A Conversation with Camper Van Beethoven’s Victor Krummenacher – HuffPost 5.22.14

Mike Ragogna: El Camino Real, is the companion album and follow-up to La Costa Perdida, but what exactly was the link to that project? Was it recordings that occurred around the same time?

Victor Krummenacher: We had a bunch of recordings left over. When we madeLa Costa there were a lot of good things that got left off, they just didn’t end up having a home, and we thought, “We should do something about this.” It seemed like the logical continuation would be to go write a few more songs and see what we could do. We had such a distinctive theme and it was so Northern California-based, we really worked those metaphors quite a bit, but David [Lowery] and I are from Southern California and we hadn’t really worked the Southern California thing, so we thought, “Let’s just try it and see if we can adapt the songs in progress and write some new songs and just do something…” In a sense, La Costa… was fairly pastoral, there was a lot of Beach Boys influences and others that were really Northern California-centric, but David and I are from Southern California, and we definitely grew up on pretty aggressive punk rock music, there were a couple of things that were really, really punk rock that we had left off and we said, “Let’s just see if we can integrate it, because we already have these California themes, let’s just see if we can push this.” So it was a pretty simple decision, really.

MR: Is that at the heart of Camper Van Beethoven, the shared experiences of growing up in the same world as David?

VK: Yeah, I think so. That’s really how we relate. Camper Van Beethoven is like a diaspora. David lives in Athens, Georgia and Richmond, Virginia, Greg and I are like the last two California holdouts. Our drummer lives in Australia. We’re all over the place, but the thing that we really have in common is that we grew up in the same place. It’s been a lot of time, 31 years.

MR: Your group is so geographically disparate, so what’s the recording process like?

VK: Well, we try and maximize when we’re around. Last year, I had a full-time job and played seventy shows, and I’m not quite sure how I did that. It kind of seems like a dream now. But at the end of the touring cycle as we were going into the festival we had a show at Outside Lands and because Jonathan was out from Sweden and everybody was in the area we convened in Berkeley. Everyone had a couple of ideas and we wrote companion pieces–a lot of the work actually occurred during the composition of La Costa…; we wrote those in August. Literally it was like, “Okay, we have an hour, I have a chord progression that goes like this, do you have an idea for a riff? Okay. The clock starts now, it’s one o’clock. At two o’clock we have to have a take, go.” It may sound strange, but I’m pretty trustful of our ability to write. A lot of people would do this, Richard Thompson sits in his living room, the kid sits in his basement, sometimes you just have to say, “It’s time to write!” I work in journalism, you know what a deadline is.

MR: Who do you work for?

VK: I work for Wired magazine, I manage their art department.

MR: So cool! Victor, let me ask you, when you guys listened back to the finished album, how did it strike you as a unique project, despite its association with La Costa Perdida?

VK: The record strikes me as more aggressive and more chaotic, which I think is more reflective of Los Angeles and its environment. Like I said, there’s a little darkness in La Costa Perdida but it’s kind of more rural darkness. In keeping its more pastoral feeling I think a lot of the places we were kind of psychologically living in the songs were coastal, because we spent a lot of time on the coast, and that can be a little quieter. David grew up in Redlands, I grew up in Riverside, those were hardly pastoral, it’s hotter, it’s drier, it’s meaner, it’s grittier. We both spent a lot of time living in Hollywood, so there’s a touch of–are you familiar with the Mike Davis book City Of Quartz?

MR: Yes.

VK: Yeah, so it’s more psychologically related to City Of Quartz than it is, say, Crying Of Lot 49.

MR: [laughs] That’s really cool, I love the references. When you get together for your creative sessions, does it just lead to more Camper Van Beethoven, or does it also inspire David for more work with Cracker? How extensive is your partnership with him these days?

VK: Here’s a really good example: When we were writing La Costa… and we hadn’t sat and done the really fertile four or five days of sitting and writing together but we were leading into it and we had a few pieces and were starting to get a shape for the record, David emailed me and said, “Have you got anything sitting around that’s kind of darker?” I had some things sitting around, and I sent it to him and then didn’t hear back for a long time and I was like, “Well, hell, it was a good piece of music, I’m just going to go work on something based on that,” because I do a lot of solo work. So I went and basically finished the same song, and he comes back to me maybe six months later and says, “Hey, I did this,” and I was like, “Oh.” So now we have two completely different versions of this song. That’s just the kind of things that happens. Certainly because there’s so much overflow with the bands, you never know. There are definitely things that Cracker has done that influence Camper, and there are things that Camper has done that influence Cracker. There are definitely things that both those bands have done that have influenced everybody in the band in their solo work.

One of the things that we always do, we had this longstanding side project with the lead guitar player of Counting Crows called Monks Of Doom which is kind of the prog rock alter ego of Camper Van Beethoven where the King Crimson influences came out and time changes and really aggressive, strange music. Sometimes David is with me and he says, “We have to bring some Monks into this.” I think the older we’ve gotten we’ve started to realize at a certain point, “I’m not going to be here forever.” We’re extraordinarily lucky to be fifty and still be doing this. most people I know my age don’t do it anymore and don’t have an audience, because the music business is so screwed up. I think the biggest problem with Camper is that we have too many ideas and want to do too many things. At a certain point you have to make peace with it and find the strengths from it.

MR: Well how do you feel about the future? This is a comfortable fit and when you guys get together?

