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#77 Exile in Beach Flats–Lulu Land, Wasted and Surf City 1985

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker on August 1, 2011 by davidclowery

Ted Kaczynski’s Santa Cruz vacation shack.

In 1982 I lived in the tiniest house imaginable. It was at most 400 square feet yet it boasted a kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms. My bedroom was 6 x 10 feet. big enough for for a single mattress on a small platform. The small closet could hold about a ½ a dozen shirts, a couple of jackets and a sweater or two. I rolled up four or five pairs of jeans and stuffed them onto the shelf at the top of the closet. The rest of my clothes I kept in a suitcase that I slid out from under my bed when I needed it. This is where I also kept my guitars. I had two plastic beer crates. I stacked these on the floor one on top of each other. I kept a few books, a couple of writing journals and my supply of cassettes for my cassette recorder. The cassette recorder was on the top of the stack. In the corner I kept a small fender amp. A Fender super champ that somebody with excellent cabinetry skills had reworked into a separated “head” and speaker cabinet. This was my songwriting workstation.

I can’t remember if the living room had any furniture in it. I know we had my roommate’s stereo in there and one wall was filled with our vinyl collections. The other side of the living room had a couple of guitar amplifiers, my full size SVT and some miscellaneous drum kit parts. I can’t imagine there was any room for any furniture. Plus I can not recall ever once sitting in that room.

The house was part of a collection of a dozen beach cottages crammed into the parking lot of the Santa Cruz beach amusement park. These were originally meant to be summer rentals. But this was during Santa Cruz’s deep nadir in popularity. Air travel had rendered Santa Cruz’s oceanfront irrelevant to the Bay Area’s middle class. Yes there were tourists on the weekend but they were a decidedly working class and rowdy lot.

This area was called Beach Flats. It was really just a sand bar barely above sea level. It was protected from the San Lorenzo river by a 12 foot levee. Aside from a few students living here the area was populated by Spanish speaking immigrants. Most worked in the local restaurants. Everything about the place suggested impermanence and transience.

In the summer it was occupied land. A foreign army of daytrippers from San Jose, Milpitas, Watsonville and Fremont encamped upon these shores. Their River’s Edge Baja Bugs, Low Riders and tricked out pickup trucks were like the chariot armies of Carthaginians to our Roman sensibilities. Thus we avoided their beachhead.

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

But most of the time, especially in the winter, it was a lonely outpost from the rest of the city. The city bus neglected the area and it always required a lonely and dark walk along the top of the river levee. Alternately you could walk across a small pedestrian bridge attached to the railroad trestle that spanned the San Lorenzo just as it emptied into the ocean.

During heavy rains directly below the bridge there was a violent mixing of river current and storm driven waves. If you fell into this you would surely drown. I’d often encounter neighborhood youth smoking pot or drinking beer on this bridge late in the evening. They stared at me warily. Their alliances were uncertain. I never knew if we were friend or foe. On many occasion I imagined they might throw me off the bridge just for their own amusement. For this reason I often carried my all aluminum Ultraflex skateboard. I rarely rode it, but both tail and nose were worn down into a sharp edge. It was like a 30” Celtic sword with urethane wheels.

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Corry Arnold defines a music scene as a neighborhood or city that is a “net exporter of concerts”. In other words

Let A = the number of concerts performed by the bands in a scene outside their neighborhood or city X.

Let B = the number of concerts performed by outsiders within that neighborhood or city.

City or neighborhood X is a music scene If and only if A> B.

By this definition I’d say that Santa Cruz (barely) qualified as a music scene in 1982.

Arnold also notes music scenes rely on low property values in particular transitional neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that had once had another purpose but now had fallen out of primary use. Cheap space and a tolerance for noise are important commodities for bands.

You could argue that the old beach rentals along the lower end of Ocean street and the neighborhoods clustered around the old harbor qualified as in transition. Too seedy and rundown for beach rentals these houses were subsequently occupied by the more adventurous. Arty students, musicians and other slackers now occupied many of these cottages.

But our cottage was effectively cut off from these neighborhoods by the river levee. In retrospect I now see it was very Dungeons and Dragonsish of the locals to refer to the homeless population that slept in hideaways along the river as “trolls”. Indeed walking to my house at night I learned to steer clear of these trolls as many were quite aggressive or totally insane. You definitely felt penalized after unexpectedly making contact with these folks.

But the isolation was very good for a couple young mathematicians and songwriters. I was able to really dive into the most difficult proofs and songs in that cottage. Later when I moved to a better part of town I found that I had to go to the science library to get any deep thinking done.

My roommate was also a mathematician and songwriter. His name was Paul MacKinney. Recognize that name? We covered one of his songs on the 3^rd Camper Van Beethoven Album. The song is LuLu Land. We also named our CVB fan club after him. The Paul MacKinney Fan Club. People were completely mystified as to why the Camper Van Beethoven fan club was named The Paul MacKinney Fan Club. Paul was also mystified. As always CVB was Inscrutable.

I’m not really sure what Paul had in mind when he wrote Lulu Land but in my mind I always associated it with that walk along the river levee. An unplanned conversation with one of the sad crazies was surely the root of this song! But who knows.

Also it should be noted that Paul, Joe Sloan (of Spot 1019) and I had a short lived band about this time called The Jaws of Life. It was actually during this time that I began performing the Black Flag song “wasted”. This was later carried over into Camper Van Beethoven’s repertoire.

Paul would often finish his math homework well before me. He’d come into my room and hover. Or he’d try to help me with whatever proof or problem I was working on. Once I was finished he’d celebrate by handing me a PBR (or joint). and dropping the needle on his well worn copy of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP. Wasted was one of the songs on the B side. We became fixated on the simple genius of the 40 second song. How could we not cover it?

03 Wasted

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Beach Flats makes another small appearance in a Cracker song. Once I moved to the eastside of Santa Cruz I rarely went back to this neighborhood. Except to go bowling. Go figure.

Boardwalk Bowl (I remember it as Surf Bowl-anyone else?) was on the western edge of Beach Flats. Right where the land began to slope up and become Beach Hills. To be accurate it should be noted that the cheap beer was more of an attraction than the actual bowling. This and the two old dive bars The Asti Café and the Avenue were for a long time my usual hangouts in Santa Cruz.

But one day my girlfriend Jennifer (see fear and loathing in Las Vegas #….) ruined it for all of us. She had become fixated on the bowling shoes at the Surf Bowl. She wanted her own pair but the ones that were available commercially were nothing like surf bowls cool retro beauties. So one day she just walks out with a pair on.

When I discovered this I was quite mad. Because we were regulars and she was quite the beauty. There was no way the middle aged men who worked in the bowling alley would not remember us. No more Surf Bowl. All for a pair of shoes.

So in Surf City 85 I sing.

Surf City

Then you stole some bowling shoes

What a pathetic criminal you.

