#74 Hits are Black Swans-Take the Skinheads Bowling

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven on July 15, 2011 by Dr. David C Lowery

The Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight.- wikipedia.

12 Take The Skinheads Bowling  (click to play)

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I’ve mentioned this before.  Success in the music business is completely unpredictable.  No one can really predict which artists will end up being successful. No one can really predict which song or album will be a hit.  And a lot of times the songs, albums or artists that become the really big smash hits seem to just come out of the blue.  They are often surprises to the record labels and artists themselves. The smaller hits and the minor hits seem almost predictable by comparison.  The really big hits are truly outliers.

In technical terms these  smash hits are Black Swans. Further there appears to be a distinct lack of causality.  By this I mean,  spending money on radio promotion, publicity,  advertising,  production, videos etc etc  seems to be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Sure it’s unlikely that a band with no budget or promotional push behind them is gonna be a massive hit.  But having a million dollar promotional budget and the full might of Warner Music Group behind a band doesn’t guarantee success. Money might sometimes be a necessary condition but it is not sufficient.In fact it leads to success in perhaps 1 in 10 cases.*

Sadly talent is overrated. Yes there are very talented artists and songwriters. While talent is a subjective quality there are clearly artists that we all seem to agree have talent. We can be objective and say they have talent.    And to be sure these talented artists always have a much better chance of becoming stars.  They have a much better chance of having hit songs, multi-platinum albums and large crowds at the their shows. But it is not guaranteed. In fact most “talented” artists do not become stars. T They toil in obscurity until they finally give up or become too old to be marketable.  Its just a lucky few that make it.  And it is luck.

And the opposite is also true.  Sometimes fairly untalented artists have big hits.  Sometimes it’s the strange one hit wonders like Right Said Fred.   Other times fairly untalented artists can have long and successful careers.  Take for instance Kid Rock. This is not a jab.  I believe there exists a scientific proof that can establish that Kid Rock is fairly untalented. I’m just stating facts. I have a feeling that Kid Rock might admit that he is fairly untalented and extremely lucky.

Talent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success.

ab

It’s not that there really is no rhyme or reason to an artist’s success.  It’s not really random.  It’s just that the process of making a hit or a star is  irreducibly complex,unpredictable and impossible to model. It can never be duplicated.  What worked for one artist doesn’t work for the next artist.  All we can say is that empirically the secret alchemist formula for success has little to do with money, clout or talent.  These seem to lead to only marginal improvements in total sales. And this is usually only once an act or a song has already generated some success on it’s own.

Yet everyone in the music business seems to think otherwise.  Artists, managers, agents and record executives will argue otherwise.  They will cite their own personal narratives that show how  their actions and decisions led to some spectacular success.  But there are always a few strange logical fallacies at work.

“Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan”- arab proverb.

What this means is not that a successful project has many fathers helping to guide it on it’s way to success.  No, this means that many people claim to be associated or responsible for a project’s success no matter how tenuous.  People play up their role in a successful project but downplay their role or completely disavow involvement in failures and disasters.  It’s a genetically encoded survival feature of Homo Corporaticus.  By doing this people artificially increase their win/loss ratio.  Equity traders would say they fraudulently increase their alpha or skill quotient.

This also helps create an illusion of causality.  It helps us tell ourselves and others the lie that our actions decisions and theories usually result in great success. There’s also something called the narrative fallacy whereby an individual will look back on events and select a cause and effect narrative that brings order to what were really chaotic and random events and decisions.

For instance Quincy Jones might naturally and understandably think that his production of Thriller was the most important and consequential narrative in the unprecedented success of this album (100 million worldwide best selling album of all time).  When in actuality totally unrelated seemingly random developments and events were likely greater factors:

1. A burgeoning middle class in the developing world that identified with american Soul and R & B.

2. satellite television that distributed american music videos worldwide

3. the guest guitar solo by Edie Van Halen onBeat it suddenly made it okay for white suburban kids to listen to Michael Jackson  etc etc.

I’m skipping a few things here but in short we lie to ourselves not because we are bad or evil, it’s just seems we can not function comfortably with a universe that is chaotic and unpredictable.  We need to make sense of the world in a way that comforts and soothes us.

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I teach a class at University of Georgia about the music business. As part of the class I like to give the students a sort of proof by contradiction that outcomes in the music business can not be reliably duplicated and are highly unpredictable.   Here’s how it goes:

Suppose that the music business is perfectly rational and predictable.  If that’s the case you could design a Hit Machine that models the music business.  For example if you put inputs X Y and Z into the machine you get a predictable volume of sales or revenue out of the other end of  the Hit Machine.  Every time.  No Variation.

For example suppose for each album

we spend exactly the same amount on advertising.

We use exactly the same radio promoters.

We use exactly the same publicity firm.

We give the band the same amount of tour support.

They play the same number of shows in exactly the same venues.

The recording and video budgets are exactly the same.

We even use the same creatives:   record producer, engineer, video director,  songwriting team and studio musicians.

We spend the same amount on Black Ops: strippers, hookers, drugs and payola.

The list goes on and on.

If there were a hit machine we would get the same result each time.  The exact same sales.  Each album generates the same revenue. 

For each album,  the exact same inputs (left) produce the exact same number of sales (right).

Of course we know this is absurd.  No one would really expect this to happen. We reasonably expect there to be variation in sales for each successive albums. No matter how firmly we control the inputs to the machine. There are just too many other variables.  The songwriter is off his/her game on one song.  Global cultural tastes change.  Current events make a song’s subject less  or more engaging… etc etc.

So let’s redesign our Hit machine.  We introduce some variation.  A little randomness or pseudo randomness.  Now we get something that seems more reasonable.   If we put exactly the same “inputs” into the machine for each album you get varying sales out of the machine.  In this case you get what mathematicians and statisticians call a “normal” or “gaussian” distribution. 

The Exact same inputs (left) produce a normal variation in sales (right).

But as it turns out we know a lot about the variation in album sales.  Album sales do not vary in this “normal” or “gaussian” way.   They vary “wildly”.***

And here wild is actually a real mathematical term. So if there is a hit machine it would have to generate wild variation in sales with the same inputs.****

Like this: 

I’m skipping a few logical steps here but basically the conclusion is that the “inputs” to the hit machine – those things that the artists, managers, record labels, agents and songwriters have control over – have only a marginal effect on the end result.  So marginal they are pretty much irrelevant.  And if the cumulative actions of managers, labels, agents, artists, songwriters, producers and video directors have only a marginal influence on the outcome then it’s fair to say  success in the music business is due to luck. or success in the music business is random or unpredictable. Q.E.D.  sort of…

To use Michael Jackson as an example again off the wall had pretty much the same inputs as Thriller.  Yet the results were wildly dfferent.  2 million vs 100 million.  Or in gross revenue terms 16 million versus 800 million.  You could plausibly argue with a straight face that $16 million dollars of Thriller was due to skill and $784 million dollars was the result of luck.  I know this is an oversimplification but it still illustrates my point that  most of the profit in the music business is not due to skill, talent or expertise.

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This fractal design is “self similar”  Each smaller piece is exactly the same shape as the whole.

While similar to fractals this is something mathematicians call a “Dork”. 

Another important fact. This “wild” variation in sales of albums or songs is also Self-Similar. By this I mean that no matter how you slice and dice the sales data,  no matter which subset of albums or songs you might create you still get a wild distribution.

For example if you look at the subset of just Camper Van Beethoven songs.  And you look at the revenue generated by each song,  you get what appears to be a wild distribution.  It doesn’t matter whether you look at one quarter’s income or the lifetime cumulative income the distribution appears to be wild.

But I doubt that it is just Camper Van Beethoven.  I don’t know for sure but I suspect that in the sub-genre of black metal,  that if you looked at income for every album in the genre you would get a wild distribution.  I suspect the same for the Narco-corridos sub genre.

This is Self-Similarity. Without going into it in detail- I don’t want to make your brain explode- everywhere that you have wild distributions you usually find Black Swans Events.  And in the music business these Black Swan Events  are the Hits. Camper Van Beethoven’s Black Swan Event was Take the Skinheads Bowling.

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CVB writing a smash hit in 1984. The guy in the hat was not visible to the naked eye.  He was only visible using certain film and special cameras (Usually KODAK EKTACHROME 160T). He is a minor demon of the Santa Catalina class. We would often accidentally conjure him during moments of intense creativity.  He told us his name was “doobie”.  

Honestly in 1984 I  never thought that much about the song Take The Skinheads Bowling. It was part of our repertoire but it wasn’t like people talked about this song much after the show. If they did talk about it they didn’t talk about it anymore than the other songs.

I don’t think it was until after we recorded our demos or the first Camper Van Beethoven album (and before it was released)  that people began to notice this song.  Usually  because we had given them a demo tape.  Our friends were also dubbing and passing around our cassette.  It started to become one of our popular songs.  At least within our circle of friends.

But it was not the only song that people liked.   Lassie, Where the Hell is Bill and Club Med Sucks  were also popular with our friends. In fact Where The Hell is Bill and Lassie were much more popular with our friends.

So it should not surprise you that I never thought  that Take the Skinheads Bowling would become a Hit.  If someone had traveled from the future and told me we would have a hit on our first album I would not have picked this song as being the hit.  Not in a million years.  I would have more likely picked Where the Hell is Bill.

Why?  we regarded Take The Skinheads Bowling as just a weird non-sensical song.  The lyrics were purposely structured so that it would be devoid of meaning.  Each subsequent line would undermine any sort of meaning established by the last line.  It was the early 80’s and all our peers were writing songs that were full of meaning.  It was our way of rebelling.  BTW this is the most important fact about this song.  We wanted the words to lack any coherent meaning.  There is no story or deeper insight that I can give you about this song.

Lassie and Where the Hell is Bill  were silly but there was at least a point to the songs.  Plus both songs were pretty jokey.  Something that seemed popular at the time.

When we first put out the Telephone-Free-Landslide-Victory  we mailed out a fairly limited amount of albums to radio and press.   We got a few good reviews and a handful of college radio stations began to play a couple of the tracks.  Where the Hell is Bill was one.  Club Med Sucks was another  and then of course Take the Skinheads Bowling.    We were pretty excited.  There were probably 20 college radio stations in the country summer of 1985 that were playing our record.

In September we decided that we should mail out another round of promo copies of our album. We expanded our list of college radio stations we added a few commercial stations like KROQ in LA  and WLBS in detroit.  Someone also suggested we send copies to two or three BBC DJs in london.

Sometime later that fall something unexpected occurred.  We began getting reports that BBC 2 was playing Take The Skinheads Bowling.  Simultaneously it began getting regular airplay in Detroit on WLBS .

Up until this point College Radio had been mildly supportive of Camper Van Beethoven.  But somehow word began to get out that we were being played on the BBC and suddenly our cool factor went way up with college radio.  I had been calling various West Coast college radio stations for some time.  I was always trying to find gigs for Camper through the college stations.  I was also aware that this also helped to promote airplay.

