Camper Van Beethoven's college rock reign won the band much acclaim, and their original, impeccable, endlessly inventive run of 1985's Telephone Free Landslide Victory through its 1989 swan song Key Lime Pie has withstood the test of time. Yet despite all this, CVB remains somewhat unsung and overlooked. The line between smart and smart-aleck is a tough one to define, and CVB gleefully straddled that line almost until the very end, when the more serious turn CVB took with Key Lime Pie finally solidified the band's reputation. In retrospect, that disc may be the band's masterpiece, but at the time even some of its most ardent supporters didn't know what to make of it, and if it wasn't for David Lowery's subsequent success in Cracker, who knows? Maybe even the great Camper Van Beethoven would have been relegated to the dustbin of history, and their clever mix of ska, punk, Eastern European folk, psych, rock, raga, country, and beyond written off, forgetten or, worse, dismissed as novelty.
Since stealthily reforming in 2000 or so, the group has made up for lost time, however erratically and confusingly. First came a mysterious compilation called Camper Van Beethoven is Dead. Long Live Camper Van Beethoven. Next came a track-for-track cover of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, a longtime favorite of estranged violinist Jonathan Segel and a test to see if the reunited band could get along in the studio. In 2002, just about everything the band ever released was included in the boxed set Cigarettes & Carrot Juice: The Santa Cruz Years, which was packaged with a live disc amusingly called Greatest Hits Played Faster.
That disc's the closest Camper Van Beethoven has ever come to releasing a best-of, and for good reason. Each of the band's albums is wonderfully sequenced (though annoyingly re-sequenced for the subsequent stand-alone reissue of the group's formative output), and the band's catalog is filled with so many gems any best-of is bound to leave many of them behind. It's better to just buy them all and make your own, really.
Still, Popular Songs of Great Enduring Strength and Beauty, a new single-disc career overview, does a pretty good job capturing all that was great about Camper Van Beethoven, from the somber side to the silly side and all sides in between. Track for track, all 18 cuts, from the goofy "The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon" and "Take the Skinheads Bowling" to the somber "All Her Favorite Fruit" and "Sad Lovers Waltz", to the satirical "When I Win the Lottery" or "Club Med Sucks", hold up really well. While the hardcore might not appreciate hearing these songs in a radically new context, some care has obviously been taken to make sure the thing flows. To the group's credit, they don't try to sneak in any songs from their otherwise OK comeback New Roman Times, either.
But then there's the matter of what's missing, songs such as sentimental favorites "Heart" and "She Divines Water", rockers "(We're A) Bad Trip" and "Turquoise Jewelry", or even any of the group's oddball covers of bands as diverse as Pink Floyd, Black Flag, the Kinks, the Clash, the Monkees, and Sonic Youth. Any fan will cite their own favorite glaring omission, though in the case of at least a few of the AWOL tracks, there may be a reason they didn't show up. Controversially-- or intriguingly-- the band had to re-record a handful of songs from its two-album Virgin catalog after the label refused to relinquish the masters (jerks). They're not remakes, they're careful recreations, and they're remarkably faithful to the originals, so all's good with these "new" versions of "Pictures of Matchstick Men" "Eye of Fatima", and "One of These Days".
Unless, like me, you think Chris Pedersen was one of the most creative drummers of the 1980s, and that Cracker drummer Frank Funaro isn't a total ringer for his idiosyncratic style. Or that Key Lime Pie is one of the coolest sounding albums of all time (David Lowery once told me to thank veteran engineer Csaba Petocz, as well as what was often the case with CVB, copious amounts of marijuana). But only a fan would notice the difference, and a fan has everything already. For the uninitiated, on the other hand, Popular Songs of Great Enduring Strength and Beauty will do just fine. It's the band's white rabbit-- "Curiouser and curiouser!"-- demanding you follow it down the rabbit hole.
