Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

My favorite album of 1988, which I have now purchased on CD, was Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. A mix of punk, Middle Eastern, psychedelia, and folk, it has an oddly hypnotic sound to it, and the rare quality in an album--every song is good.

Camper Van Beethoven was a band formed in California. David Lowery was the lead vocalist, and his laconic vocal quality suggests the kind of slacker persona of the hippie culture. Yet almost every song features the violin (or perhaps more accurately, fiddle) work of Jonathan Segel, which gives the album a unique Appalachian sound. No where is this more prevalent than the old folk song "O Death."

The highlights of the record are many, but I think there a few minor masterpieces. One of them is "Tania," an ode to Patty Hearst.

"Oh, my beloved revolutionary sweetheart
I can see your newsprint face turn yellow in the gutter
It makes me sad
How I long for the days when you came to liberate us from boredom
From driving around from five to seven in the evening
My beloved Tania,
We carry your gun deep within our hearts
For no better reason than our lives have no meaning
And we want to be on television."

The songs are also unexpectedly profound. One of the other great songs is "One of These Days," which begins as if it's full of sarcasm:

"One of these days
When you figure, figure it all out
Well be sure to let me know
Well I'll be waiting right here
Come and whisper in my ear what it is I want to know."

But no, the lyric is actually sincere:

"One of these days, gonna get into it way on over our heads
And you'll find that there's no place to hide
But if you fight and if you fail, don't fall back into yourself
You can fall back on me."

This is further emphasized in the closing track, "Life Is Grand":

"And life is grand
And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor
With those of you who have appointed yourselves
To expect us to say something darker
And love is real
And though I realize this is not a deep observation
To those of you who find it necessary
To conceal love or obscure it, as is the fashion."

CVB made one more album, Key Lime Pie, and then broke up. Lowery formed the group Cracker. I see that them reformed in the 2000s, I should check out the albums they made after that.