I was always treated decently by these college station program directors  but I could tell that some were just humoring me.  So it was very apparent when the sea change came. Suddenly everyone would take my call.  And everyone wanted to talk about the fact we were getting played in the UK.  Shortly after this we began to see our record charting on nearly every college radio station in the US (as well as a number of commercial stations.)

I have no proof that the BBC playing Take The Skinheads Bowling led to more US airplay.  It is just a strong hunch.  And I think I am probably right.  But what I know to be true is that Camper Van Beethoven acquired Gravitas when the BBC began to play us.

For a band like Camper Van Beethoven gravitas was an important property.  Without it we would have been regarded as  novelty or joke band.  We would have been regarded in the way our friends (and fellow travelers) The Dead Milkman were regarded: A cute band, an interesting and clever novelty.  (BTW I do not agree with this characterization of the Dead Milkman).

The Dead Milkman were a punk band from Philadelphia.  They put out their first album almost the same week Camper Van Beethoven released their first album. They were funny and irreverent like Camper Van Beethoven.  Like CVB they mixed serious songs with silly punk rock anthems like “bitchin’ camaro”.

Camper Van Beethoven was definitely a weirder ensemble but the bands were very very similar in many other ways.  Our fanbase overlapped a good deal.  They were also on a very small independent label.  The same college radio stations played us.  And they also were completely self directed.

For the early part of our career the two bands were traveling in parallel.  With the Dead Milkman being perhaps a little more popular than Camper Van Beethoven. But after the BBC airplay Camper Van Beethoven began to be to be regarded as more serious.  Serious mainstream journalists began writing favorable stories about us.  Spin magazine  and The Village Voice featured us.  We also began to garner interest from major record labels.  IRS records which was on a hot streak came a-callin’.  We turned them down but we were able to parlay our newfound gravitas into a distribution deal with Rough Trade Records.  More importantly  Rough Trade functioned as our label in the rest of the world bringing greater sales, publicity and radio play across Europe and Australia.   Camper Van Beethoven quickly surpassed The Dead Milkman critically and commercially.  It wasn’t until long after Camper Van Beethoven had disbanded that The Dead Milkman  had their big commercial success with the MTV hit Punk Rock Girl  and sadly they never acquired the gravitas that they deserved.

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So I don’t really know what made Take the Skinheads Bowling a hit.  I’m sure it was a lot of different things.   But I’m gonna drill down, and focus on one tiny element.  I know it’s not likely correct to attribute the success of this song to this one small event.  It’s simply an exercise to show how a tiny accidental decision can make a huge difference in the success of a song, album or artist.

Assume that the BBC playing Take the Skinheads Bowling was the primary engine of success for this song.  Then one little handwritten note on the beautifully designed Independent Project stationary made all the difference in the world for this song.

See someone told me that many of the BBC DJ’s did not accept unsolicited submissions unless  they were accompanied by a personalized handwritten note.  But this was not common knowledge .  Somehow this little factoid filtered down to us and when our album(s) were mailed they included a personal note to the DJ from one of us or Bruce Licher .  I don’t recall who wrote the notes just that they were included.   I like to think the handwritten note on Bruce’s  beautiful Independent Project stationary caught someone’s eye.  This made our album stand out from the stacks of albums that the BBC would receive each week.  And this small detail,  this tiny flap of a butterfly wing  made Take the Skinheads Bowling a  hit.

*  “throw ten records against the wall and see which one sticks”  This is often attributed to Atlantic records founder Ahmet Etegun.  I’ve googled it and find no evidence he ever said it.   Still the modern 1950-2000 music business was based on a success ratio of something like 1 in 10.  1 success for 9 failures.

*** It is know that there is “wild” variation in book sales and other cultural products. Since YouTube views of music videos seem to vary wildly and using YouTube views as a good proxy for album/single sales I’m not going out on a limb by stating album/single sales also vary wildly.

**** Actually this last statement does not really follow.  I know many of my readers are smart and will quickly point this out. For the sake of readability I am completely fudging here. I believe my conclusion is true but it’s a much longer argument and involves some induction.

“If a hit machine existed it would have to output wild variation in sales because in actuality the variation in sales of albums are wild”  No that doesn’t follow. Previously we were assuming that the inputs were exactly the same.  The only way this follows is if all albums in the known universe have the same inputs. Clearly they don’t.

Instead the logic is much more complex. It first involves the fact that there are known pairs or even triplets of albums that have substantially the same inputs.  The variation of sales in these pairs or triplets of albums is so great (thriller vs off the wall) that this inductively suggests the hit machine will produce a wild variation in sales.

Or another way of looking at it.  If there were a hit machine the market would eventually nudge the labels into using only the best inputs, those that produce the greatest sales.  These would all be virtually the same inputs. But the market doesn’t do this because  it “knows” the inputs don’t matter all that much.

(And the market may know this because at times in Nashville and Hollywood the record labels have come very close to using exactly the same inputs over and over again and they still got “wild” variation.  For instance in the late 1990’s at any time the top 10 modern rock tracks were usually mixed by just 3 or 4 mix engineers!)

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[INTRO:]
[C]–[Fmaj7]–[C]–[Fmaj7]–[C]–[Fmaj7]–[C]–[Fmaj7]

[C] Every day, [Fmaj7] I get up and pray to [C] Jah [Fmaj7]
[C] And he increases the number of [Fmaj7] clocks by exactly one [C] [Fmaj7]
[C] Everybody’s comin’ [Fmaj7] home for lunch these [C] days [Fmaj7]
[C] Last night there were [Fmaj7] skinheads on my [C] lawn [Fmaj7]

CHORUS:
[G] Take the skinheads [F] bowling
Take them [C] bowling [F]–[C] [F]–[C] [F]–[C]
[G] Take the skinheads [F] bowling
Take them [C] bowling [F]–[C] [F]–[C] [F]–[C]

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes (got big lanes, got big lanes)
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same (look the same, look the same)
There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything (anything, anything)
I has a dream last night, but I forget what it was (what it was, what it was)

REPEAT CHORUS

I had a dream last night about you, my friend
I had a dream, I wanted to sleep next to plastic
I had a dream, I wanted to lick your knees
I had a dream, it was about nothing

REPEAT CHORUS x2

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#70 I Sold the Arabs the Moon- When we fly we all become philosophers.

Posted in Cracker, David Lowery Solo with tags , on January 26, 2011 by Dr. David C Lowery


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06 I Sold The Arabs The Moon

First of all let me openly acknowledge I am hijacking my blog for a few days to talk about the songs on my upcoming solo album  The Palace Guards.  Available everywhere Feb 1st.
And I know I have a lot of competition this week.  It looks like a number of my peers are releasing records.  So let’s quickly review them.
First off Iron and Wine has a new album out. Kiss Each Other Clean. I am told it is a 45 minute field recording of Sam Beam humming The Theme to a Man And a Woman while he vacuums.*
Then there is the new Deerhoof album which is titled Deerhof vs Evil. This is also a strange album.  It consists entirely of Brittany Spears covers with vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki singing in a fake texas accent ala Stan Ridgeway of Wall of Voodoo.  **
Finally there is REMs new record “Mine Smell Like Honey”  which is a concept record about Michael Stipe’s testicles. ***

So as you can see you are much better off spending your 8, 10 or 12 dollars this week on my new solo Album The Palace Guards.
Click Here to buy an autographed CD from Newbury Comics.

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There is this magnificent book by gabriel Garcia Marquez titled the Autumn of the Patriarch.  A sprawling first hand account of a south american’s dictators improbable 100+ year rule.
Throughout the story the dictator repeatedly sells out to various world powers  eventually selling the sea to the Yanquis.
I loved this phrase.  I’ve turned on my tongue many times while strumming guitar trying to fit it into a song.
I never found a home for this phrase until in 2009 I  found myself inexplicably flying in a US Army combat helicopter 2500 meters over Iraq. We were on our way from the Coalition base at Basra International Airport to a US armed forces base variously referred to as Camp Adder by the US army or Ali airbase by US Air Force. Most People call it Talill.

We were engaged in what had become the familiar GI shit talking on headsets as we flew.  Questions from the crew about details of life touring in a rock band.  Us asking questions about their lives, their experiences and some good gossip about  celebrities politicians and others they had ferried around Iraq.

At some point one of the pilots or crew members mentioned that we would be flying over the Ziggurat of Ur.  Although I had spent a good deal of time prepping for this trip by reading histories of Iraq and accounts of both Iraq wars,  I didn’t know what this was.

“It marks the city of Ur which is literally the birthplace of civilization”

“Ur was probably the first or one of the first urban human settlements,  the first city”. another unknown voice on the internal comms chimed in.

The pilots obliged us by banking the aircraft in a large arc as we went into Talill so we could get a look at this historic site.

The ziggurat comes clearly in focus at 0:12 seconds.

I remember looking down at this and getting this weird sensation.  This feeling that you sometimes get when you are flying and you see the curvature of the Earth.

You get this sense of how small you are.  How short your life is in the span of human history.  How insignificant your small deeds and actions.  At the same time you get a glimpse of the huge yet unseen forces that shape everything we do.

The green of the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigres.  The great arc of the fertile crescent that produced the first large groups of non-nomadic peoples. How the land itself shaped who we are and what we do.  Farming and craftsmen then produced a (relatively) gentle life that produced cities scholars and philosophers. The great expanse of desert on one side. A harsh wilderness to some but a home of sorts to nomadic tribes like the arabs.  They became skilled warriors and traders taking goods from once place to another.

The Kurds on the other hand in their distant blue mountains, their strongholds they are independent and wary.   Their great herds of livestock still the cultural link between the eurasian steppes and the Persian gulf.   The people of this land also straddle the linguistic divide  between the semitic languages of the south, the Indo European mother tongue to the north and the mongol horseman borne languages of the East.

At an altitude like this you can see how the land shaped the people. At an altitude we all  become philosophers.

And other things.   I had an officer comment to me that we won’t leave Iraq for a long time because:

“we’ve scrambled their economy and now it’s reassembled around our supply lines.  The gulf arabs come in from the south and the Turks from the north. They use our supply lines.  It started with their mobile phone companies now it’s their construction companies, and so on…when you fly back to kuwait you can see the flow of containers and equipment coming in.  It dwarfs what we are taking out”.

There it is again.  When you fly you become an economist, a geopolitical scientist and a philosopher.

So here I was a son of a career US Air Force NCO.  I couldn’t help noticing the vast infrastructure of the Air that we were building.  Rows of antennae  non-directional helixes,  which told me they were for speaking to “birds’ or satellites.  As well as the more familiar satellite dishes.  Air Traffic towers,  infrastructure for unmanned ariel vehicles,  airstrips for our large aircraft, and the strangely  a high tech reprise of Edwardian blimps bristling with sensors and cameras.  All this showing no sign of a drawdown.  Sure we’re removing most of our  ground forces,  but instead we  leave behind our  dour civillian contractors with their mustaches and sunglasses. Our clever Australian, South African and English engineers to build and man our lethal redoubts.  Our invisible fortresses in the Air.  No one will notice.

