(Raises hand)
I was a huge Camper fan too. A group of friends I used to hang with would follow them around and videotape concerts. A signed Vampire Can Mating Oven EP hangs proudly on my wall.
I love their instrumentals.
I love their serious songs.
I love their goofy, silly, nonsensical songs.
I love their serious songs that sound like goofy, silly, nonsensical songs.
I love their goofy, silly, nonsensical songs that sound like serious songs.
I love their cover versions.
I love their collaborations (I want Camper Van Chadbourne on CD!)
I love their waltzes.
I love their mismash of country/punk/music from other cultures filtered through bizarreness.
I love their crazy fiddle/violin player (I was in love with Jonathan).
I love their song titles (“ZZ Top Goes to Egypt,” “Colonel Enrique Adolfo Bermudas,” “Hoe Yourself Down,” “Lulu Land,” “Balalaika Gap”)
I love everything about them!
A few favorite lines:
Chain Of Circumstances:
“So I thought that you knew the question you were asking me to answer / Now I find in your indifference you never bothered with what the words meant”
“(Don’t you go to) Goleta”:
“Intelligence is not something you should avoid”
“I’ve been there and I’ve seen their attitude
They don’t like folks who are not like them
Maybe someday they’ll take a vacation, like some flight over to Europe to take a nice cruise in the Mediterranean, but it’s very likely that on the way over they’d be hijacked by some terrorist group seeking media approval, they’d be in a really bad situation, in danger of their lives, but they’d be thinking ‘They can’t do this to me, I’m an American Citizen’”
Good Guys and Bad Guys
“Well, this here verse is for the people in Russia
Though it is a long long ways away
They couldn’t hear this song in Russia
But couldn’t understand the words anyway”
Seven Languages:
“Well up in the sky
Well I saw a cloud
And I thought that it looked like something
But on second thought not”
We’re a Bad Trip:
“You know, you really shouldn’t take yourself so seriously
if you want to know why, it’s cuz no one else does
Somewhere along the line someone told you you were deep and sensitive
but you’re not”
And their, um, ode to Patty Hearst, Tania:
“Oh, my beloved revolutionary sweetheart
I can see your newsprint face turn yellow in the gutter
It makes me sad
How I long for the days when you came to liberate us from boredom
From driving around
from the hours between five to seven in the evening
My beloved Tania,
We carry your gun deep within our hearts
For no better reason than our lives have no meaning
And we want to be on television”
And maybe my favorite song (out of many favorites),
Life is Grand
"And life is grand
And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor
With those of you who have appointed yourselves
To expect us to say something darker
And love is real
And though I realize this is not a deep observation
To those of you who find it necessary to conceal love
Or obscure it, as is the fashion"
Now I want to go have my bi-annual CVB marathon. Thanks for that link!
(My husband, on the other hand, never liked them. He didn’t think they could play their instruments, thought David’s voice was awful, and their lyrics made no sense. It’s the only musical thing we’ve ever really disagreed about. I couldn’t exactly argue hard against anything he said, but I loved them anyway. All that was, for me, part of their charm. Maybe I smoked too much weed back then, but I still love the music now, as a perfectly straight unhip old lady)
