One of my happier club memories of the past couple of years has to be the Camper Van Beethoven reunion tour of 2003, when CVB played Minneapolis' First Avenue on the very coldest night of the year (about -20 degrees). My husband and I had spent the day showing violinist Jonathan Segel the sights, most memorably the frozen waterfall at Minnehaha Park, and then I got to sneak out for the evening, while my husband stayed behind to watch our son, with the knowledge that I probably wouldn't be able to get out of the house like that again for years, or at least until our next baby was old enough to leave with sitters.
I really thought seeing Camper play together on stage was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially after seeing the tiny SUV the entire band was crammed into for the cross-country tour. But here they are again, and this time, they're bringing a new album with them, the first release from the band in 15 years. Not only does New Roman Times bring a whole slew of new Camper material to the table, the album features performances with all original members of the classic Camper Van Beethoven line-up: David Lowery on vocals and guitar, Jonathan Segel on violin, Victor Krummenacher on bass, Greg Lisher on guitar, and Chris Pedersen on drums.
"When we first started rehearsing for doing actual Camper Van Beethoven shows, I remember just looking around the rehearsal studio and going, I know how to play with these people!" says Segel. "It's amazing! You know, it's like, regardless of all the bands that I've played with before and after, these are the people that I really learned to play in a band with. And so it is really fun now." He adds, "You know, it's here, another fifteen years down the road from our last record or whatever, we are all better musicians, and we can all actually play things a lot better than we use to, and that's nice."
Despite the huge gap between records, New Roman Times sounds like a Camper record, as though the band never really stopped being. The folksy, Middle- Eastern-inspired polka instrumentals are there, as are the cheery, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and refrains that earmark all of Camper Van Beethoven's work. The album, which is being officially marketed as a "rock opera," follows the story of a young Texan who volunteers for an elite military unit during turbulent times - specifically, the secession of California from the rest of the country. The soldier begins to have doubts about the war and joins the CVB resistance.
But even when they're trying to tackle a subject as serious as war, CVB apparently can't help but be ridiculous and irreverent. "I would die for Hippy chix/we might stop and surf a bit," sings Lowery in "Hippy Chix," while in "Militia Song," Lowery channels a crazy renegade with, "Studied mathematics at Berkeley/Now I don't like society/Got me a little ol' shack in the woods/Gonna mail you some explosive goods."
"You know, people are going to try to find parallels between Bush and this soldier, since they're both from Texas," I say. "Their stories are completely different, but still--Texas."
"Well, David's from Texas. He was born in San Antonio," explains Segel. "David's really into character writing in his songwriting. He adopts a voice, you know, that's like a character voice a lot, so that ended up sort of being the character voice he was writing in. I don't think it's really based on anybody specifically."
So what's different about the band now that they're all in the forties, instead of in their twenties, as they were when Camper Van Beethoven first came to be? "It's like, everything, when we were getting started as Camper way back when, everything seemed so dire, in a way," says the recently-married Segel. "Everything seemed so important. You have to do this in order to keep being a band, in order to keep making records. But it's like, if we had just sort of relaxed and not taken ourselves so seriously, at the time, I think, it might have been a lot easier. Being a young man is so 'I'm the center of the universe.' But that's the thing - you can't say, I wish I knew that I wasn't the center of the universe when I was twenty-five - I wish I really realized that. It's like, you know, I wish I could have backed off and realized that whatever I do is just one little piece of all the rest of the stuff that the band does."
Something I've always admired about Jonathan Segel is his ability to go out and see everything he possibly can about wherever his tour van happens to stop. Last time he was here, it was -15 degrees outside, so cold that even Lake Harriet was bare of wind sails and pedestrians. Still, he was determined to meet my husband and me for breakfast and see at least a little bit of Minneapolis, snapping pictures the whole time.
"How could you not go out and see the places you're touring?" he asks. "Travel is interesting to me, you know? Travel sort of does things to you that you can't really pick up any other way. I'm not into mediated reality, you know? I like experiencing things for myself. Like, it's nice to watch another person go and climb a mountain, but it's another thing to go and actually walk in the mountains. So I really do try and figure out where I am if at all possible. I've been in 49 of 50 of the U.S. states, and I've tried to see as much of all of them as possible."
