Long live Camper. Camper is Dead.

I love Camper Van Beethoven. Love.them. They would rank right up there as one of my top favorite bands--damn close to being my favorite.

I didn't discover CVB until 1988--right before they imploded. I never had a chance to see them until I caught them in Madison, Wisconsin, in January 2003. I dragged a reluctant friend of mine with me. I say reluctant because she was not a fan. She had heard some Cracker and was expecting Cracker Lite. As CW and I drove to the bar I talked non-stop about how much I loved Camper and about how Dave Lowery was such a sarcastic son-of-a-bitch and that I was completely in love with him (and I am). We got there and I parked myself at the very front of the stage and waited. I didn't care how stupid I looked standing up against a stage 30 minutes before the show started. This was Camper Van Beethoven. I had been waiting fifteen years for this show and I wanted to see nose hair, dammit. The show started, and I was right at Lowery's feet. Heaven.

Three hours of Camper Van Beethoven. Three hours of snarky alternative polka/folk/bar mitzvah music. Or however you want to describe them. I sang. I jumped up and down. I dived for the setlist (and I got it). Lowery broke three strings. Someone threw a bra (a bra!) Some drunk guy asked me to dance during Sad Lovers Waltz (I said no). It was a live music dream come true. And CW left a Camper fan. She went out the next day, bought the boxset (Cigarettes and Carrot Juice) and played it non-stop.

I had dinner with some friends tonight. We talked about many things, including the idea of making an electric corkscrew and calling it the E-Z Screw. Or EZ Sroo. But we also started talking about bands and songs. Three bands were mentioned: B52s, Pylon, and Camper Van Beethoven. If you had to choose one song from these bands to sing, what would it be. I was torn between B52s and Pylon--B52s are good and Pylon is amazing. I was leaning towards Pylon, but Camper.... My dear Camper. Their song "Good Guys and Bad Guys" was tossed around. It's a good song, but not the one I would choose.

I know it's kind of predictable when talking about Camper, but I think I would have to go with "Take the Skinheads Bowling." It's classic Camper. It's from their best album ever: Telephone Free Landslide Victory. The opening line is "Every day I get up and pray to Jah/And every day he increases the number of cogs by exactly one." And in college we used to sing a version called "Take the Frat Boys Drinking." Now, it would be a tossup between that and "The Ambiguity Song" because "everything seems to be up in the air at this time." Or maybe "Where the Hell is Bill" just because I've always liked the line "Maybe he went to get a Vespa scooter."

Anyway, this all lead me to YouTube, of course. I found the "Take the Skinheads Bowling" video. And several live performances of "Skinheads," "Fatima," and "Matchstick Men." Then I found a more recent in-store performance from Sonic Boom Records of "Ambiguity Song." And then I found a video of the way Ambiguity Song should be performed: accoustic with the crowd singing along. Nice.