Camper Van Beethoven packed The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on Saturday night to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Telephone Free Landslide Victory, their debut album. The 80s indie stalwarts played a two-hour show that started with the entirety of the 1985 record (played in the original track order) and then moved on to a retrospective of their entire catalog.
For many of us at The Fillmore on Saturday, Camper Van Beethoven’s (CVB) music is a nostalgic flashback to a time when FM radio sucked, MTV was as bland as it was new, and rap hadn’t yet gathered attention from most of America’s White college kids. Like the Pixies and the Replacements, CVB seems tame in today’s rearview mirror. But at the time, they were edgy and offbeat. Being into CVB was a mark of being “cool” in a nerdy music way.
The vast majority of the audience at The Fillmore on Saturday looked like they’d bought their first CVB album in the 80s and never stopped listening to it. They also looked like people who still have record players and dig vinyl. Call it a hunch.
Here’s my own CVB story: In the early 80’s, I worked for several years at Sluggo’s, a collectively run cafe at Porter College on the UC Santa Cruz campus. One of our favorite bands (café staff and students alike) was CVB. The fledgling band was originally from Redlands but had relocated to Santa Cruz when some of the members enrolled at the university. I can’t say for sure if they played their “official” record release party at Sluggo’s to celebrate Telephone Free Landslide Victory in 1985, but I remember them playing several shows at our little cafe at the time.
We loved that album. CVB had cobbled together a killer collection of timeless lo-fi indie songs. Wry lyrics sung by David Lowery (the title refrain of their college radio hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” for instance) meshed well with Russian-influenced instrumental ditties like “Balalaika Gap” and a cover of Black Flag’s “Wasted.” Our cafe cassette player had Telephone Free Landslide Victory in heavy rotation along with Grateful Dead bootlegs, the Talking Heads, and NorCal folkie Kate Wolf.
Has it really been 40 fucking years! since that album came out?
I texted one of my best friends from The Fillmore show, a fellow CVB fan who worked with me at Sluggo’s. When I told him I was at a show celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of Telephone Free Landslide Victory, he texted back a very short list:
1. Fuck yeah!
2. Damn, we’re old.
Word, dude.
The lineup for the record in 1985 was Lowery on guitars and vocals, Chris Molla on guitar and other instruments, Victor Krummenacher on bass, Jonathan Segel on violin, guitar, and keys, and Anthony Guess on drums. The Fillmore show had longtime CVB drummer Chris Pedersen on the skins, but Guess showed up to sit in for a few songs. So they really did get the ol’ band back together again for the anniversary!
Guitar player Greg Lisher is credited as a member of CVB on Telephone Free Landslide Victory, but he was not yet in the lineup when they recorded the tracks. On the other hand, he’s been with the band ever since, whereas Molla departed in 1986 and only rejoined CVB for one brief period since then. Molla stayed on accordion for the show on Saturday night, giving the guitar solo spotlight to Lisher.
CVB has 40 years of history following the release of Telephone Free Landslide Victory. Too much to describe here. More albums and national tours in the 80s. Lowery leaving to form Cracker in the 90s. Other members starting their own bands and also playing with established acts including The Counting Crows, Dave Alvin, and Sparklehorse. There have been several CVB reunions, more albums recorded in the 2000s (including, oddly enough, a track-for-track cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk), and double bill tours with Cracker.
I’m a curmudgeon. Nothing CVB has ever done has grabbed me the way I was grabbed by Telephone Free Landslide Victory. But everything they’ve done has been worthy.
The performance of the classic 1985 debut album was spot-on at The Fillmore. The obvious crowd-pleasers (“Wasted,” “Take the Skinheads Bowling”) were a treat. Deeper cuts like the album opener "The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon" and closer “Ambiguity Song” sounded as fresh and exciting as ever. “Where the Hell is Bill” has perhaps the best lyrics on the record (“Maybe he went to get some gnarly thrash boots”) and remains as delightfully banal as it was four decades ago.
Likewise, the instrumental Russian polkas (“Vladivostok,” for one) and spaghetti western ditties (including “Yanqui Go Home”), have survived seven presidencies intact. Often, it’s Segel’s violin that takes the lead on these cuts, and there’s always a fun, bouncy guitar melody. All of these songs straddle the border between satire and inspiration, and they still rock my socks off.
I mean, who could listen to “Tina” without smiling and swinging to and fro?
After the run through of Telephone Free Landslide Victory’s 18 songs, CVB played about 15 more songs from its vast catalog. “(We’re a) Bad Trip” is classic pre-grunge rock, and foreshadowed the direction Lowery would take with Cracker. I can remember slam dancing to this one when CVB opened for X at a club in Santa Cruz in the late 80s. “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” their cover of Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men” – they played all the hits. (Nothing from Tusk though, darn it.)
The sold-out crowd of Crumbs (that’s the name given to fans of Cracker, who all seem to be CVB fans too) ate up every last bit of it. I was a bit sad they didn’t play “ZZ Top Goes to Egypt,” which was actually written on their setlist for Saturday night. I’m sure the fans who return for Sunday’s show will get to hear that one.
This was the first CVB show since 2000, and it was a truly special evening for those of us who have been riding along with these guys for a long, long time. Has it really been 40 fucking years? Seems like yesterday.