What a pathetic criminal

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

Lulu Land- (Paul MacKinney)

[Am] Pictures of [C] movie stars [D] fade and grow old
[Am] The hot dogs and [C] pretzels are [D] always served cold
[Am] Take nothing [C] with you when you [D] leave but your soul
In [E] Lulu Land

How can you lose when you choose what you feel?
The scab will fall off when the wound starts to heal
Luck’s on your side and it’s your turn to deal
In Lulu Land

In [F#m] Lulu land, the [G] walls are soft and [F#m] dark
In Lulu [G] land, the secret [F#m] heart
is in com-[G]-mand in Lulu [E] Land

How can you lose when you live in the past?
Nothing can happen that happens too fast
Live is a furnace and love is the blast
In Lulu Land

Where innocent promises turn into bad debts
Where things that you do you live to regret
Your life is a movie and the world is a set
In Lulu Land

In Lulu land, the wall are soft and dark
In Lulu land, the secret heart
is in command in Lulu Land

[C#dim]-[Cdim]-[C#dim]-[Cdim]-[B]-[A#m]-[Am]-[G]

[Am]-[C]-[D]
[Am]-[C]-[D]
[Am]-[C]-[D] [E]
[F#m]-[G]
[F#m]-[G]
[F#m]-[G]
[E]

Surf City 85
[INTRO x2 (also: chords for verses):]
[Am] [Dm] [F] [G] [Am]

Schoolgirls walking down the street
In schoolgirl uniforms
There’s a sadness at
The centre of the world

Well days they seem to drift away
I don’t know where they go
There’s a sadness at
The centre of the world

[CHORUS:]
So [G] come pick me up
At the tea cup
We’ll go [Am] down the seaside lanes [F]
We’ll watch the [C] girls
[F] We’ll bowl a few [C] games

Nothing to do
But there’s the red room
Then you stole some bowling shoes
What a pathetic criminal you
What a pathetic criminal

Blair and goldie on the sand
It’s raining in the surf
Well that’s nothing lost
And nothing gained today

They tried to go their separate ways
But all roads circle back
Well that’s nothing lost
And nothing gained today

[CHORUS:]
So come pick me up
At the tea cup
We’ll go down the Asti Café
We’ll watch the girls
Just like every Saturday

Nothing to do
Ride out to Bonnie Doon
We thought she had it made
But you crashed your bike on ice-cream grade
And then you were dead

[KEYBOARD SOLO then GUITAR SOLO (chords as INTRO)]

10 Comments »

#73 South California Revisited – St. Cajetan.

Posted in Cracker on July 13, 2011 by davidclowery

South California as proposed by secessionists.

05 St. Cajetan

I was browsing the web last night and came across this NY Times article about the Inland Empire and 10 other counties wanting to secede from the state of California. The idea is to form their own state called South California. Not to be confused with the Mexican states of Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur (Lower California North and Lower California South). If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you already know about the Inland Empire of California. It’s geography and how it differs significantly from the rest of the state. But here’s the quick synopsis.

The Inland Empire, Mojave Desert and much of the Central Valley (think Bakersfield) are very different than the rest of the state. It is poorer, more agricultural than a lot of California. It is also populated by a lot of people that moved along the southern wagon trails, railroads, highways and interstates from the Southern States of the US to the California. Also there was a significant Mormon migration (The Mormons once envisioned their own seperate nation that included this area of California).

The City of San Bernardino was first the center Morman migration to California and next a significant Pro- confederate settlement during the Civil War. This area has often acted like it wanted to be part of something other than California. And much of the time it has shared a sort of affinity with the US Southern States.

When my family first moved to California from Spain. (My father was in the US Air Force) I saw so many “confederate”* flags I assumed that Southern California was somehow part of the Confederacy. That wasn’t that far fetched. Indeed it tried.

From KCETs excellent history of secessionists in California (both from the Union and state of California):

On August 25, 1861, troops under the command of Major William Scott Ketchum secretly moved into San Bernardino amid rumors of rebellion. The next month, in the nearby mining town of Belleville (close to the present-day site of Big Bear Lake), the presence of Union dragoons in the streets quashed a election-day riot by secessionists.

Sweet Home San Bernardino.

To further the feeling that I was living in a lonely outpost of The South or at least Texas, Southern Rock became enormously popular in the Inland Empire. I know Lynyrd Skynyrd was enormously popular everywhere in the US but in the Inland Empire that popularity extended far down into the lower echelons of Southern Rock ie Charlie Daniels Band, Molly Hatchet,The Outlaws etc. Green Grass and High Tides was as important an high school parking lot anthem as Stairway to Heaven. Indeed in the late 70′s it was not un-common for local FM station KCAL to boast of playing a 1/2 hour of uninterrupted southern rock.

And why shouldn’t this stuff have been staples of FM rock radio? all through the 70′s, the stuff wasn’t that different from what The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were playing. Both played southern blues and gospel based rock. The difference between the english blues rockers and the southern blues rockers had mostly to do with their public persona. The Stones and Led Zeppelin may have sang about the working man the poor and downtrodden from time to time, but they decidedly cultivated an image as being part of some sophisticated elite. Albeit a dangerous, decadent and hedonistic elite. Contrast that to the Allman Brothers earthy notion of “The Family” or Lynyrd Skynyrds sneering contempt for elites and northerners. You got the feeling that the English bands sang the blues ( and sang it well) but the southern rockers actually lived it. They were still decadent and hedonistic but it was a down home working man’s kind of hedonism. Hell raising. Boys being boys.

As the the New York times article nicely notes there is also a recurring sense of victimhood in the Inland Empire. Similar to what you find in the south. In the Inland Empire it goes like this: the hard working, poorer inland californians have a better and more traditional way of life but it is constantly under attack from northern, sacramento or big city elites. “And if we were just left alone to run their own affairs things would be so much better”. Does this sound familiar? This is not to say that like the other southerners they at times do have a point.

I believe it was that subtle subtext that made southern rock so appealing in the Inland Empire. That and the family ties to the US south.

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All of this was intended as an explanation of how two california boys, myself and Johnny Hickman , became well versed in southern rock.

I classify St. Cajetan as a southern rock song. It’s what we were intending to create with that song. Hear the southern rock “oooo’s’ in the chorus backing vocals? The stomping drone of the guitars and drums. The fabulously overplayed climatic guitar solo. If we had 4 guitar players there would have been a 4 part guitarmony at the end.

Its also the song on the first Cracker album that most differentiated it from Camper Van Beethoven. While Camper could expertly play with the Jimmy Page/ Peter Green english blues rock oeuvre, mythologizing it in a semiotic/Roland Barthes sort of way, CVB never really played with the southern rock sound (despite the fact Greg Lisher sounds so much like Dickey Betts at times it’s uncanny). As one of the ways of differentiating Cracker from CVB we went a step farther and embraced southern rock. This is not to say we weren’t embracing it in the same post-modern** way that CVB embraced Led Zeppelin, we weren’t trying to be 100% authentic. It was a tip of the hat to southern rock from a couple of South California rockers.

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

St. Cajetan was named after the performance space in Denver. An old Catholic Church in Denver now part of the university there. Camper Van Beethoven was playing a show in this venue and I was sitting around with an acoustic guitar backstage. I came up with that riff and named it “St Cajetan”. Camper Van Beethoven broke up before i could ever turn that riff into a song. So this was probably the first or second Cracker song.

