High on the Flower

On my way to see Camper Van Beethoven on the second to last night of the year, I found myself thinking about all the beautiful dresses I have worn to Camper Van Beethoven shows in the past.

There was, for instance, a beautiful pink silk print dress from the 1940s I had for a while that made me look like a Dorothea Lange-era Dust Bowl refugee, perfect to dance to ”Sad Lover’s Waltz” in. There was the empire-waisted brown and pink cotton shift that originally belonged to ML, a green linen baby doll frock I wore for most of the late ‘80s, and a number of other thrift store finds we used to get at Aardvark’s or that place in the Mission that sold clothes by the pound.

This was pre-Buffalo Exchange, see; back when thrift stores were actually thrifty. My friends and I shopped there to buy things that were one of a kind, not mass-marketed. And you cannot even imagine how much more radical we looked in comparison to mainstream women in their horrid 1980s clothes: shoulder padded jackets, blouses in primary colors, slacks. We were never confused with hippie-chicks, who wore Guatamalan-weave dresses and long skirts, because we wore fitted dresses with cinched waists and then, underneath, black legging and combat boots to show we weren’t housewives.

Of course I don’t wear that kind of thing now. This time I went to see CVB in ordinary, nondescript, comfortable clothing, though when I walked in, I saw a really pretty blonde lady wearing an enviable white hoodie with the words FUCK TRUMP emblazoned across it. Up on stage, CVB was already playing and I noted – since it was on my mind – that David Lowery was wearing an oxford cloth button down shirt under a navy V-neck sweater, like the professor that he is now. It was a far cry from the long ginger pony tail and loose jeans he used to rock, and it made me smile, because I used to rag on David, both in print and in person, for looking like a hippie in a post-hippie world, and I remember him telling me once that all rock bands were posing and it didn’t really matter what the pose was.

Of course he was right. But back then it mattered to me, because it was 1985, and Reagan was President, and in 1985, Camper Van Beethoven weren’t my favorite band, not by a long shot. They were a local band – give or take 60 miles – that I saw fairly frequently, whose sense of humor and fashion sense I found suspect. Unlike my favorite bands, who came from the East Coast and the Midwest, they looked just like the burnouts who went to my high school, long straggly hair and all, and in my shallow judgy, just-past-teenaged way it was hard for me to relate that to the kind of music I liked at the time. They seemed like Dead Heads who accidentally got mixed up in the indie rock world. They WERE Dead Heads who accidentally got mixed up in the indie rock world. I liked them moderately, but I didn’t love them, like I did some other acts of the era. They had their moments. But they just weren’t foreign enough for me to worship.

Fast forward some fifteen years or so. I’m sitting at home nursing the boring old baby and Paula calls me up: “Camper Van Beethoven have reunited are playing the Bolinas Public Library, wanna go?”

Me: “When?”

Her: “Now, dummy. Pump. Hand the baby off to her Dad. Get in the car!”

It seemed so sudden and awful of a thing to do. But besides being my friend, Paula was my midwife. I had got in the habit of doing what she said, even when it was something very horrid.  So I put the baby down. I got in my car. I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I wound around Mt. Tam. Up and up and up I went, then down down down. The sun was just setting, and I saw the ocean sliding off the side of the mountain, as one does as one approaches Stinson Beach. I got to the Bolinas Public Library and I was immediately gobsmacked by the past. I had barely been out of the house since baby’s birth, so it was all even more impactful than it might have been…either that, or I was still flooded with hormones. I wanted to cry. I DID cry, sometime during “Sad Lovers Waltz” or “Joe’s Stalin’s Cadillac,” or “White Riot” or “Never Go Back.”

In point of fact, that night I realized quite suddenly that in fact Camper Van Beethoven WERE my favorite band of that era, no question…I mean, of course they were! I just hadn’t recognized it at the time because they weren’t exotic enough. It was like one of those teenage movies where the girl suddenly realizes that the nerdy boy next door was way cooler and sexier than the football hero because in fact they have so much more in common, only with bands instead of individuals. Camper Van Beethoven come from the same time and place and space and era as I do. Camper Van Beethoven, c’est moi.

That night was an apotheosis of sorts: I was on the edge of quitting my job as a rock writer, and I didn’t really pay attention to any new music again until very recently. Only with this one exception. In 2004, CVB put out a new album, called New Roman Times. Here’s the thing: I love Camper’s old stuff, but what I REALLY love is New Roman Times. It is a concept album, about a future America in which various states have split off and formed their own nations, who are constantly at war with each other.  Unsurprisingly, Texas is a right-wing Christian fascist state, while California is a semi-utopian nation that is undergoing a civil war with parts of Mexico – or something like that.

“New Roman Times” follows the fortunes of some kid who fights first for Texas and then for California, under the flag of a commander called 9 Mile Beach (after a surfing spot in Santa Cruz). The album’s goofy story line worked for me even before half of everything it predicted came true: not civil war, per se, but the increasing polarization of America. As the protagonist, a fighter for the (fictional?) Christian Republic of Texas “Secure Intelicorps,” sings, if we weren’t all “high on the flower,” we could not “work for the power/that stands for nothing decent at all.” That seems like a line worth thinking about today, on the eve of the flower being legalized in California, but then I thought about this album on other days in 2017, too, like that day we dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan, the day my student Rashad, a vet with PTSD, brought his therapy puppy Zelda to class, and when I watched the World War I scenes in the movie “The Lost City of Z.”  In other words, I think about it all the time.

CVB have 2 even newer albums, La Costa Perdida and El Camino Real, and I like them too: the California vocal fry of Lowery’s voice, the twanged guitar, the imagery shot through with some deeply Californian vibe that only those of us who grew up in this state pre-Prop 13 may connect to.  Truly, the fact that CVB’s new material, old material, and mid-era music is all equally interesting to me is what puts them in a whole different category than almost every other band of my era. And it’s surely what brought me to the Great American Music Hall over the holiday, and why I stood there, smack in the middle of the dance floor, willing myself into that state of mind where you lose all consciousness of yourself as an audience member and become one with the music.

When I walked in, the band was digging deep in their catalog, singing songs drawn mostly from “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” and “Telephone Free Landslide Victory,” even doing that one jam that meshes together Led Zepplin’s “Kashmir” with “Hava Nagila,” so nerdy and so cool: it was as if they were pressing All Western Music into a big sieve, mashing it down, extracting its DNA and the reconstituting it as their own.

CVB, 12/30/2017

Then: “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” their biggest hit, and “Skinheads” etc. They didn't play anything from New Roman Times, or 'Photograph,' my favorite cover, but I am not bitter or anything, it's always a pleasure to hear them and anyway, I like to think there is all the time in the world to play all the songs in the world...I mean, we've been together this long, Camper Van Beethoven and me, we are obviously in it for the long haul. There's no breaking us up now. They are my forever family, there's no getting away from it. 

Meanwhile, the world marches on. The baby in this story is all grown up now, and on the way home, I noticed that the electronic freeway signs had changed from "Don't drink and drive' to "Drive High/get a DUI." Here's to the years I guess. Or at least to 2018.