'Tobacco? That's not tobacco!!'— David Lowery, 1984.

'So we had to go to MTV with the video (for 'Eye Of Fatima') and lie about the lyrics: 'Cocaine? I didn't hear anything about cocaine!' ''—Virgin Records spokesperson, 1988.

With all the sanctimoniously clean just-say-no-pop that's clogging the arteries of rock 'n' roll, it's about time for somebody to spearhead a drugrock revival. Now, just so you don't think I'm implying that that's where Camper Van Beethoven have set their sights, let me say Guns 'N Roses are far more likely to take the bait. It's been said far too often in the underground press that Camper are this generation's Grateful Dead, and while the tag is convenient for random theorizers, it's quite simply not true.

The complex, improvisational quality of their music (coupled with early band missives about the wonders of lysergia) makes the 'psychedelic' jumpsuit seem a rather snug fit. The band, though undoubtedly a little tired of being pigeonholed, don't bristle too much at the description. After all, there're no liquid light shows, designer paisley duds or grave-robbed Pebbles covers in their collective closet. And though it may sound naive, singer David Lowery, guitarist Greg Lisher, bassist Victor Krummenacher, drummer Chris Pedersen and violinist/ keyboardist/mandolinist Jonathan Segel play what might be the most positively mind-expanding (or izzat blowing?) music likely to hit the charts this year.

For the past four years, Camper Van Beethoven have been prolific as hell, releasing four LPs and an EP under their imprimateur, one more (plus one in the can) with guitar god Eugene Chadbourne, and have spewed ephemera on compilations, fanzine flexis and cereal box discs at an alarming rate. Their touring schedule has been almost as rigorous (check out Gina Arnold's excellent Musician article ca. September for all the horrific road details). Somewhere along the way, Camper's rotating membership stopped rotating, and the band, notorious for jam-fests, discovered the joys of brevity and tightness. Shockingly commercial? A sell-out? Nope. Just the sound of a band growing.

'The only thing being on a major label means to me is being able to spend more time on what we want to do,' insists David Lowery. 'It's not like we've gotten more commercialjust the opposite in fact. I think when we started out, we were more geared toward 'pleasing' a crowd. I think we avoid that now. It's very tempting to try to get a big audience reaction by playing everything they want to hear.

It makes you feel good, but I think we'd rather show our (laughs) depth . . . and artistic sensitivity.'

Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, the band's major label bow, doesn't sound all that much different than their indie efforts unless you have an audiophile's ear. The disc, which ate up about three months of studio time (and cost about $75,000, as opposed to their previous high of $3,000), just sounds like a more pristine rendering of their pan-ethnic, occasionally knee-slappin' music. The humor, while not as upfront as early Camperwork like 'Take The Skinheads Bowling' and 'Where The Hell Is Bill?,' is still very much in evidence. It's just a little more subtle, since Lowery's spending more time honing his lyrics these days. The same reasoning, Lowery says, applies to the musical 'growth' evident on Sweetheart. Big label + medium-sized advance means more time to do what you want.

The band still spends considerable time with their own Pitch-A-Tent label—putting them in the same league as Kansas City Royal George Brett, who counts a Chicago Cubs' minor league franchise among his investments. The label is pretty much an extension of the Camper 'philosophy,' having released a double handful of discs ranging from the merely quirky (Wrestling Worms, Ten Foot Faces) to the downright psychotic (Donner Party, Spot 1019). So has Camper put themselves in a position to perpetuate their own myth by breeding a stable of wannabethovens?

'Well, Spot 1019 were around three years before we even started,' Lowery defends, 'but yeah, we've gotten a lot of tapes from bands who remind me a little too much of us. But then there's this weird cross-fertilization of bands from the San Francisco/Santa Cruz area, and we've all kinda adopted some of each other's characteristics.'

Dunno if it's the method of pollination or simply the THC fog that seems to envelop most of Northern California's college towns, but a goodly number of the area's music makers fall under the loose oddball/folkpsych/pseudo-amateur family tree that stretches back a full two decades. A few of 'em add enough of a twist to merit notice. In Camper's case, the seemingly effortless fusion of Eastern European/Appalachian/Tex-Mex musics, bones 'n' all, onto their early funnypunk material, seemed to be a fate-sealer (for better or worse).