Loosely the supplicant in the song is asking St. Cajetan for a cool drink of fresh water. Which is not water at all. Salt water being being heartache. Nothing more to it.

*I know this is a misnomer the flag commonly called the confederate flag was not actually the confederate flag.

** All ROCK IS POST-MODERN. IT IS AT THE HEART OF THE GENRE. THERE IS NO AUTHENTICITY. ROCK WAS BORN AS A MONGREL. STOP ARGUING ABOUT IT.

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

St. Cajetan

[A(-Am-A-A7-A embellishment)]
[F#m]-[D]
[A]-[G]-[D]-[F#m]-[E]
[A]-[Cm]-[A]-[G]-[A]

You know I don’t feel well.
I gotta thirst in my mouth.
And all I want is a cool drink of water.
You know I don’t feel well.
I got salt in my wounds.
And all I want is a cool drink of water.

Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
I once knew a well so sweet.
I put my lips, my lips to the pail to drink.
But I would give it all up for some water.

You know I don’t feel well.
Got the salty taste of my tears.
And all I want is some relief from this.

You know I don’t feel well
Been tossed and turned on this ocean.
And all I want is this one wish.

Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.

Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?

10 Comments »

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

Posted in Cracker, David Lowery Solo with tags I sold the Arabs the moon, Riverside on January 26, 2011 by davidclowery

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.

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

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.

See you on roman roads, aqueducts and matadors

See you on Moorish walls, Alhambra, Seville

05 Riverside

*, **, *** 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

14 Comments »

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

Posted in Cracker, David Lowery Solo, Sparklehorse with tags Raise 'Em Up On Honey, The Eyes of Mary on January 5, 2011 by davidclowery

<<<<<Free download of song from my new solo album “The Palace Guards” click here>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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.”

Cracker Cowboys.

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.

<<<<you can pre-order this record right here>>>>>

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

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 flowers

Open 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

14 Comments »

300 Songs on Vacation until New Year.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, David Lowery Solo on December 2, 2010 by davidclowery

Bob Lefsetz is a smart and entertaining music business theorist and writer. Yesterday he was comparing the level of innovation and risk taking in the tech world versus the music business. As an object lesson Google and Groupon. Here is his piece.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/11/30/googlegroupon/

Odd thing. It turns out that Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven play a small role in this story. Here is my letter to Bob that has been making the rounds of the Blogosphere.

Read your article Bob. Nice piece. Largely you are right about the risk averse backwards thinking folks who run the music business now. But strangely music types played a small but important role in the history of groupon. In particular myself and my two bands.

In 2008 I was appointed to the board of advisors of a small web startup called www.thepoint.com. The site the brainchild of Andrew Mason was a ” tipping point” mechanism, a social networking site that allowed people “commit” to take group action. In particular the hope was they would take group action for social change. The investors quietly noted there was not a clear way to monetize Andrew’s experiment. However they hoped that by watching the way users used the tipping point mechanism, a viable way to monetize this website would present itself.

I was asked to start a campaign on www.thepoint.com.”To get a feel for it”. Not being very socially conscious I decided that I wanted to use The Point for my own narrow self interests.

Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have a festival, The Campout. It’s rather remote and since we produce the small festival ourselves we take considerable financial risk. While the previous years had been marginally successful we were worried about the rapidly deteriorating economy (I believe Bear Stearns had just gone bankrupt). So I started a campaign to get a “break even” amount of CVB and Cracker fans to commit to attend the festival. In this way our fan’s promises to attend would become a sort of promissory note. no pun intended. While you couldn’t exactly peg it’s value, these collective promises to attend at some point seemed to be worth enough to go ahead and book the flights, PA, lights, and port-o-potties.

Other successful “campaigns” on The Point also involved similar commitments for group purchasing. It wasn’t long before The Point became Groupon.

Okay so that’s a story about Groupon, that has smart music people and smart techies helping each other and they all live happily ever after.

Now here is another story about Groupon that illustrates YOUR point that the modern music business is run by risk averse technophobe idiots.

The financial backers of Groupon as well as CEO Andrew Mason are music fans. (Andrew apparently played in bands and had dreams of becoming a rockstar.) Groupon’s founders wanted to demonstrate the power of the now wildly successful Groupon by putting on a series of concerts. There was a significant element of altruism in their efforts, but it had not gone unnoticed that most concerts have a lot of empty seats. And Groupon works best when the “incremental” cost of adding clients/patrons is very low. Adding concertgoers to a half full arena is a perfect example of low incremental costs. So concerts were seen as a natural fit for Groupon. I was enlisted to try to get a Groupon only concert going. Twice! Both times artists agents managers promoters all failed to understand the concept. Even my wife, Velena Vego who is a brilliant concert promoter didn’t really get it.

(editiors note this: is not quite true. concert promoter and groupon user Lucy Freas seemed to understand the concept)

(Due Diligence requires me to point out that there may be a strange mathematical logic to having consistently half full arenas. The theory is that in the long term the artists will bear the brunt of the inefficiencies of half full arenas while LiveNation reaps outsized rewards on the sold out shows. It’s a complex argument and it involves what options and derivative traders call Volatility Trading Theory, but it at least partially explains why LiveNation has been supposed to go out of business for the last 8 years yet has not. But alas I divagate).

In general, this is the story of the last 25 years of the music business. Everybody now thinks they are geniuses if they have one artist that is a hit. They think you can take something and make it a hit. They do not understand the roll of luck in this business. Instead they expect certainty and take no risks.

They no longer understand the need to make MANY risky bets. They have forgotten that most bands and artists will be commercial failures. They no longer have the stomach for failure therefore the modern record company spends 63.4% percent of it’s time trying to figure out who to blame for the failure, instead of moving on, getting back to work and searching out the interesting artists and new ideas.

After Virgin America signed CVB president Jeff Ayeroff told me ” Just keep doing what you do. one day you guys will write a hit, maybe even by accident”. exactly.

It’s now the Venture Capitalists and Tech Entrepreneurs who understand how to take risks, how to use their gut instincts, how to stomach the failures in search of the big hits.

Ahmet Ertegun was a Venture capitalist. A brilliant risk taker, and he knew how to stomach failure. He also signed artists purely on gut instinct. In many ways these new VC’s and Tech entrepreneurs resemble him.

thanks for letting me spew my observations at you. and keep writing.

3 Comments »

#64 The World Is Mine- Cracker. Gillette been very very good to Cracker. Suerte Loca.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker with tags guardian angels, opening theme, The World is Mine on October 11, 2010 by davidclowery

09 The World is Mine

So besides the our obvious big hits there have been three other significant money making events in Cracker career. The last two were especially important cause they carried us through some dry periods.