Although unsure about the wisdom of this naked thrust of our imperial might my chest couldn’t help swelling with pride for my country.  I suddenly felt like chanting USA USA USA!!

The English and their grey warships.  They controlled this part of the world by controlling the sea.  The Turks with their masterful bureaucrats backed by cruel and efficient armies.  The Mongols with their highly disciplined calvary of squat horses.  The Arabs with their swords, caravans and the crescent moon of Islam.  And two dozen other forgotten empires. They all came to rule this part of the world.

And so on my way out of Baghdad on the roof of what serves as the passenger terminal for officers and US government employees in and out of Iraq I began composing this.

“I sold the Yanquis the Sky,  I sold the English the Sea.  I sold the Mongols the Steppes.  No too obscure.  People will think ‘steps’ instead of ‘Steppes’,  I sold the  Ottomans… no people will think furniture,  I sold the Mamluks the…  ?  Who?  I sold the Romans the chariot? sounds sort of pathetic.  I sold the Arabs the Moon.”

I also thought of my father as I was writing this.  I couldn’t help because he actually died this day (January 26th).  I wondered if all those years of flying around in planes had made him a philosopher.  He never really talked about much in a geopolitical context.  Although I do remember a vague memory of him pointing out the faint  arrow straight outline of the roman road out of Londinium towards Dover.  And of course scrambling around on Moorish and  Roman ruins when we lived in spain.  He clearly had some sense of the bigger  historical picture.   I also document this in the Cracker song Riverside.  My father metaphorically stands on the bank of the river Styx which in greek mythology separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.

I can’t see you standing by that riverside.

I can’t see you standing by that riverside.

See you on roman roads, aqueducts and matadors

See you on Moorish walls, Alhambra,  Seville


05 Riverside

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*, **,  ***   I’m only joking.  It’s just my sense of humor y’all. And my father would approve of this kind of joking.  And *** was actually borrowed from ashley knotts.

I WAS THE MAN THAT SOLD THE ARABS THE MOON
And I was the man who sold the arabs the moon
The emirate princes their hands manicured
Their servants with luggage they followed behind
The african concubines regal and tall
And I was the man
who sold the arabs the moon
they festooned their flags with
crescent moons
And i was the man who sold the English the sea
They wanted the afternoon breezes it bore
The sweet smell of spices from over the sea
The afternoon showers it brought during tea
And i was the man
who sold the english the sea
i cowered before
grey battleship guns
And I was the man
who sold the yankees the sky
the black of the night
and the blue of the day
the endless horizon
of hope and desire
I was the man who sold the yankees the sky
the english the sea
the arabs the moon

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# 68 The Long Plastic Hallway-Playing on a Flying Saucer with The Talking Heads.

Posted in Box O Laffs, Camper Van Beethoven with tags , , on January 10, 2011 by Dr. David C Lowery

 


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12 The Long Plastic Hallway

“The music business is cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free, where good men die like dogs.  And then there is a negative side.”-attributed to Hunter S. Thompson

There is actually a debate as to whether Hunter S. Thompson said this or not.  I suppose because there are variants that are similar attributed to other people.  Really? It sounds so much like the guy it has to be Hunter S. Thompson.

Part of this post is a story you may have heard.  I like to tell part of this story at shows. usually as an introduction to the song The Long Plastic Hallway.  But it definitely needs to be written down for posterity. So here goes.  It also allows me to get into the history of Box O’ Laffs one of the bands that preceded Camper Van Beethoven. Like the Estonian Gauchos and Sitting Duck there are a number of Box O’ Laffs songs that ended up being Camper Van Beethoven songs as well.  Most notably Ice Cream Everyday and Flowers. So Box O’ Laffs’ story is integral to the history of CVB.

14 Ice Cream Everyday

11 Flowers

Box O’ Laffs consisted of Eric Curkendall on vocals, Chris Hart on Guitar, sometimes Chris Molla on guitar, keyboards and drums, and then a host of different drummers, Anthony Guess, Chris Pedersen and Richie West.  All of which played with Camper Van Beethoven at some point.  I’m also quite sure i’m forgetting a drummer or two. But you’ll forgive me if I just move along with the story?

And yes that is how we spelled it: Box O’ Laffs.  Sometimes we wrote it this way Box O’ Laffs™ as the name was supposed to evoke a toy or board game.  Often the venues would list our name wrong in ads or on flyers.  They’d spell it “Box of Laughs”.  This drove us crazy.

So Box O’ Laffs™ was formed in 1981 when I met Chris Hart and Eric Curkendall at College 5 at UCSC.  I was still living on campus and so was Eric.  We constantly struggled to find places to practice.  We rarely managed, so much of our rehearsing was done live at shows.  There was a neat little formula.  Chris and I would make up a couple of very simple repetitive grooves.  Then we’d alternate between the two while Eric improvised lyrics over the top.  Each “song” had a title and generally Eric sang about pretty much the same thing  but each performance was always different. Sometimes radically different.

It was very easy to add a new song to the repertoire.  As long as me and chris alternated correctly between the two or three grooves that made up a song,  usually the drummer could follow along.  And Eric? well he was good at just making shit up on the spot.  After a while these improvisations became more and more settled. Eventually they would come to resemble normal songs.

Mostly the college kids we were playing for didn’t notice this process.  The grooves we played were kind of bouncy and were easy to dance to.  As long as we didn’t stop they danced.  No one seemed to notice that Eric would be singing lines from Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, Dr Seuss stories or even laconically announcing a LA Lakers vs Boston Celtics game like a stoned Chick Hearn.  This is how we worked out the songs.  Sounds crazy i know but the over all effect was  we came off like a slightly funky californian version of The Fall.

But a little bouncier.  So a lot of people compared us to The Talking Heads.

So what does this have to do with the Hunter S. Thompson quote?

In the summer of 1983 Chris Hart our guitarist was living in LA.  He was working for Eric Curkendall’s father in Pasadena.  At the very end of the summer he started to call me repeatedly insisting that he had managed to get us a gig supporting The Talking Heads in Los Angeles.

Chris was never the most reliable person.  Although he was the most normal or straight laced looking member of the band there was something not quite right about him.  Aside from being a poor judge of character he would constantly end up in some fucked up situation. He of course would profess that he was a completely innocent bystander and had no idea how these bad things kept happening to him.  The truth was we had all watched him put himself in dangerous situations over and over again. It was strange to us.  Cause otherwise he was (and probably is still) an intelligent and thoughtful person

Still we had our guard down when Chris phoned us and said he’d got us a gig with the Talking Heads.  We were skeptical but we wanted to believe.  We called people we knew in LA for some sort of independent confirmation.  Anthony even called KROQ to see if any of the DJs had heard anything about us opening for the Talking Heads. We know from our friends in LA that we weren’t in any advertising.  It was 1983 and it wasn’t like  we could look on the Goldenvoice website to confirm we were playing. It seemed improbable to us… still we wanted to believe.  So after a little badgering from Chris we decided to make the 400 mile drive Santa Cruz to LA to play the gig.

Anthony Guess was at that time the drummer for Box O Laffs.  Anthony and I got Joe Sloan to drive his pickup truck to LA.  Anthony me and the gear road in the open back of the truck 400 miles to the leafy Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena.  It was nearly midnight when we made it to Eric Curkendall’s parents house. Early september.  We waited out in the yard smoking cigarettes and enjoying the mild night. we waited for quite a while for Chris Hart and The Talking Heads’ “percussionist”.  They didn’t show.

Joe Sloan started to get really impatient and agitated.  Finally someone figured out where this “percussion” player lived.  We drove over to the apartment which was in a much sketchier area of Pasadena or perhaps even Alta Dena.  There we found Chris Hart with a person who in retrospect was very clearly a crack head.  Chris seemed pretty disoriented and stoned himself.  Did I say apartment?  It was really more of a crack house.  An upscale crack house, but nonetheless a crack house.

Immediately our spirits fell.  Still there is nothing like wanting to believe that something really implausible is true.  We began to pepper the “percussionist” with questions.

“What time do we load-in?”

“How much do we get paid?”

“How long do we get to play?”

“Why aren’t we in any of the advertisements?”

The “percussionist” began to get more and more agitated.  Finally he’d had enough of us and our ridiculous questions.

“Man I’m not talking about that gig.  That gig is the fake gig.  I’m talking about the real gig.  And the real gig is after that gig.  The real gig is on a flying saucer above Los Angeles”.

Joe Sloan is a big man.  And at first I thought he was gonna attack the “percussionist”. Instead he turned his attention to Chris Hart.  I really thought he was gonna beat the crap out of Chris.  He didn’t.  But he didn’t do anything to rid Chris Hart of the notion either.  That is the rest of the night Chris kept a wary eye on Joe,  certain that the ass-whipping was about to come at any time.

Now to quote the lyrics from the third verse:

playing on a flying saucer

box o laffs was supporting talking heads

everyone was high and having a real good time

they was having a real good time.



The story doesn’t end there.  In the summer of 2000 I went to the wedding of Virgin CFO Ken Pedersen.  There were several other celebrity guests at the wedding and I was delighted to find out that I was sitting at the table with David Byrne.  Wow.  This is so cool.  David Byrne, ever gracious, stood and introduced himself to me as I approached the table.  We exchanged greetings and then I said:

“We actually played a gig together a long time ago”

“Really?!”

“Yes, it was on a flying saucer above Los Angeles”.

At this point David Byrne backs away almost imperceptibly.

“It’s a long story,  you don’t remember because they erased your memory of the event”

Now he perceptibly takes a step back from me.  Of course I then realize that i may have genuinely freaked him out.

“I’m joking… well sort of…”

It all ended up okay and I did manage to explain the whole story to David Byrne and he seemed to think the whole thing was amusing.  But at the same time I could tell he was thinking what I sometimes think:

“some of our fans are out of their minds.”

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The Long Plastic Hallway


CHORUS:
La la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la
La la la la

REPEAT CHORUS

Cigarettes and carrot juice
Marijuana and lots of booze
I threw the flower of youth into that stew

The serpent’s tongues were red and pointy
But they were wearing very cool shoes
Who wouldn’t wanna sell their soul?

REPEAT CHORUS x4

We waited in line for hours
VIP passes bouquets of flowers
To see the brand new siren sing her song

The virgins then were thrown into volcanoes
A beating heart, it was held aloft
And no expense was spared

REPEAT CHORUS x4

Quezacotl and Busby Berkeley
Hanging out in Pasadena
Rodney on the ROQ, and David Byrne

Playing on a flying saucer
Box o’Laffs were supporting Talking Heads
Everyone was high, everyone was having a good time (a good time, they were having a good time)

REPEAT CHORUS x4

 

 

 

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#67-Turquoise Jewelry- Grace Slick Where Art Thou?

