CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN, “TAKE THE SKINHEADS BOWLING”

Welcome to The Minute of Spin, a bite-sized music segment in which we explore a single song that came to define an entire band. Unfortunately, we can't afford the rights to the songs we spotlight, so you won't actually hear the song. But you're welcome to listen to it here.

Sometimes, a band is so original it takes the world years to catch up.  And when said band signs with a major label, it doesn’t necessarily mean success.  Often, a band in its earliest form is a band at its most pure, most effective.  You could make this case and then some for Camper Van Beethoven, a band so out there, so fascinating, they were alternative before there even was an alternative.

CVB started out in Redlands, California, in 1983, the product of several merged garage bands, and eventually migrated to Santa Cruz, where they put out their first album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory.  A five-piece at this point, including bassist/vocalist David Lowery, guitarist Chris Molla, bassist Victor Krummenacher, drummer Anthony Guest, and violinist Jonathan Segel, CVB’s first outing was a loose collection of songs that celebrated as much as it sent up California life.  Ska and Eastern European-style melodies interspersed with songs so pointless you couldn’t help but laugh, like “Where the Hell is Bill,” “The Day that Lassie Went to the Moon,” and the song that became their trademark, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.”

So:  why take the skinheads bowling?  The song never answers that, but it does provide some howlingly bizarre lyrics, like “There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything,” and “I had a dream – it was about nothing.”  It’s the not caring that makes it work, the not knowing why the skinheads have to go bowling – or even if they’d want to go bowling.  The music’s so propulsive, so upbeat, there’s no time to ponder such questions.  Just take them, dammit. 

Camper Van Beethoven released two more critically acclaimed records on their Pitch-a-Tent label before moving to Virgin for two more, then disbanded.  Lowery formed the band Cracker and had major hits with the songs “Low” and “Euro-trash Girl” before reuniting CVB in 1999.  Undaunted by time, and still very much in pioneer mode, the band covered the entire album of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and released a record of all-new material in 2004.  Meanwhile, Take the Skinheads Bowling was covered by Teenage Fanclub, and figured prominently in the 2002 film Bowling for Columbine.