08 Shake Some Action

1. The inclusion of “Shake Some Action” in the film Clueless. And it’s subsequent appearance on the soundtrack album. We were at the peak of our career (sales wise) when this song was licensed. Bryan McPherson our attorney at the time demanded and received top dollar for the rights. Well actually half the rights. The song was written by The Flaming Groovies. So the Publishing half went to them. The other half was credited to our virgin account which at the time was recouped. And not only was the price dictated by Cracker’s stature at the time. We were also in the secondary phase of the great Alternative/Grunge asset bubble. There are three phases to every asset bubble, the three “I”s : The Innovators, The Imitators and finally the Idiots. I make no judgement upon the band Creed. But i did meet Scott Stap around 1996 and he was an arrogant idiot. This was before they were really famous. So by my own set of empirical data Creed marks the beginning of the Idiot phase of the Alternative/Grunge bubble. When we sold “Shake Some Action” it was about a year or two before the Grunge asset bubble peaked, but the price of all alternative rock songs were artificial inflated. The record companies were flush with primarily their Hootie/Counting Crows and second their Nirvana/ Songe Temple Pilots cash. There was too much money chasing too few bands/songs. The result to things like this is always an asset bubble. Similar bubbles have appeared throughout the history of the record industry. But that’s another post.

Auntie Led Zeppelin

2. A careless miscalculation by another major record label (not ours) involving the trademark Cracker™ cost this record label dearly. The holy grail for trademark infringement litigators is a clear and demonstrable case of ”confusion in the marketplace”. We had that.

Quite a few people warned me that we were making a catastrophic career mistake by suing this large major label and artist. That they their associated managers and agents would never do business with us again. That they would blackball us from the industry. That all doors would be closed to us forever. These were serious respectable people giving us this advice. And apparently they felt they were receiving this information from credible sources.

The problem with this is that all the doors to the music business have always been closed for me and my bands. Except for a brief period in the early to mid 1990s. And they were certainly closed for us in 2004. I have spent much of my career prying the doors open or sneaking in through the mailroom. Plus your typical music business executive agent, manager will gladly sell his/her soul if there is a buck to be made. So if we have something that others think will sell they will always do business with us. Logically it was always an empty threat. But it’s amazing how often I hear managers advise artists to not rock the boat.

It is always better to be respected in the music business than it is to be liked. Get the distinction? Anybody that tells you otherwise is setting you up to be ripped off.

A legal settlement does not allow me to discuss this any further.

3. The Gillette company decided to use the Song The World Is Mine in a commercial. The commercial is positively dismal and unimaginative but the great thing is that we re-recorded the song for the commercial. So we didn’t have to pay anything to Virgin records. Second the commercial has Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry so it was shown practically non-stop worldwide. Also worldwide is very key. Unlike the US and Canada in much of the industrialized world significant airplay royalties apply to commercials. Finally because we re-sang the lyrics to match a new structure for the commercial we were considered voice talent so all kinds of AFTRA/SAG (actor) fees began to apply. So yes Gillette has been berry berry good to Cracker.

But this also illustrates one of the finer points about my career as an artist and every artist’s career. All of an artists success is wildly unpredictable. When you make an album you never really know what songs will be hits. It’s only clear in retrospect. It always seems logical but this is because we are the victims of something called The Narrative Fallacy. In retrospect we re-arrange our actions, emphasizing some discounting others to make it seem that we logically and methodically acted as if we were certain the hit song was a hit song all along. But even stranger is that a song does not have to be a “hit” to generate significant revenues. The world is mine was not a hit. The obscure CVB demo “guardian angels” was not a hit, but somehow some advertising executive plucked it from obscurity and put it in a Citibank Commercial. Finally the most bizarre and unpredictable bit of success involves the CVB track Opening Theme.

01 Opening Theme CVB Version.

Opening theme Giorgos Margaritis

Giorgos Margaritis is one of the best known Greek singers. I don’t know much about his career except that he was considered a bit of an old fogey when he made a sort of edgy comeback album: Ola tha ta diagrapso (I Reject Everything). The record was quite successful in that part of the world (Greece and the Levant). The “cover” of Opening theme was apparently the idea of producer Thodoris Manikas. He purportedly found the track in a pile of discarded CDs. This bit of CVB success was freakishly unpredictable.

Finally this is my last public 300 songs post for the near future. I will most likely resume in January 2011. It has been a great experience but I must continue doing things like writing and recording music, things that actually pay the bills. I appreciate everyone who has contributed donations. I am using those funds to hire an editor to make this into a book. I promised to turn this into a book and I will. I will resume writing this when I get those details worked out. probably sometime later this fall or winter. thanks so much.

THE WORLD IS MINE

[D]-[B]-[A]-[G]
[E]-[G]
[D]-[E]-[G]-[D]

Well we went to the station
They were looking for Vegas
But I was stuck in my beat phase
Like it was 1959

They say the girls wanna hip-shake
They say the boys wanna ball-break
But we couldn’t be bothered
Cuz we’re hipper than y’all

And everyday I resolve to say
The world is mine

So will you bring me salvation
Or a standing ovation
Cuz I really deserve it
And so much more

The big kid in the magazines
You and me, we went to make the scene
?Better get your? name, man
And tomorrow you’ll be gone

So everyday I resolve to say
The world is mine

31 Comments »

#63 Everybody Get’s One Free- F*ck Montreal. CVB Get’s Ripped Off.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker with tags everybody gets one for free on October 10, 2010 by davidclowery

Little Known Fact. The “H C” on the Montreal Jersey is an abbreviation for the city’s motto: Heist Central. Over the last decade many many bands have had their gear stolen in Montreal, not just CVB.

13 Everybody Gets One For Free

In the wee hours of the morning oct 20th 2004 someone broke into the Cracker/CVB trailer and stole a bunch of our Camper Van Beethoven instruments. We were in Montreal Quebec. Few people down in the states realize this but Montreal is a little like Manhattan. It’s a relatively safe cosmopolitan big city, but you are really asking for it if you leave your band gear unguarded in the van or trailer.

We hadn’t. We had parked our trailer in the parking lot of the Hotel in the supposed “secure” lot. It really did seem secure as it was just around the side of the building from the reception. Maybe 40-50 meters from the front door. Also we had backed the trailer up as close as we could get to the fence, so it was not really possible to open the back doors very far. Nevertheless some sophisticated thieves managed to get break in. Check it out. These guys were pros:

They drilled a hole or series of holes through the back door next to lock hasps. Then they used something like a “saws all” to cut a rectangle all the way through the doors around the lock hasps. Say 6″ by 6″. this was through 2 layers of sheet metal and 3/8″ plywood. They were there for some time. Then they managed to get the doors open about a foot wide. They squeezed in and took all the guitars, amplifier heads and any item they could get through the opening. Basically all our instruments. The most expensive stuff. The loss was covered by our insurance but still we lost our original instruments. The loss was and still is incalculable in our minds.

And stop asking us if we ever got our instruments back. No we didn’t. Not one.

But that’s only where the nightmare begins and why the Camper Van Beethoven junior hockey league team we sponsor has an F and an M on the Jersey. It stands for “Fuck Montreal” which since 2004 has been the official CVB motto.

(It was changed by unanimous vote of the board of directors on Oct 22nd 2004. Formerly the motto had been “the last band to never stop saying ‘a bad idea is still an idea’”*).

First it had to have been an inside Job. There was only an hour and a half in which the trailer was un-attended. One of the guys had gotten in very late I think it was Victor. Like 4:00 am or later. He went to the van to retrieve something and when he went in the building the night security man asked him if anyone else from the band was coming back to the hotel? This did not seem odd to him at the time. He figured the guy wanted to lock the door and take a nap.