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven with tags on January 7, 2011 by Dr. David C Lowery

 

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07 Turquoise Jewelry

come down from that condominium treehouse

stop driving around in that station wagon with the wood on the side

take off that jumpsuit you look like grace slick

staying up all night drinking that 7-11 coffee

Funny story about this song.  It was all pretty much based on the alleged sighting of Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) at a 7/11 in the north bay of SF.  Sausalito?  Mill Valley?  I’m not really clear.  I’m not even sure who told me about it.  Paul MacKinney (my old college roomate) Jackson Haring (our former manager)  one of the guys in Spot 1019?  Anyway the alleged sighting was approximately this:  Someone had seen Grace Slick buying coffee at a 7/11 or other convenience store.  She was wearing some sort of fashion forward pantsuit or designer coveralls, and a fair amount of jewelry.  I’m pretty sure that the turquoise jewelry part was my embellishment of the story. More on that in a minute. The part of the story that makes me question the veracity of the story is that she left in a Buick roadmaster station wagon. No self respecting Northern Californian hippy would drive a Buick station wagon.   Any former hippy who needed a station wagon would naturally choose a Volvo station wagon.  I’m pretty sure it’s in the handbook.

Either that or it wasn’t Grace Slick.

Or the entire story was made up by one of my friends.

But what this song clearly illustrates is Camper Van Beethoven’s delight in picking apart the bones of the dead or dying Norther California hippy scene while simultaneously praising and emulating hippy culture in general.  For at the same time the songs distinctly owes it’s narrative voice to Don Van Vliet.  That’s Captain Beefheart to you civilians.

Check the distorted harmonica,  disjointed and seemingly random horn parts, the hoo hoo hoo vocalizations  and most tellingly the barked non-sequiturs.

I know Captain Beefheart was from Southern California. So was Zappa.  See even the guys from Northern California in the band seemed to prefer these hippies, these musical anarchists to their Northern Californian cousins.

We were mocking the flower power, peace and love part of hippiedom while simultaneously trying to emulate and update the bomb-throwing part of the movement.  Using Captain Beefheart’s voice to comment on Grace Slick was just one way of doing it.  We didn’t really dislike Grace Slick or Jefferson Airplane. They just happened to be innocent bystanders.  Collateral damage if you will…

(and too be fair Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane were a lot more edgy and punk than we gave them credit  for).

****************************

But as previously noted Camper Van Beethoven was also defining itself against the punk and post-punk scenes.  To a lesser extent the new “college rock” movement.  Back in 1986-87 we actually wore a lot of turquoise jewelry.  It was one of our ways of rebelling against the punk and college rock movement.  It worked too. If you wore a fake indian pancho, giant turquoise belt buckle,  laminated scorpion bolo tie and turquoise beaded mocassins into Hollywood’s Club Lingerie in 1987  people loked at you like you were crazy.

We didn’t wear the good stuff.  Just the knock-off fake stuff you’d buy at a truckstop or “indian” trading post along I-40 somewhere in the southwest.  We also spent a lot of time in thrift stores in this part of the world.  Tucson and Albuquerque still have some of the best thrift stores around.  I mean they were (and probably still are) hip deep in fake indian panchos and bolo ties with laminated scorpions and of course turquoise jewelry.  When we’d return to Santa Cruz from one of our periodic tours, it was usually via the 40.  Inevitably we’d come home looking like a deleted scene from movie Billy Jack.

Right on.

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Turquoise Jewelry.

Come down from your tree house condominium
And start driving around that station wagon with the wood on the side

Take off that jumpsuit, you look like Grace Slick
Stayin’ up all night an’ drinkin’ that 7-11 coffee

And take off your turquoise jewellery

Shake your medicine rattle

And fill a sock with an herb
Put on your fringe skirt

Come sit down next to your man, he’s hankering for some company
Come sit down next to your man and let him cough in your ear

‘Cuz you bring me sticks and stones
You bring me everything

Take off your turquoise jewelry
Shake your medicine rattle

‘Cuz you bring me sticks and stones
You bring me everything

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#66 -Raise ‘Em Up On Honey. Notes on the etymology of the word cracker

Posted in Cracker, David Lowery Solo, Sparklehorse with tags , on January 5, 2011 by Dr. David C Lowery

 

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The word Cracker has an interesting history one that I felt worthy of further elaboration. It’s origination is widely disputed. Was it from the  ‘crack’ of the whip of the white vaqueros that herded  Spanish cattle in Georgia and Florida? Was it because they were such  poor people they cracked and ate their seed corn?

The most interesting etymology of the word purports to illustrate a history of  friction between the dominant English culture and Celtic subculture  of the British Empire including North America.  This is not my theory.  It has been thoroughly researched and written about by several historians. Much is in dispute but clearly  the word Cracker is intimately associated with Celtic culture in particular the Scots-Irish of the American frontier.  The most notable author to propose this is Grady McWhiney.  In his book Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways of the Old South McWhiney  argues that Cracker is synonymous with being of Celtic origin.  Here is a brief summary of historical uses of the word.

Cracker as in a braggart or sharp and entertaining speaker.  In Shakespeare’s King John

“What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?”

Craic in middle english also was  used to mean “to enter into” conversation.  Especially loud boisterous conversation.  Hence  to “crack” a joke.

McWhiney points out that this is exactly the use and spelling of the Gaelic word craic.  This and other uses of the word  from this  period generally reference the Scottish and other Celts of the British Isles.  These included not just the well know Irish, Scottish and Welsh but also lesser known Celtic groups like the Cornish,  The Manx and the Hebrideans.  One must remember that at this time the British Isles had yet to be fully conquered  much less  anglicized.  Later many of these troublesome un-anglicized groups were shipped overseas to the North American colonies.  The southern American colonies and maritime Canada were prime destinations. Many of these wild celts arrived in the new world fully un-anglicized. Speaking their native tongue and chafing under the English ways.

Certainly by the time these Celts hit the new world at least some of them were being called “Crackers”

From Wikipedia:

As early as the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American Colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads:

“I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.”


First a little curious fact about the state of Florida.  It was a spanish colony from 1513-1763.  It then became an English colony for a brief 20 years.  In 1783 it was handed back to Spain after the American revolution.  But during those 20 years,  many colonists from Georgia and colonies to the north were encouraged to settle in Florida. When the spanish regained control they continued to encourage American settlers to move there by offering land grants.  About 20 thousand american immigrants and 40 thousand spanish colonists lived in florida at the time it was ceded  to the United States in 1819.

The white cowboys who herded cattle in Spanish Florida alongside the Spanish Vaqueros were purportedly called “Quáqueros.” A corruption of the spanish word for Quaker which was also generic insult for any protestant.  Others say they were  given the name “Crackers” by other white Floridians and Georgians because of the crack of their spanish whips.

McWhiney and others argue since these were mostly  freed Scots-Irish indentured servants  they were already called Crackers. Further the pan-celtic preference (at that time)  for ranging cattle on common land ( in this case sparsely populated Spanish Florida)  as opposed to the english preference for penned sheep and hogs, lends some credibility to the account. Cattle herding was the preferred livelihood of many of these immigrants.

As a footnote the battle between the advocates of private land for grazing and the advocates of a common free range often played out violently through American history.  It ended in a stalemate. East of The Rockies most grazing activities happens on private land.  In the West,  The Federal Government owns much grazing land through the BLM or Bureau of Land Management. Historically this agency then doled out grazing rights.

I have often wondered if the Scots-Irish had a such a deep seated ideological preference for ranging and common grazing land as McWhiney proposes, what did  those in Texas  think  as the US army methodically killed and subdued their Native American analogues?  By this I mean the Comanches and other  buffalo herding plains Indians. For ultimately the Indian Wars were a process of converting the Indian common lands to private land. Yes they may have been happy to see the murderous  cattle rustling Comanche vanquished and confined to reservations. But were they not saddened by the following influx of settlers?  For it were these settlers that destroyed the greatest commons the world ever knew.  It was settlers from the east that  divided the great sea of grass into a patchwork of poor farms and meager homesteads.  Did the Texan Scots-Irish descendants secretly prefer the commons loving Comanches to their new neighbors?

Allow me to divagate for a moment so  that I can make perhaps my most glancing reference yet to a song from our catalogue.   Raise ‘Em Up on Honey.   This is the opening track from my Solo Album The Palace Guards (Feb 1st 2011). In this song the protagonist proposes a very Cracker-like return to the common. Although for the purposes of marijuana cultivation.

Go up on the mountain build a little shack just over the line

well BLM they won’t complain cause no one surveyed this in a while

home school the children give them weapons training

just in case the DEA comes snooping round again

go up on the mountain where the water comes from glaciers blue.

With my red beard, cowboy hat and preference for the wild frontier I could easily pass for one of these Scots-Irish “lawless rascals” so detested by the English overlords.  And why not?  My  murky family history would support this.  Lowery is a common enough name not only in Celtic parts of the British Isles but very common through the main Cracker heartland.  Indeed my great grandfather came from “somewhere in Georgia” and settled deep in the Piney Woods of Southwestern Arkansas.  The Piney Woods are a distinct ecoregion covering 54,000 square miles of eastern Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, southern Arkansas and extreme southeastern Oklahoma.  But it must also be somehow culturally tied to the Georgia and Florida Cracker heartland.  And for a simple reason.  Spanish Cattle.

 

Those Crackers herding cattle in Spanish Florida were herding a type of cattle that is still referred to today as “Cracker Cattle“. This is somewhat of a misnomer as this breed of cattle is a Spanish breed that the Conquistadors brought to Florida.  Cracker Cattle had a very close cousin further west known as Pineywoods Cattle.  These also were remnants of the Spanish herds.  Whether they were brought west by Florida Crackers or whether Florida Crackers followed them to the piney woods is immaterial.  There is somehow a connection.  Indeed some historical sources equate the term “pinelander” and “cracker”.  But This Is Pinelander Soul doesn’t have the same ring.

Finally the Piney woods immediately reminds me of another Pejorative.  Peckerwood.  My grandfather used to endearingly refer to me as his little Peckerwood.  Years later I looked it up and was shocked to find it was probably the only known slur for red haired white people.

In 1999 I returned to the Piney Woods for my grandmothers funeral.  There was a sea of people at the small church graveyard.  More than 100 people.  Most of these were my blood kin.  The majority direct descendants of my grandmother.  There were 90 year olds and nursing great-great grandchildren.  It was impressive and beautiful spring day. The children were beginning to run in a pack.  My wife at the time, Mary was pregnant with our first child.  She looked out at the crowd and gestured with her head  ” I want one of those”.  I looked at where she gestured but i didn’t understand.  “One of those”  she pointed at a flaming redhead of a boy that bounded past us barefoot and freckled.  Two more followed.  I looked across the churchyard and realized that my clan was full of these redheads.  I laughed.  “Careful what you wish for”.

