a group of uninitiated people in my dorm room who really thought I was being an asshole. It’s second order. The in group is having a laugh at the expense of the out group. The in group being me, my sister and friends comfortable with the weirdness around the disability and the out group that is unsure how to navigate in this situation.

Now look, if my sister was severely disabled, we probably wouldn’t have teased her in this way. Nor would would we ever make a joke that was likely to really upset her. There is a line there, impossible to define, but siblings instinctively know where the line is and not to cross it.

Of course maybe this isn’t normal. Some of this may have to do with my family’s rather dark sense of humor. For instance, I remember years later when my mom was suffering from Alzheimer’s. She was living with my little sister Stephanie, and I came to visit. When I walked into the living room, Stephanie had a mischievous look on her face.

“Margaret and I are talking about that man in the picture.” My sister was pointing at a picture of my dad as a young man in his Air Force uniform. My sister was calling our mother Margaret because that day she didn’t know who my sister was.
“That’s my husband, Charles.”
“David, I told her that’s my father.”
“That’s not her father,” my mother said, a little irritated.
“Well then, who is my father?”
“I have no idea who your father is.”
“No idea?”
“NO IDEA,” she said loudly, clearly finished with the conversation.
“Well, okay then… would you like some tea, Margaret?”
“Yes, I would.”
My sister got up and headed to the kitchen, but before she disappeared around the corner, she looked back at me, mimicked snickering, and covered her mouth with her hands.

Right up to the line. Didn’t cross it. Well maybe she did but my mother was oblivious.

The dark humor was to take the sting out of the ambiguous loss of a parent who was slowly fading out. I welcomed it, even if it also made me sad.

My sister Sandra was born on my grandma’s couch in Wallace, Arkansas, in 1954. This was a very rural area, and the hospital was quite far away. The doctor didn’t arrive until my mother was deep in labor. The birth was difficult, and at some point, my sister was deprived of oxygen, resulting in brain damage that impaired her motor skills. It did not affect her cognitively, and she has lived a relatively normal life. She has a family, worked for many years, wrote a book about her life, and until recently, she drove and even managed to roller skate a bit.

My sister Sandra is a blessing to our family. Because she required special therapy and often had to attend special schools, my mom focused on her. Much of our family dynamic was built around making sure Sandra was okay. It brought us together and made us close, made us a team. There was also cruelty from other kids. Much of the time, it was directed at me and my other sisters when she wasn’t around, but sometimes it was straight to her face. It was appalling at times. She had to be strong. We had to be strong.

There was also a sort of happy accident for us. When other moms started getting jobs in the 1970s, my mom didn’t. She remained a stay-at-home mom until Sandra was in high school and could drive herself places. So, while the other kids on the cul-de-sac were coming home to empty houses, my mom had food, fresh-baked cookies, and hot tea ready. We were like the idealized 1950s sitcom house in the neighborhood. Eventually, the other kids in the neighborhood realized this, and our house became quite popular. We lived in a mostly Mexican American neighborhood, where the tradition at Christmas time is to make sweets and tamales and share them with your neighbors. My mom reciprocated by making the closest thing she could think of: English sausage rolls. Not pigs in a blanket, not kolaches, but a light, flaky English pastry. It was like something from another planet to the neighborhood kids, and we became known for after-school sausage roll snacks. My sister and her friends from the neighborhood have since “localized” the sausage roll by substituting chorizo for the English sausage. In 2064, there will be a food/travel show that rolls into Redlands, California, and the locals will insist they try the local specialty: a chorizo variety baked in a delicate, flaky pastry. It’s only found in this part of California. No one knows why.

How Does Your Sister Roller Skate

Tell me how does your sister roller-skate
It’s a cruel trick teenage boys play on the weak
When you ask the answer is
“She’s got no legs”
Then they kick your ass
So let me tell you how my real sister roller-skates
 
She was born in a thunderstorm on my grandma’s couch in rural Arkansas
She almost died before the doctor arrived it was a painful difficult birth
She walked with braces and sometimes crutches for the first part of her life`
So let me tell you how my sister roller skate
 
Tell me how does your sister roller-skate
My sister roller-skates just fine, she’s got a job a family and she drives
She won an employment discrimination lawsuit she wrote a book about her life
Tell me how does your sister roller-skate
 
It was a less enlightened time and she was harassed all the time
They called her retard and spastic right to her face and they generally cruel and unkind
Me and my sisters we tried to defend her but nothing really seemed to change
Until our neighbor Victor broke somebodies’ nose



Tell me how does your sister roller skate
It’s a cruel trick teenage boys play on the weak
But my sister roller skates just fine
And you can’t let the pricks ruin your life
Tell me you how does your sister roller-skate
++++++++++++++++++
Bryan Howard: bass


Luke Moller: strings


David Lowery: vocals and guitar


Carlton Owens: drums


Thayer Sarrano: piano

Stream the song here. Order the new album here. 