I wasn’t intending to be funny when I searched for images of Montreal police. But this is what I found. They made me do it.

“Fellas: try spending a little less time grooming the moustaches and little more time fighting crime. OK?”

There is a parking attendant’s kiosk in the parking lot. At 6:00 am the parking lot attendant came in and found that his kiosk had been broken into. He explained to me that all the keys were in a pile on his small desk. Like someone had tried to find our van and trailer keys. (Like we would be stupid enough to leave them with a parking attendant.)

So in this short period of time our trailer was robbed. And either the night security person from the hotel, possibly the parking lot attendant or both were in on the scheme.

I don’t remember who discovered the theft. But suddenly we were all at the van. I went to the desk to call the police. We waited some time and the police did not arrive. I went back to the desk and asked them to call the police again. This time they put me on the phone with one of the detectives who told me they were just around the corner and to walk over to the police station. This seemed odd to me. There was a crime scene after all.
“The Montreal Policeman

He wouldn’t get off his ass

So all your shit was stolen

What’s s’matter with that?”

There is a policing technique especially popular in the gallic world. In order to keep crime rates down the gallic police technique is to pretend that no crime ever happened. Try to discourage the victim from even making a report. This makes these french cities seem relatively crime free when compared to their anglo/american counterparts. This is very handy when making the point that french civilization is superior to anglo/american civilization.

It also incentivizes the police officers and detectives because then they don’t actually have to do any work.

At the police station I was asked to fill out a form. Like some kind of petty theft. When i protested i didn’t have room to write all the items stolen and the form was clearly for thefts less than $10,000 CAN (it was printed across the bottom in french and english) I was asked archly If I was “trying to tell them how to do their job?”. Assholes. It went downhill from there. They wouldn’t even come to the crime scene.

“You don’t want to come over and maybe look for evidence or fingerprints?”

“Again Mr lowery you are once again telling me how to do my job. okay? enough”.

They could not have cared less.

Jonathan and Victor had gotten the word out on the internets our website, myspace, friendster even a few gay cruising chatrooms. That was actually me. Hey whatever takes. Word was spreading fast. I suddenly got a couple of calls from the press. Somehow one of the reporters called the local police precinct to find out what they knew.

Did I already tell you that the Montreal Police couldn’t care less? I was wrong. They give a shit about geting interrupted during their 3 hour lunches by journalists.

I got a call on my mobile shortly after this press inquiry. It was the detective in charge of our case. He made it clear we were on his shit list for talking to the press and being prodded to do his job. He told me he was making our case a low priority for making it “political”.

Political? WTF? It took me a while to figure out that i’d wandered into some kind of francophone/anglophone thing. Something to do with which newspaper made the call. Fuck I can’t even figure out the politics in my own country much less Canada’s .

But I do know this. Every country has rivalries between the various levels of city/state/county/provincial/national police. I needed to literally make it a Federal case. This detective and these police were not gonna do shit. So I might as well make there lives miserable. I was in Toronto by this point so it was easy to find how to do this. One of our friends in Toronto worked for the Crown’s attorney office. Basically I made a complaint to federal Canadian authorities that the police in Montreal were not doing there job, and the detectives conduct was completely unprofessional. About 2pm the next night I get a apoplectic call from someone I assume is the same detective. He is now lapsing into mostly french to to chew me out, but apparently to emphasize his points he has to cross back into english to say “mother fucker” and “shit list’.

I would think that a grand language like french; the language of Sartre, Baudelaire and Tocqueville; the language in which Bastiat debated Proudhon, the language in which Galois wrote the foundations of Abstract Algebra; and the language of Monty Python’s famous Flying Sheep sketch; this language would have a word for “shit list”. Apparently not.

Regardless. I was on this guys shit list. As I went through the process of trying to get our insurance money we continued to spar. Copies of the police report of course were needed. Well just put the insurance adjuster in touch with Detective Liste de Merde. Et Voila more angry phone calls! and on and on it went.

Finally I just wrote the fucker into this song.

Yes there’s more to this song than that. It’s got a reference to the Project For A New American Century. It’s got the Inland Empire, it’s got the usual self-deprecating remarks about our musical career and fortunes and of course “papa was a preacher and mama was a go-go dancer”

This song was not designed to be thought about much. It is what it is.

Musically the most interesting thing about the song is that after we recorded it, live it evolved to have a much better ending. I prefer the live version to the album version. perhaps some of you will be so kind as to post a link to a good archive.org version.

*actually this was the Spot 1019 motto. CVB never had one before that.
Everybody Gets One For Free

[INTRO:]
[A] [D] [A] [G] [D] [A]

[A] I talk to the waitress
Yeah she was pretty hot
She gave me her number
But that’s all I got

CHORUS:
[D] Everybody gets one, everybody gets one for [A] free
[G] Everybody gets one, [D] everybody ‘cept for [A] me

Started a conversation
About the United Nations
Had to use imagination
She was talking about reincarnation

REPEAT CHORUS

Stayed up all night drinking
When I should’ve been home
Had a vision of the blessed virgin
Butt now I’m not sure at all

REPEAT CHORUS

[INSTRUMENTAL: CHORDS AS VERSE THEN CHORUS]

Miguel Urbiztondo
Backstage New Year’s Eve
When the policeman came to look for him
He said “What the fuck do you know?”

REPEAT CHORUS

She from the Inland Empire
Her dad was an umpire
Her mama was a go-go dancer
Everybody got in for free

REPEAT CHORUS

[INSTRUMENTAL: CHORDS AS VERSE THEN CHORUS]

I know that our last record
Didn’t do very well
But now we’re back on the block
With our freedom rock?

REPEAT CHORUS

The Montreal policeman
Wouldn’t get off his ass
So all your shit was stolen
What’s the matter with that?

REPEAT CHORUS

I got a yellow carnation
I got some Kevlar pants
I got a new American Century
Do the freedom-hater’s dance

REPEAT CHORUS

I was driving in my car
It was filled up with yams
For no obvious reason
That’s just who I am

REPEAT CHORUS x2

[G] [A]
Last call
Find the one

Everybody gets one
Everybody gets one ‘cept for me
Everybody gets one ‘cept for me
‘cept for me

18 Comments »

#62 I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right-Cracker. Just your usual southern rock track set on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, Uncategorized with tags i could be wrong i could be right on October 9, 2010 by davidclowery

Member of the Lewis and Clark expedition the explorer York. The Arikara Indians of South Dakota called him “Big Medicine” and the nickname stuck.

07 I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right

I stated before some songs are coherent stories that can be explained easily. Some are just collections of words that sound good together that evoke a mood or sentiment. And others are somewhere in between. I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right is one of the the latter.

On one level it’s a playful jab at my wife and manager Velena, and our very complex personal and business relationship. We’ve known each other since 1989 but finally got together in 2006. On another level it is about Sacagawea and York the only African American member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In my song they have a volatile and semi-secret affair.

