March 26, 2003

By Victor Krummenacher

LATE ONE NIGHT after our gig in Brussels, Camper Van Beethoven stumbled about looking for some late-night greasy food – a recurring theme in the vampire life of rock 'n' roll. We wound up at a donner kabob stand in the center of the city, talking to a Turkish diplomat to the United Nations about his homeland, the European Union, NATO, the U.N., and Iraq. "You don't understand a thing about the dynamic here," he told us over beers and cigarettes in the back of the tour bus. "We Muslims are exploited for our labor, but they won't let the Turks in the E.U."

"We may not have the greatest record of human rights," he continued, "but why is Bulgaria in line before us? They aren't saints. Especially with the U.S. holding a money bag over our head to get us to let in their military. I don't understand Western policy. It seems incoherent."

Thoughts to mull over.

A few days later, we pulled in late to the gig in Paris, in the neighborhood of Sacre Cœur. The bus had been in an accident the night before, and we didn't have much time to kill. I was hungry and wanted to get some food in me as soon as I could, and I began to head east, into the Arab neighborhood, only to be quickly admonished by the club's manager. "Head up the hill instead," he said. "Americans and English have been getting jumped there regularly. Best to not take a risk."

A post-freedom fries world

I've traveled to Paris many times since the mid 1980s. Until now, the only hassle I can think of was when north African terrorists were blowing up cafés left and right in 1987. I got stopped by the police and dragged back to my hotel room so I could show them my visa.

In the early '90s, I walked all over town with nary an incident. In 2001, prior to 9/11, I sat in the east end of the city and ate couscous with friends in an Algerian restaurant before a gig with Eugene Chadbourne, having a wonderful meal. But in February 2003, the tone had changed. In every large European city Camper went to, we were advised to keep our guard up in, or altogether avoid, Arab neighborhoods. Americans, and to some degree the British, were not welcome.

At 3 a.m. in Malmö, Sweden, on another drunken forage for kabob, the restaurant we found had CNN Europe's Showdown with Iraq airing in the background while the Syrian owners fried falafel. They didn't speak much to me, but when the register guy heard my American/California boy accent, he looked at me and simply said, "These are frightening times. And very sad."

For as long as I've been touring Europe, Americans have been regarded warily. Although our music is much loved, our government is frequently questioned and sometimes loathed. Back in the Reagan-Bush the First era, Camper didn't envision ourselves as the Clash or Crass, or now in 2003, god forbid, something like Rage Against the Machine. Yeah, we grew up on Joe Strummer, but we never wanted to be too overt. That wasn't our deal. But times have changed, dreadfully so, and nobody feels like being quiet. And it seems like we can't avoid politics, no matter what.

More outspoken

The overtones were always alive in the songs, whether early jokey stabs such as "Goleta" or tunes with increasing degrees of poignancy and directness, like "Good Guys and Bad Guys," "When I Win the Lottery," and "Sweethearts." Playing these songs with the re-formed band in the last year has felt eerily relevant, almost prescient. It's an unexpectedly ominous vibe for a group of people whose biggest musical assets were almost always based in intentional or unintentional contradiction.

Playing with Eugene, who's always been more outspoken than us, I never felt at odds about wearing my political heart on my sleeve. Camper was always more guarded. But it seems now, because of circumstance, we can't and won't afford ourselves that luxury. Charles Lowery, our singer-guitarist David's father, is a 30-year Air Force veteran who served in Korea, and he's opposed to the war, and he entered our onstage banter in a way I wouldn't have anticipated 20 years ago, as an example of rank-and-file resistance.

In January, before Camper left the States, we had informally dubbed our East Coast jaunt the "Regime Change in Washington D.C. Tour." That line seemed a little too verbose and obscure in Europe, and the phrase "regime change" hadn't really made the lexicon yet. The crowd didn't seem to get what we were going on about until we started saying, "Texas has an autocratic government. Texas controls 6 percent of the world's oil supply. Citizens of Texas are frequently executed by their government. Bomb Texas!" They got that just fine. And they couldn't seem to agree more.

Music journalists sent to interview the band always turned the subject to Iraq, if we didn't go there first. We couldn't help talking about politics, keeping in mind the fact that the Europeans were gracious enough to be our audience and buy our music while our government prepared to wage a unilateral war against a country that posed no credible threat. As when I'd toured Europe with Eugene during the first Gulf War (during which we performed with a hand-painted banner that read "Nein Zum Krieg" (No War), hoisted behind us), the whole band tried to serve as some sort of low-rent cultural ambassadors, as if to say, "We're sorry. We're not all assholes."

Everyday people

In Kreuzburg in Berlin, home to the largest Turkish population outside Turkey, walking in the freezing cold back to the hotel, I passed women in burqas walking with their children home from school, talking, as best I could tell, about the day at school. They seemed like peaceful, loving families, working hard to get by and hoping to get ahead.

My thoughts turned to walking through the Mission and seeing Latino families doing the same thing, and the epiphany came: replace every donner kabob stand with a burrito joint, populate them with Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Colombians, and then see what the reaction would be when Russia decided to attack Mexico for its natural resources. Can you imagine the instability and resentment in the Latino communities? How'd you like to work at the Russian embassy then?

I didn't encounter one person in Europe who thought this war was a good idea. Not the cabbie in London, not the crew on the ferry, not the Turkish diplomat, the Swedish hotelier, the Thai Dutch immigrant restaurateur, or the Danish promoter. Not the French music shop owner. And not the German airport security guard who had to x-ray my boots and jacket and bag and guitar case to meet U.S. FAA security regulations so the plane could leave Frankfurt. He just wanted to talk to me about my Fender. Of the war, he said, "Some things just don't make sense."