Of course, the sniggering 'Take the Skinheads Bowling' created the biggest buzz among novelty-slurping college radio folk and made CVB's debut Telephone Free Landslide Victory a cult hit, much to Lowery's surprise. The thing that first struck me, however—and I'm about as Polish a Pole as you're likely to encounter— was how old country-perfect obereks like 'Balalaika Gap' were. I quickly became convinced CVB had to be an elaborate front to sell the recordings of a buncn of 60-year-old refugees to the hipoisie. Lowery, however, is quick to burst the bubble.

'The way this whole thing started was through one of my pre-Camper bands in L.A.,' he explains. 'We had this kind of surf aesthetic and we'd do these instruments that almost sounded foreign. We didn't know ethnic music at all but we liked the idea of approximation.

'Like, for example, 'Ali Baba,' you know that song? That was basically this Tin Pan Alley composer type trying to do fake Turkish music. It probably started out with some basis in Turkish music, but then this surf band played it, condensed it and made it this mutated musical entity. Surf bands always did that, they used country music and spaghetti western stuff. ..

'All we wanted to do with Camper was play semi-acoustic stuff using whatever instruments our friends played. We ended up saying 'Oh, soand-so has a violin, let's play some country.' And as we got more and more into faking it, we actually did start to listen to klezmer music or whatever. And when we moved to Santa Cruz, we ran into Jonathan Segel who was a music major and knew all this stuff, and off we went.'

Segel, whose violin playing flits through just about every style the instrument could conceivably be used for, from polka to swing to It's A Beautiful Day psychedelia, plays a large part in separating Camper Van Beethoven from the fakers. Besides the fiddle, he strums/saws/bangs a goodly number of pan-ethnic noiseboxes to good effect. And along with mathematics major (tho' his record co bio lies 'music') Lowery, he writes the bulk of the music.

'It's done a lot of different ways, actually,' Lowery rasps. 'Like 'Tania'— the best way I can do this is with examples—Greg was doing this weird chord progression and Jonathan came up with the melody. I started singing about Patty Hearst and in five minutes we had a song. Usually everyone jams on stuff and makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.

'I suppose if I was in a band with people with a more straightforward approach to music, the songs would be melody/chord progression oriented, but I try not to think about that.'

From their debut, through the followup, II And III, the self-titled third LP and the odds 'n' sods Vampire Can Mating Oven, the band gradually started shaving some of the complexity from their recorded output. Culminating with the stiIl-fairly-offcenter Virgin debut Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, Camper have been, with a few side trips, easing into the role of—as disquieting as this may be to cultists—a rock 'n' roll band. Live runthroughs of their own material and, perhaps more surprising, considering their past proclivity for deconstructing others' material, straightahead covers of songs as diverse as the Buzzcocks' 'Harmony In My Head' and the Kinks' klassic 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else' have shown 'em aiming squarely in that direction.

'The whole point of Camper has always been to write completely hummable, completely singable tunes. It tucked away for people with an irrational fear of modern production was 'Nero the Zero,' a meaty session leftover laden with heavy electric chords and chiming six-strings. The melody was straightforward and propped up with an ounce of melancholy; in the background hummed a wise harmonica refrain, like a teenager looking down on the follies of society. I played it five times over, it nailed me in the heart, and I told Paddy so.

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'It's lovely that you should pick up on that,' says Paddy with so much sincerity I felt like squirming. 'It's one we used to play live when we played in tiny pubs in Durham, where we come from. We went into a local studio in Newcastle for a couple of days and banged down six songs real quick, pretty much live, with a few embellishments. I wrote 'Nero the Zero' when I was 18 or 19, and it has a funny lyric, actually about playing in Durham.' Indeed, the chorus ends,

But don't you worry / In Durham County / What you're really feeling / You'll soon forget.'

'You know what it is,' he ponders. 'I'm 31, and I went through that, and I like it, but I suppose with the intervening years I've changed in what I want to do. But I still like to go back to that. A lot of songs that I wrote, what I know some people think are some of my best things, I was 19, I was 20. I'm pleased that they still hold up and that people like them, but then I had the feeling of 'I wish I was better.' And I now think I am better, no matter what people think of the new songs compared to the old ones. But I still feel I'm not doing what I want to do. And that's healthy. I still feel I'm in the early days as a writer.'