York was Clark’s slave. But on the expedition York was purportedly treated the same as any other member of the expedition. Given weapons, full voice and voting rights on all major decisions made by the explorers. By all accounts a very intelligent man and superb outdoorsman he was also of quite large stature. The Arikara Indians were duly impressed and gave him the Nickname “Big Medicine” and this name stuck.

Other accounts portray “Big Medicine” as being quite the stud. Fathering many Indian children along the way. Some of these reports seem quite fanciful or at least exaggerated. They would seem to me to be products of racial stereotypes of the age. But there does seem to be some consensus this is at least partially true.

The sad thing about York is that when he returned to the United States he lost all of his freedoms and returned to being a slave. He petitioned Clark for his freedom but it took at least 10 years (if at all. accounts vary) before he was finally granted his freedom. While he was on the Lewis and Clark expedition his wife was “sold” to another family in Kentucky. He supposedly died of Cholera in Tennessee while on his way to rejoin Clark’s household after his business in Tennessee failed.

But there is also a fictional ending that made the rounds. A bit of folklore it would seem. But the fictional ending is that he is freed and he makes his way back to Wyoming where he lives out his days with the Crow Indians. (Another ex-slave may have lived with the Crows about the this time)

But what’s interesting about this story is what it says about “us”. That is our ancestors of the 19th century. We knew that the voyage of discovery was the only time that York was truly free and treated as an equal. And in some way we were ashamed of that.

So “Sacagawea and Big Medicine” in the song is a big messy composite: forbidden love, unrequited love, freedom, a crowning achievement, one’s zenith, and a sad slow fall, the fictional happy ending like a fevered dream.

The Agency Group’s Proposed Routing For Camper Van Beethoven / Built to Spill 1806 Tour.

Like Lewis,Clark and Big Medicine returning home, Camper Van Beethoven was working their way from Portland Oregon back into Montana. At some point we crossed the bitterroots and Velena was wearing tall brown boots and I made the rhyme connection in my head. I wrote it down somewhere. I keep a collection of overheard things and phrases in a notebook, or sticky notes on my desktop. They sometimes become a songs.

Later that year Johnny and Sal were playing this lick at soundcheck. We were in Berlin. (Note to self: this is the 3rd song created at sound check in germany. must tour there more often.). I thought it was cool so i recorded it into my macbook as usual.

blue berlin riff

But it wasn’t until late 2007 that we actually made this into a song.

Oh and the chant over the riff? I think subliminally I was influenced by the theme song to The Wire. ”Way Down in the Hole”. I didn’t even think about it till much later. But this was around the same time I was watching a lot of The Wire.

Snoop is an excellent carpenter. Especially with a nail gun.

I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right.

[E] Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
[A] Darling don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
[E] Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole
‘Cause the [D] devil come out and keep you [G] for [D] his [E] own

[E] Long brown hair and tall brown boots
[D] You came across the bitterroots
[A] To finally take what you knew was always [E] yours

I was glad to go along
I didn’t think it’d be too long
‘Fore you were bored and on to the next big thing

CHORUS:
[C] I could be wrong, I could be right
[G] You and I so much alike
[D] The devil tried to keep us far a-[E]-part
[C] Now i was stoned and i was high
[G] But everything it felt so right
[D] I could be wrong, I could be could be [E] right

Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Darling don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole
‘Cause the devil come out

Sacawagea big medicine
Had a thing they knew must end
When they finally saw the western sea

I was glad to go along
‘Cause the best laid plans are always wrong
They come apart they always end in misery

I could be wrong, I could be right
What’s wrong with you is also right
There should be laws to keep us far apart
Now i was high and i was stoned
I didn’t want to be alone
Is that so wrong, is that so wrong
It must be right

[BREAK - CHORDS AS CHORUS]

I could be wrong, I could be right.

Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Darling don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole
‘Cause the devil come out and keep you for his own

Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Darling don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole please
Baby don’t you go don’t you look down in that hole
‘Cause the devil come out and keep you for his own

I could be wrong, I could be right
You and I so much alike
The devil tried to keep us far apart
Now i was high and i was stoned
I didn’t want to be alone
Is that so wrong, is that so wrong
It must be right

[CHORDS CONTINUE AS CHORUS TO FADE]
I could be wrong, I could be right
I could be wrong, I could be right
I could be wrong, I could be
I could be right

8 Comments »

#61 My Life is Totally Boring Without You, The Good Life- Cracker, Don Smith and The Heartbreakers.

Posted in Bugs, Cracker with tags My Life is totally boring without you, The Good Life on October 7, 2010 by davidclowery

Cracker Producer Don Smith. A Very Young Don Smith 1981.

05 My Life Is Totally Boring Without You

01 The Good Life

Although most of Gentleman’s Blues was recorded at the legendary Bearsville studios near woodstock NY a few of the tracks were radically revamped in Agoura Hills at Don Smith’s studio “Costalot” (see #48 Friends).

We were supposed to be mixing by the time we got to Don Smith’s place but mixing is a very loose concept when you are working with Don. It might suddenly involved singing the lead vox again, putting a new drum track on the song, or in the case of these two songs, completely stripping them back to the acoustic guitar part, vocal and drums, then starting anew.

When I walked into the studio I had expected to see Benmont Tench (from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) there working on a hammond and piano part. This was planned. Benmont had been playing on our records since the very first album. (he is actually on Kerosene Hat uncredited). But I did not expect Mike Campbell to be there. Mike was playing a plinky muted guitar part to the track “My Life” that along with Benmont Tench’s bubbly organ part the song was completely transformed. And much to my relief no longer sounded like a b-side or an outtake. I had begun to worry that this song was living up to part of it’s title. Boring. I guess Don had been thinking the same thing cause he, Mike and Benmont pretty much rearranged the song.

Mike Campbell

Benmont Tench sets The Controls to the heart of the San Fernando Valley by way of Florida.

Okay, Okay, this is probably cool. At least that’s what I was thinking. Johnny’s part was still in there and he generally doesn’t get too territorial about sharing the guitar space when it’s one of his heroes like Mike Campbell.

But then what started to happen next really started to make me wonder what Johnny was gonna think.Don put up the track to The Good Life. And again he stripped it back to acoustic guitar drums and lead vocal.This song hadn’t really been bothering me or anything but I did feel unfinished in some way. It certainly didn’t feel like a lead off track or a single.

Johnny had a fairly rock lead at the top of the song, and also in the middle. It seemed like a nice album track.But Don was just listening to the song Acoustic guitar vocals and drums. He was doing his patented head bob, which everyone who worked with him knows.

Bounce your head up and down in time on the quarter notes, but alternate which speaker you are looking at on the 2 and the 4. It’s very dramatic if you have a big ‘fro like Don did. And it usually meant he was digging the track. The groove.

He hadn’t been doing this before. Not till he stripped it back.”Mike just play along”.Mike Cambell nearly immediately-say within 8 bars-is playing the signature riff that starts the song. This is not the what Johnny had played. In fact Mike probably hadn’t heard anything that Johnny had played.

“yeah man that’s great” Don encouraged him.

