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You know that marketing term \u201cearly adopter?\u201d Those are the people who bought CD players in 1984. They bought Blu-Ray players before there were any Blu-Ray discs available. And they maybe, just maybe, bought a CD-i player and a DCC player back in the 80s.<\/p>\n
Me, I’m what they call a \u201clate adopter.\u201d I didn’t buy a flat-panel TV until 2012, when my old, late 80s model CRT television bit the dust. And \u2013 even though I worked in a record store back at the dawn of the CD era, I didn’t buy a CD player of my own until 1993.<\/p>\n
Of course, by ’93, vinyl records (then and now my preferred musical media format) were scarce, especially when it came to new releases. So when I wanted new music, my choices were limited to cassettes. And I’ve always disliked storebought cassettes; those things seemed so cheaply made. Clearly the guts of a storebought cassette were not on a quality level equal to a Maxell chrome tape of the day. So occasionally I’d ask friends to make me mixtapes from their CDs. And thanks to a coworker \u2013 this was back in my corporate cube farm days \u2013 I got turned onto some new music beyond what I had heard on (reasonably good) commercial radio.<\/p>\n
The band whose catalog lay at the center of my cassette discoveries was Camper Van Beethoven<\/strong>. I knew of them through their connection to Cracker<\/strong> (David Lowery<\/strong>‘s later\/other band), but I hadn’t heard any of their music elsewhere. Certainly I hadn’t heard CVB on the radio.<\/p>\n By the time I was getting into their music, Camper Van Beethoven were no more (at least for awhile). And while I was fascinated by their early albums \u2013 I found them, especially on 1986’s II & III<\/em> to be a sort of modern rethink on (American band) Kaleidoscope<\/strong>, David Lindley<\/strong>‘s late 60s band \u2013 their final pair of albums were, for me, the most accessible.<\/p>\n Those records \u2013 1988’s Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart<\/em>, and Key Lime Pie<\/em> from the following year \u2013 finally distilled their dizzying mix of influences into a distinctive sound, one that was more than the sum of those influences. While \u201cOne of these Days\u201d is straightforward and commercial-sounding (it would be right at home on a Cracker album), even there the band introduce some off-kilter sonics into the mix. Often as not, where a more conventional band would drop in an electric guitar solo, Camper would instead feature a gypsy-flavored violin solo from Jonathan Segel<\/strong> (no Neil Diamond<\/strong> jokes, please; it’s been done). The band could stomp it out on an instrumental number like \u201cWaka,\u201d with plenty of distorted guitar, but there was still an odd sensibility, a sort of sideways take on world music, that made Camper songs sound like nobody else’s.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/camper_sweetheart.jpg\")
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