I think this song is pretty self-explanatory so this won’t really be a long blog. tl/dr: You do crazy things as a teenage boy. Then you grow up have your own teenage boys of your own and you hope that they don’t do the same shit that you did.

I was a good kid
Tried not to lie much
But there are some things
You don’t tell mom and dad

I was a good kid, or at least I tried to be. Growing up, I did my best to stay out of trouble and avoid lying to my parents. But as any teenager knows, there are some things you just don’t tell mom and dad. These inevitably involve drugs and alcohol. Sometimes driving cars or motorcycles while inebriated.

Like the bottle in the brown bag
And the Ziploc baggy
I got from the bikers
I worked with downtown
They thought I was older
Cause I worked the night shift
Emptying jukeboxes for Mongols MC

I’ve had jobs since I was 12 years old. Started as a paperboy delivering the morning paper and then shifted to the afternoon paper when I was 14 so I could stay up later at night. As soon as I had my license I bought a motorcycle and shifted to doing a motor route for the Redlands Daily Facts. Eventually I started working at the pressing plant, first assisting the Circulation Manager and then later working in the press room. For whatever reason there were a couple of (honest to goodness) bikers that worked at the plant. I later discovered that this was a trade that was significantly populated by members of outlaw motorcycle clubs and so this was not unusual. One of my many jobs at the paper was to empty the coins out of the vending racks that were the staple of the newspaper trade in those days. There were no real safeguards or controls to prevent someone emptying the machines from skimming money. And someone less honest would have probably done that but I didn’t. After I took over the fact that the machines were producing more revenue than they’d been previously was noted and this led one of the bikers to recommending me to a guy (clearly another biker) that controlled jukeboxes in a number of bars in the Inland Empire. I guess because they judged me an honest non-skimming kid, I was a good candidate for the job of emptying the machines.
In retrospect the whole thing was pretty shady because the guy worked from an office at the back of the local Muzak franchise. It was never clear if he worked for Muzak or not. See both businesses are essentially ways to legally publicly perform music in your establishment without needing a license directly from the songwriter organizations BMI, Ascap and Sesac. I can’t quite work it out but there was definitely something not kosher about this arrangement as public performance of music is regulated by The Department of Justice Antitrust Division and I’m sure this arrangement would raise eyebrows there. The arrangement felt like it was part of a racket.

Through these connections I met what would seem to be other members of outlaw motorcycle clubs. The bikers were a rough crowd, but they treated me well enough. They saw me as one of their own, despite my age. This was handy as I was a teenager, and I was interested in things like weed and mushrooms. As was standard practice, the bikers didn’t actually sell this stuff, but they would point you to someone they knew. And likely were paid some sort of tribute from these low level dealers. BTW the way I refer to this motorcycle club as The Mongols. They were not Mongols. Anyone familiar with this subculture will understand why I don’t use the real clubs name.

And that’s basically how I end up with the mushrooms that me and my friend Dale take on an all night Disneyland event they had in those days for graduating high school students. And there really is a Disneyland Jail. It’s a holding area below or behind the buildings on “Main Street.”

Never ride dirt bikes
Tripping on mushrooms
Through the Dangermond’s orchards
In the middle of the night
Never climb the water tower
Drunk as shit on vodka
You just might end up in the county morgue

We ate all the mushrooms
In the Disneyland parking lot
Dale had a puffy down jacket
Put the vodka up one sleeve
He looked like a body builder
But only on one side
So we rolled up a t-shirt
Put it up the other sleeve

Never take mushrooms
And ride on Space Mountain
You just might end up in Disneyland jail
Never drink vodka
Pass out on the monorail
You just might end up in Disneyland jail

Then you get older
Have some teenagers
You say “Oh my God please don’t do the shit that I did”
Stay in the chess club
Run for student council
Keep playing clarinet in the marching band

Never take mushrooms
And ride on Space Mountain
You just might end up in Disneyland jail
Never drink vodka
And pass out on the monorail
You just might end up in Disneyland
++++++++++++++++++++++
David Lowery: vocals and guitars