Only it didn’t sound like that. Don was from Texas,his accent and his unknown ethnicity made him nearly impossible to understand unless you’d worked with him for a few weeks. So that probably sounded like:

“yahhmamnumuh dat n grayheyy”

And yep it was great except I was thinking “Uh oh, what is Johnny gonna think”. Shit. It transformed the song. It made it way better.

Don Smith. No head bob.

Now before you think Don Smith was some arrogant producer guy who just never consulted the band and did whatever he wanted, let me tell you he was not. I’d never really seen him do anything like this before with Cracker. In fact Don usually never told anybody what to play other than the most general suggestions.

“lay it back a little”

“what if you straightened out the drums”

or his classic

“I don’t think it’s done yet. Not sure why. Let’s move on to something else”

Michael Urbano.

If a song didn’t work he just moved on to something else. Always. Don was more about vibe than anything. Setting the mood. Great sounds of course. Amazing 3D stereo soundstage in his mixes. But yeah he worked on some entirely hidden or unseen level. As drummer Michael Urbano said in about Don

As I get older I’m finding most of my greatest lessons were taught to me years ago when I wasn’t looking. Don Smith was the best. He didn’t construct records on a grid. He created a space, to conjure a vibe, then captured the beast out of thin air and trapped it onto a tape or a hard drive. All with a Cheshire Cat smile on his face.

Cracker and crew during recording of Kerosene Hat. Pioneertown CA. Bugs, Michael Urbano, Davey Faragher, David Lowery, Don Smith, Johnny Hickman and Rich Hasel.

So I’d never seen Don so deliberately take a song apart and construct it anew. AND I was freaking out about what Johnny would say when he got to the studio.By the time Johnny did get to the studio, a totally different song had been constructed. Benmont had added some good atmospheric keys. It was sounding like.. well a little like a single.

When Johnny did walk in Don just acted like it was no big deal.

“Hey Johnny check this out,… check what Mike just played … it’s awesome, awesome”

(which actually sounded like this to the rest of you mortals:

“haayfffjjunheeeehnbijflajljannzcyerjkhgdhfkjsahfklhkgjh”)

Johnny cocked his head to one side. Like he knew the song. it was familiar but couldn’t quite name the song. I was on pins and needles wondering what was gonna happen.

“Oh my god” when the vocals came in and he finally figured out it was the good life. ”That’s way better than my old part”. He then slapped Don on the back, or high fived him or something suitably manly.

That’s the great thing about Johnny, he can keep his ego out of the way. If it makes the song better it makes the song better. And he quickly grabbed a guitar and added that slide answer to Mike Campbells guitar lick. Second fiddle to Mike Campbell? No big deal.

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

Don hard at work behind the console. Gentleman’s Blues era.

I think this was on the patio at his home studio he joking referred to as Cost-a-lot.

Don probably mid early 1980′s. His sauve period.

Don Smith 2009. Scarf? Why not. If anyone calls me a pussy remember I’ve got Keith Richard’s knife.

Don Smith died on Jan 26th 2010. A few hours after my father died. It was quite a sad day. In many ways Don was like a father figure to me also. At least when it came to making records. (Dennis Herring of course is more like a mischievous big brother).

Don had an incredible discography as an Audio Engineer and Producer. His most famous stuff and the stuff he was most proud of was his work with Keith Richards and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. His friendship with Keith, Benmont and Mike Campbell was quite deep.

When Johnny Hickman Davey Faragher and I drove out to meet him in 1991 he was working at a small studio in the far western valley. Chatsworth which primarily known as the hollywood of the porno industry.

We walked from the bright sunlight into the dim room. There were candles lit. It smelled of burnt sage, and the walls were covered with tapestries and all manners of vibe making gear*.

Don was wearing a flat brimmed cowboy hat of some kind. His ample curly hair was sticking out on either side of the hat, he was smoking a schimmelpenninck cigarillo. There was a large switchblade on the mixing desk. Open. It appeared to have a real pearl handle and was perhaps jeweled. He was like some kind of New Orleans voodoo priest.

“Nice knife”

“yeah keith gave it to me”

Of course i didn’t really understand what he said. It would be a couple weeks until I could understand his accent.

He popped in the Big Dirty Yellow demo tape and went straight to St. Cajetan. He started blasting it through the studio big speakers. The gist of what he was saying seemed to be he really liked this track. Every once in a while the assistant engineer would interject and interpret Don for us.

We left after an hour or so. As we drove off we started discussing him. Davey Faragher immediately started referring to him as “gris gris“. gris gris sometimes is used to refer to an amulet or bag that believers in Voodoo wear to keep them safe from bad spells.

“I like that gris gris guy. we should do a record with him”

“yeah he seemed pretty cool”

“what was his accent?”

“I dunno, new orleans? cajun? mexican?”

We drove along for a while then I finally asked the question that we were all wondering but were afraid to ask.

“um is he black? or hispanic?”

” I thought he was like indian or something.”

“he’s not asian?”

“asian? his hair!”

“no those yakuza guys always have perms”

“could be jewish, like really sephardic”

“but he wouldn’t be Don Smith”

“maybe that’s like some witness protection name”

“they don’t give witness protection people jobs in hollywood”

This would become a running gag. Why no one ever asked him is also kind of funny. It became a sort of “It’s pat” of ethnicity. And we sort of didn’t want the show to end.

The funny thing was when we had african-american artists in the studio with us, like Charlie Drayton or Steve Jordon we were sure that his language and accent became more african american, and we were also quite sure they were treating him as if he were black in some subtle way.

Don’s doppelgänger.

Then we brought Bugs (#50 the antechamber of hope) into the Kerosene Hat sessions, Don adopted him, as his mini-me. They looked alike, dressed alike and seemed to share some cultural heritage which then led us to assume Don being from Texas was hispanic. They could spend hours discussing the subtle differences in the variety of chiles grown in the Rio Grande Valley. hmm. After the Kerosene Hat sessions, Don always hired Bugs to cook or be in charge of the boxes of “vibe” that he used to decorate the studio.

One day I thought I’d help out. I bought a bunch of different candles at some sort of mexican santeria type shop. I was taking the candles out when Don leapt across the room and started pointing at a set of candles like it was a viper.

“get those out of here! get them the fuck out of here!’

He was gesturing at a pair of black candles.

“Are you insane!? No black candles in the studio!”

No black candles. Okay maybe we are back to New Orleans, accadian, creole?

Shortly before we started the Gentleman’s Blues record Don came to visit us in Richmond VA. Johnny wasn’t in town so it was just me and Bob Rupe kicking around town with him. We went to Sound of Music Studios, and a couple other places. It was 4th of July and we finally ended up at The Hole in the Wall, a bar which served as the Sound of Music Lounge. No one was in there. It was the holiday and the heat. The Hole in the Wall had really poor air conditioning.

Don started talking about how he used to come to Virginia in the summers. How hot it was. This was back in the early 60′s.

“Yeah my grandmother, she lived by Roanoke. One time we went into Sears and this was during segregation-”

Okay here it comes i thought. I looked at Bob.

“- and I went over to get a drink out of the water fountain, and and suddenly she slapped the back of my head, almost knocked me down, then she pointed to the sign it said ‘whites only’ “

Bob and I looked at each other. Finally. But wait Don wasn’t finished.