My grandmother was of course famous for saying of her red-haired progeny.  “red-hair is how god marks the crazy ones”.

We must have seemed exotic to Mary.  Her family also of Celtic origin are textbook Black Irish. The Black Irish largely from counties in the west of Ireland, are not “Black”. They almost look spanish with their black curly hair and dark brown freckles.  And as it turns out for good reason.  The Black Irish do appear to be from the Iberian peninsula as they share common genetic markers with the Galicians, Basque and Portuguese.  I reference Mary, her sisters and their love of broken, old and decrepit houses in this track I recorded with Mark Linkous.

16 Eyes Of Mary

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Raise Em Up On Honey

going up the mountain where the water comes from glaciers blue
take along my sweetheart gonna raise ourselves up a brood
raise em up on honey from bees and buckwheat wine
if we can go do this make our clothes from hemp and twine
go up on the mountain where the water comes from glaciers blue
go up on the mountain build a little shack just over the line
will BLM* they won’t complain cause no one surveyed this in a while
home school the children give them weapons training
just in case the DEA comes snooping ’round again
go up on the mountain where the water comes from glaciers blue
every fortnight or so the bible thumpers they come around
they’re worried ’bout the eternal souls of our daughters and our sons
they’ll be fine they’ll move into the city start black metal bands
give up and move back up the mountain again
raise their little broods on mountain waters from glaciers blue
Eyes of Mary
You were born
With it inside
A secret twin in your wounded side
Bits of hair
Teeth and String
And Yellow flowersOpen Up
Let it all in
Let the strange parade begin
A piece of pie
A piece of cake
For Every sister

Let the eyes of Mary
Carry you away now
Let the eyes of Mary
Carry you away now

A baby born
It’s made of leaves
And Carried round the maypole tree
By Irish Girls
With jet black hair
And dark brown freckles

Let me bring
You bits of string
Tired and worn and sagging things
Under the weight
Of old crows feet
And the seasons

Let the eyes of Mary
Carry you away now
Let the eyes of Mary
Carry you away now
Let the Brides of Jesus
Carry you away now
Let the Brides of Jesus
Carry you away now.
Away now
Away

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#59 Stairway to Heavan (sic)- In Praise of Half Baked Ideas and Unfinished things. The importance of not being earnest.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 4, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery

“C amper Van Beethoven” II and III.  I think the C fell off the paste up board and was incorrectly lined up again.  Camper Van Beethoven placed the Star of David on the album for no other reason than to confuse people.  The symbol has such heavy meaning while this record was purposely devoid of any coherent meaning, messages or interpretation. On Subsequent pressings the star was removed after we were hammered by Rough Trade about the symbol.  They were worried that the obliqueness of our songs and the record would eventually lead to terrible mis-interpretations of our intent. Some sort of radical zionist or anti-semitic interpretation of one our songs. who knows.

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Part of the charm of camper van beethovens earliest records that they sometimes contained half baked ideas,  studio experiments and things that were really only partially finished.

Some might disagree.  But when I look back on these records I think that it was cool we had the self confidence to not take things so seriously.  Most young artists tweeze their records to death.  Over polish and over arrange each song.  They remove every little imperfection.  They constantly fret how each song will be perceived.  We did none of this.  As noted above we put one of the most meaningful symbols of the  20th century on the cover of II and III for no apparent meaning.

In 1985 and 1986 underground rock music was a very serious business to most of our friends and peers.  Lyrics were serious.  The music was serious.  Everything was very important and burdened with meaning. We were very aware of this.

I noted this in earlier posts that Camper Van Beethoven was purposely messing with that notion right from the start.  From the choice of the band name,  to the non-sensical “Take the skinheads bowling”. We felt it our mission to be seriously unearnest.

But part the way through the second album and especially on the third album  we started doing this in a different way.  We started including weird sonic experiments and including them in the record.  Half finished songs.  We included these also.   They weren’t bullshit filler,  but neither were they 100% serious endeavors.  Some were accidents.Like putting the tape on the reel upside down.  so the wrong tracks played and were backwards.

We came to believe that if we tried too hard to arrange these accidents and turn them into a real song we would ruin the original flawed yet briefly beautiful idea.

Others were songs we felt  just weren’t enough of an idea to be a real song of proper length and scope. So instead of struggling to make them a second rate “song” with lyrics and a standard verse chorus verse chourus bridge chorus outro structure,  we let them be as they were.

We WERE earnest about some things. We had the earnest belief that we were creating a sort of demi-song,  an overlooked and under appreciated form of music.

04 Turtlehead

The first entry is a Chris Molla penned ditty.  A “small idea” I remember him terming it.  A small spinning tension.  Release in the repeated abrupt stops.  An explosive atonal bridge. Then release in the repeated abrupt stops.  No words.  The title ?  I have no idea.

12 Circles

Circles was created by listening to the song the song Oh No backwards.  We learned the structure and kind of played along with it. In the A and C sections. We added a few incidental melodies with guitar and keyboard but nothing that could be considered a focal point an actual melodic theme that ties the song together.  The only part of the song that makes an effort at being a real song is the B section where we let the words to chorus play backwards.

13 We’re All Wasted and We’re Wasting All Your Time

This was also done at about the same time as circles.  This is jonathan and victor singing along to Take The Skinheads Bowling backwards.  I thin anthony guess or chris molla is also drumming along with it.  It’s got a sort of reggae rock steady feel. weird.  But again. Its just a thrown away chorus.  Perfectly joyful and mischievous.

13 Dustpan

This hard driving collection of guitar chords changes and arpeggios would have been used by most bands for the basis for a song with lyrics.  Even CVB in a more traditional mood would have tied it all together with an instrumental melody line.  Neither of these happened.  It was left this way.

17 Cattle (reversed)

Another song that contains what would normally be a good set of riffs,  an A and B section that should have made a good basis for a psychedelic blues song that an early led zeppelin or fleetwood mac might have played.  There should have been some robert plant hobbit rock lyrics over the top of this.  but no we were content with the “response” lines of the guitars.  The fact the “call” vocal lines are missing qualify this as a demi- song.    Arguing against that is the strange interlocked guitar parts in the B section.  They are of two different lengths so they phase against each other.  This is more interesting and makes this part of the song a more full fledged instrumental.  The title of this song came from a randomly drawn celtic rune. (kind of like tarot cards)  we went through a period of naming songs in this manner.  Abundance (tarot card)  The fool (tarot card).

16 Zztop Goes to Egypt

This song really doesn’t  belong in this category.  The only reason i put it in this category is that it doesn’t have two traditional elements of a fully fledged CVB song.  A repeated consistent melody or lyrics.  The main feature of the song is jonathans multiple tracks of modal violin noodlings.  The song slowly builds in intensity. After the crescendo it pedals and slowly decays.  That is the arc of the song.  Building tension a climax and decay.  It is however the most successful of our melody less psychedelic demi-songs. People always shout out for it at shows.

03 Five Sticks

This is pretty much ambiguity song backwards.  Or parts of it.  It was the result of putting the reel of tape on the machine upside down.  We made a stereo mix of it and then figured out how to play along with it.  It has a strange beauty.  Like an ancient text in a lost language.  Untranslatable.  I assume we called it 5 sticks to continue the reference to Led Zeppelin’s fourth effort.   The Led Zeppelin album features a track called 4 sticks.  get it?  I mentioned in an earlier post we always considered this album our 4th album.  The second album was both the second and third album  hence the curious title II and III.  It was recorded in two different sessions.

Also while on the subject.  We toyed with using symbols as the album title.  Just like Led Zeppelin.  However we did not.  What we did do was give the album a title that no one could find.  Unless you were looking very closely.  The album does have a title.  The title is “Soviet Spies Swim Upstream Disguised as Trout”  It’s right there in the liner notes.  And on etched in the inner groove of the first run of vinyl.  We titled it this way because we had an obsessive fan that would write us nearly everyday.  In one of the letters she (?) said she dreamed the next Camper Van Beethoven album was titled “Soviet Spies Swim Upstream Disguised as Trout”.  et voila.

07 Surprise Truck

This was simply a damn good riff that didn’t want to have a B section or anything other musical variatiion attached to it.  Relentless with just some off the cuff bullshit lyrics about “the surprise truck”.  (the “surprise truck” was the apparently the literal translation of hezbollahs code term for their then novel suicide bomb trucks).

08 Stairway To Heaven (sic)

So Led Zeppelin’s 4th and untitled obliquely titled record contained Stairway to Heaven.  Well we decided we needed a track of approximately the same name.  Of course we changed the spelling and added “sic” (Spelling incorrect). Largely because we had all just read Hammer of the Gods and we’re pretty sure Peter Grant or some english thug who worked for Led Zep  would show up and break our legs.  This track is the most accidental.  It starts with a live recording of CVB playing an after hours illegal show in The Icehouse in Fayetteville Arkansas.  It was a very early very slow version of the song processional.  Someone is playing a weird toy piano or something.  It then goes into a Mao Reminisces about his Days in Southern China.  With extra instruments dubbed in forward.  Most notably a distorted slide and a dumbek. But the great accident is when the previous song on the real comes in.  It’s Folly for two.  It’s backwards cause we were always flipping the tape upside down to do these manipulations.  We didn’t intend for that last bit to be on the recording but it did.

09 Pope Festival

Another interesting case is this song.  It doesn’t really count as a demi-song.  but there is something cool about the unfinished non-words and dense repetitive arrangement.  Later when it went onto Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart album,  it got “produced”  it has a better arrangement and structure but becomes quite inconsequential. It was also retitled “The Fool”.

12 The Fool

10 Interlude

And then all those demi-songs disappear once we start making our albums for Virgin Records.  With one notable exception the track “Interlude” from Key Lime Pie.   This is simply Garth Hudson – yes that Garth Hudson from the Band- warming up on his pump organ as the microphones and such are being placed and adjusted.

Later when the band reforms these demi songs these sonic experiments come back into play.  Camper Van Beethoven is Dead Long Live Camper Van Beethoven is largely made out of these pieces of music. Tom Flower’s 1500 valves being the most notable piece.  The drums are from a reel of drumbeats that Chris pedersen sent to us.  The strings are a chopped up bit of Dixie Babylon strings.  Jonathan and victor played along to this loop. I’d just watched a show on the Bletchley Park. This was Britain’s brilliant codebreaking enterprise in WWII.  Thomas Flowers was the unsung hero.  He built one of the first working computers if not the very first.  It used 1500 valves or tubes.  We made up the song in a few hours. Jonathan tagged on a very discouraging message to him from PJ Harvey, rejecting his suggestion she sing on his solo album.

03 Tom Flower’s 1500 Valves

finally I hate this part of Texas and Come out to show them are similar type songs from New Roman Times. But we already went into great detail about both of these.

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Tom Flowers 1500 valves

Contains recording of a phone message where PJ Harvey rejects music from a tape sent to her by Jonathan Segel.

