Camper's big Mac

Camper Van Beethoven's version of Fleetwood Mac's albatross – recorded in a mere 16 years – makes at least as much sense as anything they've ever done.

By Tim Quirk

THE LAST WORDS we hear on Tusk, Camper Van Beethoven's new, song-for-song cover of Fleetwood Mac's semi-ambitious 1979 double album, are "This is a bad idea." While the chuckling band member who says this probably isn't referring to the project as a whole, it's safe to assume the band left that bit in as a winking acknowledgment that their Tusk is an odd little beast, as likely to frighten and bewilder those who listen as it is to please them.

We'll get to just why you should risk listening shortly. First, you're probably wondering why in the hell the band recorded the thing in the first place. The story goes like this: Sometime in 1986 or '87, the band retreated to a friend's cabin in the mountains to write songs for what would become their first LP on Virgin Records. But drummer Chris Pedersen broke his arm skiing, and the group got distracted when their friend, who apparently had a Lindsey Buckingham obsession, suggested they try recording Tusk note for note.

Now, if someone dared you to take a record that cost something like a million dollars to produce in state-of-the-art Los Angeles studios and try to re-create it over a weekend with your four-track, you would probably giggle and tell them to quit hogging the bong. This is why you are not in Camper Van Beethoven.

"We would just do stuff like that," singer and guitarist David Lowery recalls. "Like the way we used to cover things like the Swat theme – songs that were just sort of weird and uncool."

Bassist Victor Krummenacher (who is also this publication's art director) agrees that Tusk's utter lack of indie cred was key to its appeal. "Tusk, to me, was so bad that it was good. It just seemed a weirder, more absurd choice than Pussy Galore doing Exile on Main Street, which seemed kind of über-hip. Tusk was anti-hip. The Mac version is just a cold, dead, lifeless thing to me. I do, however, love the thread that runs through it, which is Lindsey's apparent psychosis. Stevie is a wreck at this point; it's just a chronicle of decadence and self-destruction – kind of like an Orson Welles movie in rock terms, The Magnificent Ambersons of rock. It's not so good, but it's fascinating."

The band dove into the project, with the injured Pedersen programming a machine the liner notes refer to as a "drumulator." For some members the idea quickly wore thin. "Two factions sort of developed," Lowery says. "There were those of us who thought this was just a bad idea, and there were those of us who said, 'Well, we started it now, and the real artistic thing to do, if we're really, truly artists – we have to finish this.' Sort of like an artistic machismo."

Machismo notwithstanding, the band didn't manage to complete the experiment. "We didn't really get to the end at first, entirely," Krummenacher says. "It was like paving a street with not enough asphalt – we just kind of spread stuff around and left a lot of potholes." The tapes got stuck in a box in guitarist Greg Lisher's parents' Santa Cruz store, the band went on to make some relatively normal albums for Virgin, and everyone forgot about Tusk.

Everyone, that is, but violinist Jonathan Segel. "No one really cared about it except for maybe Jonathan," Lowery says. "We felt that it didn't really sound that good; he was just into it 'cause of the idea of it." But, he adds, when Lisher dug up the box with the old tapes last year, "we started listening to the individual tracks, and it was actually kind of cool. Somehow the drum machine made it seem kind of modern in a way. A lot of our inspiration for finishing it was that it actually just sounds kind of cool in this day and age to our ears."

And so the band decided to complete what they'd begun a decade and a half earlier, employing a technique similar to the one they'd used for 2000's Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead: Long Live Camper Van Beethoven: sprinkling the old tapes with newly performed bits and manipulating everything until you neither know nor care what pieces were recorded when. Which brings us to why you should listen to Tusk, rather than just think, "Huh. Seems kind of clever, I guess," and go on your merry way. It's true the album can now join Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka as a record you don't actually have to hear to appreciate. But, as with at least one of those records, the music on Camper's Tusk proves even more intriguing than the concept. It's well worth a listen or 12.