VK: Yeah, I think that’s kind of how it has to be. If I got into predicting the future I don’t think it would work anymore, it’s not a predictable business model, right? I know people who are more famous than me and have trouble getting their records out. A friend of mine took me to meet David Crosby a few weeks ago and he was basically saying the same things that we say. “I’m not making any money and this is really difficult and it’s hard to get a record out.” I look at that and go, “Wow, that’s David Crosby.” I think Camper did its part, we made some great influential music, I think we really did change how people perceived and listened to music when we were first a band and everything we’ve done since is kind of icing on the cake. My one condition with the band when we started playing together was that I don’t want to be a nostalgia act. When we get to the point where we’re a nostalgia act I’ll just not do it, you can get another bass player. We have to have new music and it has to be active. That’s my situation. It’s just kind of what works. “Where can we make some money and how can we do it?” Otherwise I just consider myself lucky. Let’s not forget the future ’cause we can’t.

MR: You guys are very proud of the work you do with Camper Van Beethoven, aren’t you?

VK: I’m very proud of the band. I’m really proud of the fact that we made good music that people still like. One of the things I’m most proud of is how much it means to people. It’s almost a weird burden on some level because every set we have to play “Take The Skinheads Bowling,” but we have people come and they bring their children and the children are adults now and they sing along and say, “I grew up on this music.” To have it still be relevant to people and play “All Her Favorite Fruit” and someone starts crying, it’s pretty touching to have been part of it and that it means so much to–it’s not a big group of people but we have a small but dedicated group of people. I put out a solo record and five hundred people will buy it. That’s not a lot, but it keeps it going. A lot of people just can’t do that anymore. There are a lot of things I wish were different, I wish the music business still existed, I wish that people weren’t completely pressurized into being on the road, I wish people cared about albums and content and didn’t look at their phones so much and spent more time reading books, but you can’t change that stuff. You just can’t do it.

MR: Victor, what advice do you have for new artists?

VK: My advice is to do whatever you want to, because that’s what I did. Put your heart and soul into it and mean it and don’t compromise. Just don’t do it. When I make a record, it doesn’t matter who I’m making a record with, these conversations come up where we’re talking about compromising for the record company or other people’s tastes and I’ll disengage. I’m not interested. Your art has to have your complete integrity and if it doesn’t there’s just no point.

MR: Do you have any favorites?

VK: You know, I have my favorites. The Virgin that Camper did were re-released by Omnivore earlier this year and as a result I went and relistened to them and I feel really, really strongly proud of those records, I think they were really well-executed, they were very hard to make and it was a very hard time to be in the band but I think they really stand up and they should last and serve as influential records. The first Camper record we had no idea what we were doing. It’s like The Modern Lovers’ first records, they didn’t know what they were doing, they hadn’t got a clue, it was still completely unique. I think there’s some great Cracker records, I think Kerosene Hat is pretty marvelous still and I think that Golden Age is really quite amazing. I think La Costa… just kind of proved that were still totally violent and creative, maybe long after the fact that people had said, “Are they going to be like ‘X’ and not play anything but the first few records?” It’d been eight years since we put out a record and I think if you want to dig deep there’s a lot of cool stuff in the solo realm from pretty much everybody. If you want to get deep with Camper stuff there’s a lot of places to go and I think there’s a lot more good music in there than just the high points that people know.

MR: One of the interesting things about Camper Van Beethoven is that it’s always cited as having been influential. Do you think that’s true?

VK: Oh yeah, I think so. I think you see it in Pavement, I think you see it in Cake, that kind of absurdist sense of humor that seems to percolate through culture, people were very earnest when we came along. The whimsical bands were either like the B-52s which was pretty camp or things like The Fibonaccis who were this Los Angeles new wave art rock band. It was all either very campy or very esoteric and high brow and we were just kind of a circus which harkened back maybe more to things like Country Joe & The Fish or some other sixties bands where there was a little bit more of an educated mindset but not elitist, you know? We’re from the suburbs. One of the first reviews that I remember that really rubbed me the wrong way was Spin magazine saying of Telephone Free Landslide Victory, “Don’t these guys realize there’s no culture in the suburbs?” [laughs] It still pisses me off. What a really, really horribly arrogant thing to say. There’s a lot of culture. Culture is where humans are. Just because it’s suburban… I think what we did is that we opened up the door to not being from “the right place.” We’re from Santa Cruz, we’re from Redlands, we’re from Riverside, we weren’t from San Francisco, we weren’t from New York, we weren’t from LA. In the way that R.E.M. was from Athens we were able to do a California analogue. There was a lot of affinity for bands at the time like The Minutemen and the Meat Puppets and things like that, like all good revolutionary groups we didn’t sit and talk about it, we just kind of did it. But we understood the kindship, I think we all instinctively understood where we were coming from and what we were doing.

MR: You also played with Cracker. What do you think about Cracker?

VK: They’re recording some stuff right now and I really want to hear it but he hasn’t played it for me. I mean, I’ve been busy and he’s been busy too, it’s a nudge, but I’m not really pissed about it. When the band broke up it was a bitter breakup and I was very much off in a different world, I didn’t much care for what they were doing because I wasn’t listening to it. When David and I reconciled I had to go listen to it and learn how to play it and my respect for it went way up. There’s a lot of subtlety and a lot of nuance to what they’re doing. When Cracker’s at its very best it’s got a lot more going on than I think first meets the eye, I think people always see it dumbed down compared to Camper but it’s not, it’s actually slyer than that, it’s smarter than that and musically, especially, there are certain people who played in that band who did remarkable work. It’s pretty deep. It’s a longstanding relationship. I still don’t always get along with or agree with David, that’s just how that works, but if you don’t have a tension then nothing goes on. If we all agreed… The last thing I want to do as a creative person is go into a situation where everybody agrees. It never works.

MR: And what two brothers haven’t fought with each other?

VK: Exactly.

MR: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

VK: No, just that in regards to El Camino Real, we didn’t really plan on having a record out so quickly and we’re all kind of happy that we did. It’s nice that it’s working.