Further info from David Lowery:
"Thomas Flowers was the British postal service engineer who with Alan Turing built the first (years before the americans) electronic computer (Colossus?), allegedly powered by 1500 valves.   I watched a BBC documentary on Bletchley Park some years ago, and i believe these are more or less the historical facts, of course its all a little foggy to me now.
Bletchley Park (sic?): the site of english and allied efforts to break german ciphers in W.W.II.
Cipher Girls: the corps of young women who were hired to work by hand all the possible permutations once a code was partially broken.
Monty: Montgomery.
Ultra: the Cipher Girls slang for decoded german communications
Valve: English term for Vacuum tube.
Tunnyfish: nickname for the german u-boat cipher, apparently the most
difficult to break."

[INTRO:]
[A]

[BREAK:]
[A]–[Bm]–[E]–[C#m]–[D]–[Bm]–[Esus4]–[E]

[A] Bletchley Park – [Bm] what a lark
[E] Cipher girls, they’re [C#m] dressed in curls
They [D] gave to Monty [Bm] the very best of their [E] Ultra

And Thomas Flower in his hour,
It’s 1500 valves were powered
And tunnyfish, is permanently broken

[BREAK] (unintelligible echoey voices)

[BREAK] (voice of PJ Harvey):
[A] “Hi Jonathan, this is Polly, [Bm] er, got your call, and thanks very much for [E] sending that CD and demo tape that Ann? showed my Mum?. Erm, I listened to the [C#m] tape and, er, I don’t [D] feel that it’s the right kind of #thing for me to [Bm] be doing, it’s just not, I don’t feel the [Esus4] mood is right for me, so I, [E] I’m sure you’ll understand. Erm, it was real good to [A] see you the other day. Errm, I-I [Bm] hope it all goes well for you, and er, [A] keep in touch, get your card? off?, and maybe you’ll find that [Bm] recording in Majorca/New Yorker? should last [A] through, kind of help proof? some different? songs?. [Bm] So, er, yeah, really good to see you Jonathan. [A] Take care. Bye.”

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#57 Can I Take My Gun Up To Heaven. Hollywood Cemetery. Richmond And Oregon Hill Part 3

Posted in Cracker with tags , on October 1, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery


Church Hill is on the opposite side of downtown from The Fan and Oregon Hill. But firmly on the East West Axis.  Indeed this is the original city center. The city shifted first west than stretched north and south.  Leaving the old city center Church Hill isolated from the main life of the City.


08 Can I Take My Gun To Heaven_

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Although Oregon Hill is now considered a neighborhood of Richmond it wasn’t always that way. It had a distinct identity separate from the city. When established during the Reconstruction (the rebuilding and re-industrialization ) of the South after the Civil War it was far west of the City. The neighborhood was established primarily for the workers at the Tredgar Ironworks and the Albemarle Paper company.

The houses in the neighborhood have a distinct look. The rumor I always heard was that they were intended to be only temporary housing for the workers. Hence their simple construction.Very narrow two story houses. A steep staircase at the middle of the house that went up at a 60% angle to conserve space. constructed of wood when most of the rest of the building in the city were brick. The adjoining row houses although separate houses and not “condos” often share continuous floor joists and communal walls. The whole neighborhood has the feel of something you would find in New Orleans or more tellingly some of the old West Virginian Mining towns.

Indeed one rumor or story I have heard over and over again from many Richmonders is that the workers were all recruited from a single village in the mountains of West Virginia because they supported the Union in the Civil War. The reconstruction authorities wanted Yankee loyalists in the factories to foil potential saboteurs. Indeed West Virginia broke away from Virginia and was made a separate state because by and large the folks in the mountain counties of Virginia supported the Union. For various reasons this seems believable to me, but I’ve yet to find any real reliable source that supports this story that the inhabitants of Oregon hill were imported from Appalachia in mass.

Still like all the big cities within a few hundred miles of the Appalachian mountains, Richmond attracted many many West Virginians. They came many in successive waves. Certainly during the reconstruction and industrialization of the southern cities after the civil war. But also during other periods of boom and bust. So the idea that the Oregon Hillbillies- as they are often called- came from west virginia or Appalachia is plausible for many reasons. When I lived there you could hear the neighborhoods distinct accent. It was different than the rest of the city. You could hear the mountain cadence in there speech. Older people used curious mountain phrases and words like ‘ye ought to ‘ or ‘thar’ and the river pronounced  not with the pretentious Richmond/Tidewater accent pronunciation:  Ruhvuh. it was pronounced River. Like the rest of us.

It was also 100% white neighborhood. Very poor, very working class. Insular and wary of outsiders. Although the wonderful and elegantly decaying houses were magnets for artists hipster and musicians. The students from VCU were also busy colonizing the neighborhood. Blocks of houses were abandoned and condemned. This didn’t stop people from living in them.

If Corry Arnold’s theory of the inverse relation between housing prices and the vitality of a music scene ever needed a case study, it would be oregon hill 1981- 2000. These are the earliest and latest dates by which my (admittedly) small pool of  Oregon Hill residents agree there was some music scene based in Oregon Hill. Even if your band practiced on Broad street or Fulton hill, the fact most band members lived in Oregon Hill made oregon hill the center of the scene.

The Fan district another neighborhood of brick homes and with a distinct upper middle class and historic pedigree attracted many students. But the Gestapo-like Fan District Association did not permit any bands to practice (or live music establishments) in it’s domain. Or even near it’s domain. Church Hill the oldest and most historic part of the city was another promising area where artists and students lived, but it was too ghetto to rehearse there. Your gear would get stolen.

In recent years oregon hill has begun to emulate the fan district. Exhibit A. the flag at the main entrance to the neighborhood.  This is in marked contrast to the old bumper sticker you would sometimes see around the neighborhood.  Oregon Hill: That better be a tan!

So Oregon Hill by default was the hub of the music scene however brief and small. Despite the fact it was an alien in a host body that did not 100% accept it’s presence. Yet it thrived in it’s own way.

It produced only a handful of bands that went onto wider recognition. But I have to say. owning a studio I have empirical quantitative evidence that the Richmond music scene in this period was much more vital than the current period.  With the exception of Lamb of God most of the Richmond bands that have had any lasting commercial or cultural impact emerged in that brief period.

Again leaning on Corry’s observations,  this was the period when the the city had abundant cheap real estate (mostly in oregon hill and along broad street),  but was sufficiently safe (in that area)  to support a start-up band ecosystem.

One thing that helped Oregon Hill remain inexpensive while The Fan rapidly gentrified was that it was not considered a “historic” neighborhood for a long time. It is still often dismissed by the local historical societies. Especially the University VCU which coveted the neighborhood for expansion.  I suspect this has something to do with Richmonds economic axis being pivoted 90 degrees after the civil war. Oregon Hill was definitely tied into the industries that were part of the “new” North-South trade.  It didn’t even exist when there was a East-West trade.

In contrast Church hill and the Fan (with it’s monuments to the confederate war heros) still dream of Richmond’s Antebellum past. These neighborhoods and others further west are where you find the connected families that make up the old money power structures.   The lawyers and politicians that broker the deals of the city and state. I have a friend who identifies this social strata as  the “skimming” class. His point they aren’t actually adding anything to the GDP of Richmond or the US. They are  just simply taking their cut. Much as generations of virginian rentiers that came before them.

Conversely the troublesome carpetbaggers   with their  US Army, Fort Lee,  Defense Supply Depot, railroads, industrial facilities, fancy credit card companies, pharmaceuticals, and bio tech firms all live and work along the north south axis. The poor ones live in places like Oregon Hill, Lakeside  or trailer parks along rte 1 south. The prosperous ones live in the gated communities and sparkling suburbs of Chesterfield county. Brandermill. Colonial Heights. As opposed to the “skimmer” class these people are generally involved in thevalue added part of the economy. But I digress.

My point is that Oregon Hill did not represent old Richmond. The old southern aristocracy. It also didn’t represent the old southern poor. It was simply a white working class factory neighborhood remarkably similar to those found in cities like Portland ME, Providence RI, Pittsburgh Philadelphia  or Baltimore.  Yes it had a southern flavor.  But it was it’s working class white trash sensibility that had the greatest influence on Cracker. That’s what Can I Take My Gun Up To Heaven is about.

Yes it gently mocks and praises the inhabitants of this neighborhood at the same time. And how could we not?

The first weekend we had our studio set up we heard a ruckus that was so loud we could hear it while wearing headphones listening to loud guitars.  Two different factions in the neighborhood had decided to fight.  Well not exactly fight but sort of pretend to fight. Each side had a leader.  One guy had a shovel.  Another guy had a chain. They were naked to the waist like ancient Celts or Comanches. They were standing in the middle of laurel street daring the other to “come on” .  To throw down.  To throw the first blow.  A crowd of at least a hundred people had gathered to watch.

“I’ll Rock and Roll you Motherfucker!!”

A cheer from most of the crowd.

“Yea and i’ll beat your ass,  C’mon C’mon!!”

A cheer from most of the crowd again.  Which really doesn’t make sense if you think about it.

Amazingly  a single fat white city policeman walked into the crowd and dispersed it.  In LA or NYC 25 squad cars and the SWAT team would have responded.

Then of course there was The Prison. Actually I think it was called the Virginia State Penitentiary.  I guess I should have mentioned that earlier.  Neighborhoods that contain a prison are quite unique.  And this was not the city jail i’m talking about.  I mean the Prison with death row prisoners.  They electrocuted people in that prison.  I was at a party in oregon hill one night when the lights dimmed. It was the night they electrocuted a prisoner.  It was probably just a co-incidence. There were death row protesters across from the prison sometimes.  Sometimes there would be Oregon Hillbilly counter-protestors.  One time I saw a guy standing at the corner of belvidere and spring with a sign that simply said “fry him”. People driving home to south side were honking and waving at him.  Like he had a sign saying “Go Redskins”.

Anyway  sometime during this time we lived in Oregon Hill,  they closed the prison and tore it down.  Suddenly our whole neighborhood was filled with rats.  They brazenly walked around my kitchen.  I could scream and stomp and they would hold their ground.   They would have had to smoke and feign boredom to seem more disinterested in me.  These were some hardened city rats. They’d done time.

There was also dirt woman.  He was a sort of local celebrity.  A redneck drag queen. Worthy of a John Waters movie.  Every year he would wrestle Dave Brockie from GWAR (in costume) for charity.  He walked up to Mary once and took a bite of her Ice Cream cone.  She gave it to him.  “You eat the rest”.

There was dog man.  That’s just what Johnny called him.  Cause he was like a dog.  He’d sit on his non functioning car in front of his house.  Drinking beer and barking or shouting at whoever drove by.  Not in an unfriendly way.  It was a shout but the important thing was it usually made no sense.

“Hey man it’s going on!”

“That’s what I say!! yep that’s what I say! ”

Some nights when buzzed just enough I sensed a profound truth in his seeming inanities.  But it was always just out of reach.