Krummenacher doesn't hesitate to declare that "our Tusk is way better than theirs," and he's right. Despite its lo-fi origins, the album is a marvel of production: the old pieces and the new blend seamlessly (so seamlessly that you start to wonder just how much of the we-recorded-this-thing-on-a-four-track-in-a-cabin-in-1987 story is bullshit), and the band seem to have had a perfectly intuitive grasp of when to embellish the original compositions and when to strip stuff away. Some of the Camper cuts goof on the Mac versions ("Honey Hi" replaces the lyrics with a series of meows, "Sisters of the Moon" employs a Macintosh-generated "female" voice to recite Stevie Nicks's lyrics, then adds such phrases as "I would like some pork" and "Fuck me harder"), some opt for Jah Wobble-inspired dub versions, and others are relatively straight-ahead readings of the original. Whatever the approach, each track turns out subtly wonderful.

Fun as it might be to compare Camper's songs with the Mac's, the less familiar you are with the original, the more likely you are to appreciate this album's charms. Also, like a lot of records made under the influence of drugs (Krummenacher blames "Percodan, pot, and tequila with a line of coke and some strong coffee" for making the project seem like a good idea in the first place), Camper's Tusk probably sounds a lot better if you're on some when you listen. Unfortunately, my inability to shake a persistent summer flu bug prior to my deadline prevented me from adequately testing this theory, so I had to settle for quintupling the recommended dosage of my cough syrup. I can at least vouch that Tusk benefits greatly from a low-level DMX buzz. The repetitive drum patterns take on a hypnotic grace, and the extended freak-outs at the end of some songs – those seem to become more and more common as the album progresses – prove more compelling than the verses and choruses. (Granted, some of them go back to sounding a bit too long and masturbatory the next morning, but not all the way back. You have to love perfectly legal Tussin.)

Better than the original, of course, doesn't necessarily equal great. Lowery freely admits his band's version suffers from all the same flaws as its template: "I think the original album was spotty at best. Had some great stuff on it; had some misguided stuff." Also, you sort of have to give a shit about Camper Van Beethoven in the first place to love the Santa Cruz ska of "Angel" or to believe that the hoarse voice crying, "Track a ghost through the fog baby / You try hard, but you'll never catch me!" means a lot more coming out of Segel's mouth than out of Nicks's. Nonetheless, there's something alluring about listening to an album that's so clearly the product of intense studio tinkering but still feels like band members interacting with one another. And when you layer in the realization that these thirty- and fortysomethings are basically jamming with their twentysomething selves, well, the experience approaches the sublime.

Even though it sold more than two million copies, the original Tusk felt like a commercial and artistic disappointment at the time of its release. Maybe the expectations for the band that made Rumours were simply too high for anything to live up to them. Camper's Tusk, coming as it does from a band that broke up a decade ago and isn't officially back together, arrives with no expectations whatsoever, which may be why the thing is so satisfying. The irony is that if Camper were to officially re-form and release an actual album of all-new material, they'd face the indie-rock version of Fleetwood Mac's 1979 dilemma: how could they possibly follow up a legacy that so many people revere?

So here's my last Tussin-inspired revelation: What initially seems like a low-risk endeavor (doing something too stupid for words and thereby being shielded from any genuine criticism) from a band that always took a little too much pride in defying expectations may in fact be an inspired way to rekindle the past without fetishizing it. While everybody (a word that here means "that subset of the population that cares who Camper Van Beethoven are or were") is distracted by comparing these songs with Fleetwood Mac's, they're forgetting to compare them with old CVB material. Which leaves Camper free to be themselves and do whatever the fuck they want, just like they used to.

It's a pretty nifty trick.

Camper Van Beethoven play Aug/24, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $20. (415) 885-0750. Also Aug/25, 8 p.m., Slim's, 333 11th St., S.F. $20. (415) 522-0333.