I’ve been very fond of this song, “Big Dipper” by Cracker for some time. Last couple of days I’ve been quite addicted to it.
My problem is, I had a poetic bypass when I was very young. I have no freakin idea what this song is about. Any thoughts?
Hmm, make sense of Lowery? Have at it my friend.
One of the songs on CVB’s New Roman Times starts with the exact same phrase though, FWIW.
OHOHOH. I can answer this one!
It’s about Santa Cruz, CA- where Cracker formed and where I lived for way too long. You’ll find a lot about Santa Cruz in their songs.
“Cigarettes and carrot juice” is a sort of rhyming slang they made up for “Santa Cruz”. It’s also a pretty appropriate summary of the place.
It goes on about the Cafe Zino (which I think never existed, but probably represents any one of the many cafe who’s steps you can sit on and watch the girls go by) and the summer, and then it talks about the Big Dipper (technically the Giant Dipper, but nobody calls it that) rollercoaster, the centerpiece of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
It’s got kind of a neat entrance that goes in to a long tunnel like passage, where indeed there are dull turnstiles and people chickening out. You can see Monterey from the top, and San Jose really is not all that pleasant (at least, compared to Santa Cruz).
And people claiming to be Jack Keroac’s brother are exactly the kinds of bastards you are likely to meet in Santa Cruz- and it may well be true- lots of well-known families send their kids to SC to waste time and money and lots of artsy drifters end up there.
Oh Santa Cruz. I feel like I lived that song for six years.
Technically, Cracker formed after Camper. The first time I saw Camper in Chicago was a couple years after a big earthquake there. The guy that introduced them at Metro introduced them as:
“…From Santa Cruz, California - the town so nice they built it twice…”
I have deleted the lyrics. Standup Karmic, you can provide a link to some site that has rights to the lyrics, but you cannot quote full lyrics here.
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You’ve been around long enough to know this, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I agree, I should have known better, and I am ashamed. I should also know better than to revive a thread dead for three weeks just for the sake of apologizing, but I’ve not always been the sharpest knife.
And I don’t think any site with rights has the lyrics.
I’m about 10 years too late to the party, but let it be noted that http://www.santacruzpl.org/history/articles/266/ lists Cafezinho as one of the businesses in buildings destroyed by the 1989 earthquake. In 2016, Google Street View shows that the lot is still empty, lending this already wistful song an even more elegiac subtext for those familiar with this.