We didn’t hang out with the locals. The students, musicians and artists that had moved into the neighborhood were our friends and peers.  Most were from northern virginia.  They played or listened to punk rock, hardcore metal alternative and indie rock.    Some played some quite fey indie-pop.  So it wasn’t like we were in some Southern Rock immersion zone.

And a lot of the young oregon hillbillies were picking up on rap, and listened to the more bonehead metal bands.  But yeah on any given day you would hear southern rock emanating from someones car or the local bars.  Especially the locals only place on the corner of Pine st and china street.  That place was rough. (somebody remind me of the name The Chuck Wagon?).  Johnny and I loved our dive bars, but even though we were accepted by the locals we only went in there once.  We were immediately challenged to a fight so we left.

One night I was driving Mary’s car up Pine street and a guy comes running out of that bar at full speed chased by an angry mob.  I didn’t have time to even react and touch the brakes.  I hit the guy going about 20 miles an hour,  he went up and over the hood of the car. Landed on his feet and kept on running.  I stopped to see if he was okay,  but  one of the locals started shouting at me.

“get outta here or you’ll get what he’s gonna get”

My dream was that one day I’d drive by this bar and hear this song blasting from the jukebox.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Finally there is an cemetary at the edge of Oregon Hill.  It’s called Hollywood Cemetery.  It is fairly famous because it has several US presidents and CSA president Jeff Davis buried there. It also has a giant stone pyramid that marks the burial place of 17,000 (?)confederate soldiers.  Many people assume that the song Hollywood Cemetery is referring to Hollywood California.  It is not.  It refers to this graveyard.  In oregon hill it’s presence is overwhelming.  The whole neighborhood should be filled with ghosts.  The protagonist sings the song from texas.  His lost love is like a ghost that haunts him.  He wishes she would stay buried and gone.

04 Hollywood Cemetary

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Can I Take My Gun Up to Heaven.
[D]

Can I take my [G] gun up to [C] heaven? [G] [C] [Cmaj7] [D]
You know she’s [G] always been by my [C] side [G] [C] [Cmaj7] [D]
Can I take my [G] gun up to [C] heaven? [G] [C] [Cmaj7] [D]
I’ll check it with St. [G] Peter at the gate [C] [G(sus4)]

And if I had a [D] woman that was [C] faithful [Am]–[G]
Or even [D] kind some of the time [C]–[Am]–[G]
I’d drag her on [D] up to the gates of heaven [C]–[Am]–[G]
Or follow her right [D] down to the gates of [C] hell [Am] [D]

REPEAT CHORUS

[G]–[D]–[C]–[Am]
[G]–[D]–[C]–[Am]
[G]–[D]–[C]–[Am]
[G]–[D]–[C]–[Am]

[C] When I come home from a long day [G] a-working at the prison
[A] I find my woman she’s not a-[D]-round [C]
She’s down at Dahlie’s corner [G] a-playing cards and drinking
[A] Or sitting on the cars singing Dixie with the [D] boys [C] [D]

REPEAT CHORUS

Can I take my gun up to heaven?
Can I take my gun up to heaven?
Can I take my gun up to heaven?
Can I take my gun up to heaven?

[C] Can I take my gun up to [G] heaven?

Hollywood Cemetery


[G]–[B]–[C]–[G(sus4)]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[G7]–[B]–[Em]–[C(7)]
[G]–[B]–[C]–[G(sus4)]

[G] I left my baby, [B] I left her [C] down in Hollywood [G(sus4)] Cemetary
Weren’t a cloud in the [B] sky, but how I [C] wish it was [G(sus4)] raining

[Em] Well I know it was [C] wrong to feel love like a [G] burden [G7]
[B] But if we all were [Em] angels [C(7)] Heaven would be earth
[G] So I left my baby, [B] I left her [C] down in Hollywood [G(sus4)] Cemetary.

[BREAK:]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[G7]–[B]–[Em]–[C(7)]
[G]–[B]–[C]–[G(sus4)]

She got her petees? and coffee, while the band plays a funeral dirge
In New Orleans Mardi Gras, but I’m sick as a dog, here in Texas

When the one that you love’s in the arms of another man
You’ve got to rise above it, and let her go
Leave your baby down, leave her down at Hollywood Cemetary

[REPEAT BREAK]
[G(sus4)]

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#56 Kerosene Hat-Cracker. Richmond and Oregon Hill Continued.

Posted in Cracker with tags on September 29, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery

 

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In #47 part 2  I mentioned the move Johnny Hickman and I made from California to Richmond Va.  The 64 plymouth threw a rod in Arkansas stranding us in the middle of rice paddies in the middle of the night. That’s where i’m gonna pick up.

We were being eaten alive by mosquitos in the rice paddies while we were waiting for a tow.  Johnny started smashing the mosquitos with a magazine on the headboard of the car.  Finally aftter 2 hours a tow trucke arrived and took us to a local Uhaul facility.  We had to wait several hours for the place to open up.  We’d now been up all night. We rented a truck and a tow dolly and towed the station wagon all the way to Richmond.  When we  pulled the station wagon off the dolly in Richmond i noticed all these brownish red smudges all over the headboard of the car.  I stared at them for a while trying to figure it out.  Those hadn’t been there before.

Johnny leaned in the passenger window to see what I was looking at.

“It’s our blood”

I guess I gave him a confused look.

“from the mosquitos”

There were hundreds of these smudges. “We’ve already played a price in blood” I thought. I knew this was funny and overdramitic still  I didn’t say it out loud.  I couldn’t decide if this was an inauspicious or auspicious start for the band.

 

Big Dirty Yellow Demos were recorded on a machine like this.

Big dirty yellow is what we named the house at 239 S. Laurel street in Oregon Hill. Because it was well Big, Yellow and Dirty. This is also what we called the demo tape of 20 songs we turned in to Virgin Records.  The house had a few distinct pluses.  The first was the neighbors took an immediate liking to us, cause Johnny (always the goodwill amabassador) did an impromptu duet of Streets of Bakersfield with the neighbor lady to the right.  This drew a small crowd.  When Johnny flipped the last chorus to Streets of Oregon Hill the small crowd broke into pandemonium.   They had to play it 2 more times before the crowd dispersed.  Meanwhile I had managed to unload half the truck by myself.  It was a small price to pay for the goodwill of the neighbors.  We never had to lock our doors, and no one EVER complained about the noise we made recording the demos.

It also didn’t hurt that the neighbors on the left were a deaf family.  Well not entirely. The oldest daughter could hear.  She would play the pop radio station quite loud.  On weekends we noticed that the radio would often blast  all night.  This was because the one hearing member of the family, the daughter, had gone away to the grandmothers for the weekend.

It was not always easy to gain the locals trust.  Oregon Hill had been it’s own little city within a city for 140 years. A white some would say white trash ghetto in the heart of the city.  And the neighborhood was beginning to be not exactly gentrified but filling up with artists, hipsters and especially musicians. They were drawn there by the ridiculously low rents and charm of the funky houses. Members of GWAR, The Alternatives, The Fugs, Michael Hurley, House of Freaks, Flat Duo Jets and Cowboy Junkies could be seen wandering around the neighborhood. The old locals which dominated our block were hostile to these newcomers.  But never us.  It was fortunate that Cracker was such a country rock roots oriented ensemble.

Big Dirty Yellow  had three bedrooms and was 300 dollars a month.  It was the classic Oregon Hill row house.  Narrow like a shotgun shack.  Each room lead into the next room till you got to the kitchen on the back of the house. It had no heat or air-conditioning.  There was a hole in the floor between the kitchen and living room.  You could crawl down into the basement through it.   We tacked a large piece of plywood over the hole. I found an industrial strength restaurant kitchen fan at a junk store.  I installed this in the uppermost window of my bedroom recording room.  It basically sucked the cool air out of the basement into the upstairs of the house.   Except for the hottest days it was adequate.  In the winter Johnny and I each had a kerosene heater.  We would actually carry these around the house with us.  not lit of course.  But if we had people over we would drop both of them in the living room and kitchen.  If we took a bath or shower we would bring our kerosene heater with us.  To this day the smell of kerosene reminds me of the poverty and the wistful hope we had for our music.

 

Site of the old East Coast Gas Station in Gunsmoke.  Cary and Meadow Richmond VA.

In some ways this is part of the inspiration for the song Kerosene Hat.  The kerosene hat was the wool hunting cap with earflaps that I would have to wear when I walked to the  gas station in the middle of the night to get more kerosene.  This was sometimes a scary proposition because if it was too late and the local texaco by VCU  was closed, we had to walk to the East Coast station up in the neighborhood known as “Gunsmoke”.  Cary and Meadow st.  This is still a sketchy area today.  It was really quite dangerous in 1990.

The second part of the inspiration for this song was the simple fact that Johnny Hickman and I were older than many of our peers in the alternative and indie rock scene at that time.  Also we were one of the few bands that was playing what would later be called Americana.  So this is exactly what i’m talking about when I sing:

How can I fly with these old doggy wings

While a magpie sings some shiny song.

Finally the main body of the song is populated by characters that are similar to the broken down houses and people who populated the neighborhood at that time.  I’ll go into this more in the next post “Can I Take My Gun Up To Heaven”.

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04 Kerosene Hat

[INTRO & BREAK:]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[D(bass F#)]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[D(bass F#)]
[Em]–[D]–[C]–[A]–[G]–[C]

[Em] How can I fly with these [C] old doggy wings
While a [G] magpie sings some [D(bass F#)] shiny song?
[Em] Old corn face row of teeth, she says [C] sweetly to me
In the [G] elevator [D(bass F#)]

CHORUS:
[Em] Everything [D] seems like a [C] dream
and [A] life’s a scream.
[G]–[C]

Here come old Kerosene Hat
With his ear flaps waxed, a courting’ his girl
Come clattering in here on your old cloven skates
With that devilish spoon

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
And life’s a scream
When you’re submarine

[BREAK]

So don’t you bother me death with your leathery ways
and your old chaise lounge (old chaise lounge)
Wickerman’s fence of leathery tyres
And the cook’s gone bad, started several fires

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
When your submarine

Head like a stream she says softly to me
from the rattling chair
Bring me a steak and my old pair of crows,
my medicine lamp

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
So life’s a scream
(life’s a scream)

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#55 James River- Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. Richmond Virginia.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker with tags on September 28, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery

 

The James River in Downtown Richmond.

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The James River is the major waterway through the center part of the state of Virginia.  The river is quite deep until it hits the “fall line” at Richmond.  Indeed this is why Richmond was built at this spot.  It is the farthest you navigate up the James in an ocean going vessel.  After that there are a series of falls and rapids. In the early 1800’s  the James River and Kanawha Canal was built to bypass these rapids and bring trade from the mountains of Western Virginia down the James River to Richmond. As a footnote it was surveyed and designed by George Washington. But that’s another story.  This canal helped bolster the city’s commercial activity turning it into a relatively prosperous and large city.

