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Camper Van Beethoven will release Cigarettes and Carrot Juice, a five-CD box set, on November 5th. The set will include four of the group's albums -- Telephone Free Landslide Victory, II & III, Camper and Camper Vantiquities -- in addition to one CD of live performances.
The first three CDs represent the band's first releases for I.R.S., prior to its departure for Virgin. While at Virgin, Camper released Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988) and Key Lime Pie (1989), before the band began to splinter, first with the departure of Jonathan Segel (violin) in 1989, followed by the exit of bassist Victor Krummenacher, guitarist Greg Lisher and drummer Chris Pedersen. In 1993, Krummenacher compiled a series of odds and ends and released them as Camper Vantiquities.
The band says the live set was preferable to further digging in the vaults for unreleased studio cuts. "Aside from some live recordings, that's all we have," singer/guitarist David Lowery says. "'Cause nobody wants to hear us do 'Kung Fu Fighting.' There could be a whole disc of covers: 'Rock Your Baby,' the theme to 'SWAT.' The MTV theme."
Following the band's split, Lowery threw himself into Cracker, while Segel released a trio of albums as Heironymous Firebrain, and Krummenacher, Lisher and Pedersen recorded several albums as the Monks of Doom. Even with the reunion, the members continue their own projects. Cracker released Everyday last year, and Krummenacher continues to work on his own solo recordings.
The release of Cigarettes and Carrot Juicecomes amid a busy Camper year. The group played a series of reunion shows in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which marked the release of Tusk, Camper's song-by-song cover of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 recording of the same name.
"When we first started out, we were doing what ended up being kind of dangerous some nights, which was go and play for these hardcore punk rock kids," Lowery says. "And we'd go out there and basically sort of make fun of them for thirty-five minutes. Generally by the end, people really got into it, because we played all these punk covers and eventually we were sort of embraced by that community. But a lot of it, if it went wrong, we'd turn inward and concentrate on playing our parts, and that's a theme that went through our whole career. If the audience didn't get it, we'd turn inward and sort of make our parts tighter and fancier. It was the age, things were supposed to be simple back then. We would sort of play simple, but make little things complicated to go against people's expectations. We were such a jam band."
Adds Krummenacher, "A big part of our element is that one part of our core is very simple and one part of the core is really not and they intersect in a cool sort of way. It's funny, the songs have very sound foundations and it still sounds good to me. It's kind of aged well, and in this day and age, I think we have more in common with the jam bands than the alt/uber mafia."
Despite the reunion shows, there are still no definite recording plans. "I don't wanna be the band that put out a bunch of other records that weren't as good as the first material," Lowery says. "I suppose we'd do it, I don't know if I speak for everybody, but I would do it if the material was really strong. Right now, there seems to be a whole family of bands that came from Camper, and we're kind of interested in touring and showcasing some of these other things that happened in the Nineties."
ANDREW DANSBY
(September 23, 2002)