“oops-I mean ’Blacks only’, haha woops meant to say blacks only”

If I hadn’t have been there I would have never believed it. You couldn’t write anything any better.

Don Smith we all miss you. You were perhaps the best audio engineer this country ever produced. A true american treasure. There are legions of engineers, well regarded engineers who learned from you or learned from your works or those you taught. Every young engineer who decorates a recording studio with your voodoo vibe and tapestries, because that’s what Rick Rubin does, should know he got that from you. You were also just a great all around human being. Our lives are totally boring without you around.

My Life Is Totally Boring Without You.

[D]-[A]-[E]-[B]-[D]-[A]-[E]
[D]-[E]-[F#m]-[B]
[D]-[E]-[F#m]-[B]-[D]-[E]
[F#m]-[E]-[D]-[A]-[B]-[E]
[D]-[E]-[F#m]-[B]
[ending:] [D]-[E]-[F#m]

My life is totally boring without you around
These days, they fade to another; I want you around
So I’d like to say
That I’m better off,
I’m happier this way…

But my life is totally empty without you around
Well my life is totally boring without you

Well I fell, but you fell much farther, I was envious
Around here, everyone loves you, cuz you are insane
So we started a band,
owe it all to our fans,
went somewhere near the top…

My life is totally empty without you around
Yeah my life is totally boring without you

The Good Life

[C]-[D]-[Em]-[G]-[C]-[D]-[Em]
[D]-[C]-[Em]-[D]

This holy circus camp
Aladdin and his lamp
A feverish daydreams and suerte loca
My face in magazines
The lesbian James Dean
I got all I ever wanted

So I don’t mind saying
This is how the good life’s supposed to be
The good life for you, for me
Well I don’t mind saying
This is how the good life’s supposed to be
The good life for you, for me

Down miles of empty road
With acolytes in tow
You could be Persephone
And pitching through the glass
A drunken trapeze act
Well you got all you ever wanted

15 Comments »

#60 I’m So Glad She Ain’t Never Coming Back- How an unfinished jam became a song. Other unfinished unreleased outtakes.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, David Lowery Solo with tags classy dames and able gents, I don't hear a hit boys, I'm so glad she ain't never coming back, infidel sorcerers of the air, live at bombay, peppermint mind on October 5, 2010 by davidclowery

The Cracker Demi Song Vault.

So continuing where I left off with post 59.

I had a few more thoughts on the demi-songs that populated the early CVB records. I said after we went to virgin most of these went away. Part of this was a function of being on a major label instead of on our own imprint. But not in the way you imagine. Typical major label contracts pay you songwriting royalties on only 10 songs no matter how many you put on the record. (it gets pro-rated). So we were much less inclined to put a bunch of smaller demi-songs onto the albums. Now we preferred to hold them for an oddities collection or for B-sides. And there is some minor record label pressure to not put really weird stuff on your albums. Although considering how challenging things like “The humid press of day” ”opening theme” and “light from a cake” are, we never got much hassle from virgin.

So basically these demi-songs went away until we put out CVB Is Dead Long Live CVB. At least for Camper Van Beethoven.

But then there is the matter that we became much more expert at turning weird ideas into actual songs. Certainly with CVB and also with Cracker. Be My Love, Guarded By Moneys, Eyes of Mary are all pretty strange demos that got turned into some real songs. But perhaps the best Cracker example of this is the song “I’m so glad she ain’t never coming back”

I returned from dinner to find Miguel Urbiztondo (Drums) David Immergluck (Guitar) and Johnny Hickman, sitting on the floor in the studio jamming. Miguel had some tablas and David and Johnny were playing acoustic guitars.

Always be recording.

i mmy mig jh groove

I flipped open my ibook and just recorded their groove straight into the computer.

later I edited it into a little structure and sang some words to it. We also did a few minor overdubs. et voila

07 I’m So Glad She Ain’t Never Coming Back

But many remain unfinished demi-songs or whatever you call them. They have not disappeared. we generally try to use them at some point or another, work them into another song. But they are still out there. Here are a few

02 don’t hear a hit boys (drum machine)

This is from around 2001. It’s basically Johnny Hickman, John Morand and myself Jamming to a drum machine loop. probably started when the click track ended and one of the saved or demo drum machine loops came in. There may have been some pre-mediation. That is we may have set up to record that piano part or bass part. We kept it because we kept thinking it was gonna turn into a song. But after 10 years i doubt it.

Infidel sorcerers of the air

This was a melody i was working on around the time I was doing greenland demos. It’s Miguel on drums, probably david immergluck on guitar, and maybe matt trowbridge on keys. It sort of devolve into this space jam. Really it could have been a monks of doom song.

classy dames and able gents

This is a little collaboration that Lauren Hoffman, Alan Weatherhead (slide, pedal steel keyboards) and myself whipped up one night. Lauren pretty much improvised the words. Again the intention was to turn this into a more structured song, but I’ve always wondered if it would have the same feeling if it got turned into a real song.

peppermint mind

I had a little bit of this carbon leaf (I produced one of their albums) song in my sampler. I looped it and started jamming on it with various synths and exotic instruments. I think it was supposed to be something for the New Roman Times record. For various reasons I put it aside and never did anything with it.

Finally the last three song were untitled so i whimsically made a cryptic reference to an organization. First one to figure it out the name of the organization and what they do (did) gets a CVB or Cracker Souvenir.

Finally I stumbled across this one song, that i had completely forgotten about. It’s so weird or good depending on how you look at it, i’m gonna use it as a B-side for my solo album that comes out Feb 1st.

[G(sus4)] Saw my baby at the autumn dance
Dancing with her new boy friend
Saw my baby in her new beau’s car
She’s the [D] pride of any [G] man

CHORUS:
[G] Now I don’t mind and I don’t cry
‘Cause I’m [C] living on the mountain top [G]
The wind might blow through the cracks at night
And I [D] know she ain’t ever coming back
I don’t mind and I don’t cry
I’m living in a log pine shack
My shotgun keeps me warm at night
And I know she ain’t ever coming back

Saw my baby at the autumn dance
She was dancing with a big ring on
Saw my baby in her new beau’s car
She’s the pride of any man

Saw my baby at the bridal shack
She was looking for a wedding dress
Saw my baby at the dry goods store
I’m so glad she ain’t ever coming back

REPEAT CHORUS

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300 Songs

Archive for the Cracker Category

#77 Exile in Beach Flats–Lulu Land, Wasted and Surf City 1985

#73 South California Revisited – St. Cajetan.

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

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

300 Songs on Vacation until New Year.

#64 The World Is Mine- Cracker. Gillette been very very good to Cracker. Suerte Loca.

#63 Everybody Get’s One Free- F*ck Montreal. CVB Get’s Ripped Off.

#62 I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right-Cracker. Just your usual southern rock track set on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

#61 My Life is Totally Boring Without You, The Good Life- Cracker, Don Smith and The Heartbreakers.

#60 I’m So Glad She Ain’t Never Coming Back- How an unfinished jam became a song. Other unfinished unreleased outtakes.

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