Although Richmond is very far inland few people realize that there is actually a Port of Richmond which accepts container ships -albeit the smallest container ships.  The port is tucked away along the south eastern side of the city, in an area dominated by large (and mostly abandoned) industrial sites.  Few people who live in Richmond even know where it is. I’m not sure how financially viable it is. I suspect that the fact the Defense Supply Facility is nearby has something to do with it’s continuing function

But these days the James is a relatively unimportant waterway.  And it figures little into the commercial life of the City. The city literally turned it’s back on the river for many years. The banks were  dominated by railroad right aways,sidings industrial facilities and power plants. Until recently there was no easy access to the river from downtown. It was only in the last 15 years a riverwalk was built along the river in downtown.  There were parks along the river but you still have to cross railroad right aways to reach them.  And thenyou were often in close proximity to railroad hobo camps (south bank) or the rough but not unfriendly denizens of Oregon Hill.*  It is a beautiful river nonetheless.  There are spectacular rapids for rafting and this is in the core of an urban city.  Quite strange really. Deer, foxes, bald eagles and even bears are often seen wandering along the forested banks of the city’s river.  But to me there is a certain sadness or nostalgia to river.  It feels at times a relic of the past.  Like the antebellum mansions and the Civil War battlefields  and monuments. And a hint of even darker things.  Belle Island in the center of the river was a POW camp for Union troops throughout the Civil War.  By american standards a gulag of unimaginable horror.  30,000 prisoners on this island. 1 in 25 perished.  A prominent Baltimore surgeon who treated some of the  released captives from the Belle Isle prison  had this description of the prisoners:

“in a semi-state of nudity…laboring under such diseases as chronic diarrhoea, phthisis pulmonalis, scurvy, frost bites, general debility, caused by starvation, neglect and exposure. Many of them had partially lost their reason, forgetting even the date of their capture, and everything connected with their antecedent history. They resemble, in many respect, patients laboring under cretinism. They were filthy in the extreme, covered in vermin…nearly all were extremely emaciated; so much so that they had to be cared for even like infants.”

 

Talk about Southern Gothic! Cormac McCarthy in his imagination could not do much better.  But it is less the horrors along the river that captured my imagination. It was the sense the river was part of the lost past.  Once important it  is now but a shadow of itself. It is irrelevant to the life of the city. Just as the city was once the capitol of the Confederacy it is now a second tier urban center.  It is somewhat irrelevant to the greater life of the nation.That is both sad and sweet.

The river was the heart of a system that sent the products of the colonies and antebellum south mostly tobacco back to England and Europe.  An export oriented agricultural / natural resource economy.  Trade that went East to West with Richmond an important trans shipment point.   But as the North began it’s rapid industrialization, and railroads proliferated  trade shifted North to South.  The Civil War only accelerated this trend.  Indeed one of the minor frictions between the norther and southern states was over tariffs.  High tariffs protected developing industries in the north.  Richmond was also industrializing and was becoming more tied to the northeast than the south.  Hence many Virginians reticence to join the cause of the Confederacy.  As Corry Arnold (Rock Prosopography 101)  recently explained to me:

Thus the geography of Richmond is infused with a logic that no longer applies to the way the city works, as it is oriented towards the river when that is not actually the economic engine of the city (rivers are pretty, fortunately, so its not a terrible thing, but I’m not researching quality of life). In effect, the economics of Richmond were literally rotated on its axis, as the James River initially facilitated East-West transportation, but was of no value when commerce in the the region moved to a North-South axis (eg Atlanta and Florida to Baltimore).

(This post on richmond is largely based on research that Corry sent to me)

I wasn’t aware of this when I began to write about the James River.  But one – even an recently transplanted westerner- could sense that the James River represented the old romantic past of Richmond.  It’s sorry state also represented something else that I came to associate with Richmond. “Elegant decay”  and “opulent poverty”. Two evocative phrases my ex-wife  Mary uses to describe Richmond.

 

The first time I ever spent any real time in the City was my 29th birthday sept 10th 1989.  Camper Van Beethoven was on tour with the 10,000 maniacs.  We played a show at the Mosque theater (now called the landmark theater) just west of downtown in the middle of the VCU campus.  Natalie Merchant had some friends that lived nearby.  Later Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to a party at her friends house in this funny little neighborhood to the south of the VCU campus.   This neighborhood is called Oregon Hill.  It is a former factory neighborhood built along the banks of the James for the workers at the Tredgar Iron works.  The neighborhood is very distinct.  It even has it’s own accent despite the fact it’s a 4 by 10 block area.  Tiny two story  row houses with porches.  It looked like some neighborhood in New Orleans.  The residents were out on their porches this fine late summer evening.  Some polite with nods or “good evenings”  others drunk with catcalls and wolf whistles.  Cicadas buzzed in the trees and I thought to myself?  “where the hell am I”.  I’ll explain this  neighborhood more in a later post (Can I take my Gun Up to Heaven).

It was at this party where i met my future ex-wife.  (I’ve always wanted to use that expression). It is the neighborhood that Mary and I lived in for many years.  And more importantly this is the neighborhood that Johnny and I set ourselves up as we sought to finish writing the first Cracker Albums.

So the song started as a Camper Van Beethoven Song.  With me trying to evoke what I would term the “Old-fashioned seediness” and “antiquated decadence” of Richmond.  There were a surprising number of junkies, drug fiends and decadents in the music scene when I first began courting Mary.  So that was what first struck me. That’s what the Camper Van Beethoven version and early Cracker demo reflects.  Later I would come to appreciate the “Elegant Decay” and “Opulent Poverty” of Richmond VA.  Thus the later more gentle more evocative version of the song on Gentlemans Blues.

Finally I hope my description of Richmond comes across as honest but still affectionate.  In many ways my musical career is deeply infused with the life of three places the Inland Empire,  Santa Cruz and Richmond VA.

james river (live) Camper Van Beethoven Italy March 1990

05 James River (Demo) Cracker Sept 1990

04 James River-Cracker Gentleman’s Blues
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James River (later version)

[INTRO & BREAK:]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[G]

 

[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]

[Dm]You come across [Ddim] the [F] James River [C]
[Dm] A-for a [Ddim] needle, and a [F] spoon [C]
[Dm] But would you [Ddim] come across the [F] James River [C]
To be my woman again [G]
To be my woman again

[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]

You come across the old lee bridge
A-For a dollar fifty in change
But would you come across the James River
for this heart of gold?
For this heart of gold?

[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]

[BREAK]

[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]

You go to work for Ms. Kitty
For a decent rate of pay
But would you come across the James River
To be my woman again?
To be my woman again?

[BREAK]

[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]

You keep a pistol in your left boot
A brush and comb in your purse
But would you come across the James River
To be my woman again?
To be my woman again?

[ENDING:]
[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]–[G]–[Dm]

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# 52 Yalla Yalla Yall. Gallows Humor Addendum. Cracker Live in Iraq.

Posted in Cracker with tags on September 24, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery


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Frank Funaro  (drummer Cracker and CVB) reminded me of some of the excellent Gallows Humour while we were in Iraq.   Here is Frank’s comment:

Oh, and lest we forget… When we were riding around in Iraq in armored vehicles, we all had headsets and microphones on so we could hear each other above the ungodly din these vehicles produce. The 82nd Airborne guys that were in the vehicle that David, Greg and myself were in would pepper us with questions about the band and touring, and music, etc, constantly chattering into our earpieces over the radio. This was to (as we later found out) keep our minds off the fact that at any given moment, it was entirely possible that we would get hit with a roadside bomb. Ok, that was part of their their job, can’t have any civilians gettin’ all panicky in the back of a sealed, 14 ton MRAP. But, here’s the strange thing. Every now and then, apropos of nothing, they would yell BOOM! over the radio. Talk about your professional-grade, industrial strength gallows humor…

And since we are on the topic again.  Here are a couple more pieces of gallows humour I overheard in Iraq.  The first are normal military variety.  The last is of a Deer Skull variety be forewarned.

BTW I am 6 foot tall.  Foxx on the far right  is really that tall.

First while we were  traveling through baghdad by MRAP with soldiers  from the 82nd airborne Frank and I must have telegraphed to them that we were okay with the gallows humor. None of the other band guys got this treatment.  Once we  were faced with two unattended disabled vehicles along the side of a road.  The soldiers paused the convoy for a while and got on their comms.  I’m not sure how this works but they were talking to Iraqi security or American forces to find out what the deal was with these vehicles.  They didn’t want to proceed even though it was unlikely they were bombs. It wasn’t a long pause and  eventually someone gave them enough assurances that these vehicles were okay and we proceeded past them.  But before we did the soldiers began wagering on which of the two vehicles would explode.  Like anyone would be alive to collect on this bet.

“my money is on the mini pickup”

“thats  bullshit why would you use a pickup truck there’s no trunk, no place to hide enough explosives”

“it’s good enough for an Iranian shaped charge and stealthier”

The part about the shape charge may have been explained later within the safe confines of BIAP on the way out of the country. No matter how jaded these guys were I don’t think even they wanted to imagine a high velocity ball of molten metal ricocheting around inside a MRAP severing limbs.

I Forget Are klingons Sunnis or Shias?

At another camp I asked one of the Soldiers  what he thought of the Sons of Iraq or Sunni Awakening Councils.  These were former insurgents who had now switched sides to the US. And they were now on the US payroll.  We passed by their checkpoints occasionally.

” What do you mean what do i think? you mean how do i feel about the fact these guys  were shooting at me last tour of duty*?”

“yeah something like that”

“well,  this is Iraq: The next generation. They’re the Klingons” This was delivered with a disinterested shrug. A sort of “it’s not my fucking job to care” gesture.

Finally at one of the Army airfields in Kuwait right before we went into Iraq I overheard this very fucked up conversation.  Basically two young soldiers on there way into Iraq were sitting around talking about what terrible things should happen to  US army Major  and Psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan.  He is the guy who had shot up Fort Hood about 10 days earlier.  We were all waiting around next to these pallets that we had piled our gear and duffles on.  It was dusty and pretty warm.  We were waiting for someone to do some kind of roll call.  We would have rather been inside the airconditioned tent that served as the passenger terminal.  An older NCO was listening to these two young soldiers.  Whether it was the heat or the dust or he was genuinely sick of hearing these kids talk. He stood up and walked over to them.

“You two.  Shut the fuck up.”

They looked at him stunned.

“Sorry sir-”

“There are probably a lot of guys here that are a lot closer to that shooting and those events than you are.  I’m sure they don’t want want to hear your bullshit… besides there is a distinct positive to this event”

“sir?”

“The US Army now has a Psychiatrist with actual combat experience”.

JEEZ.  remember i’m just repeating the story. This is less than two weeks after the shooting.  So in the US Army  Tragedy + 10 days = Comedy. The deer skull has been….
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