Camper Van Beethoven Are Possibly the Only Band to Have Made Corn Sound Seductive

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Camper Van Beethoven Are Possibly the Only Band to Have Made Corn Sound Seductive

David Lowery looks back at the beautiful 'All Her Favourite Fruit' from the band's 1989 album 'Key Lime Pie'.

And I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
And I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay
She serves him mashed potatoes
And she serves him peppered steak, with corn
Pulls her dress up over her head
Lets it fall to the floor
– "All Her Favourite Fruit", Camper Van Beethoven (1989)

In the mid 80s Camper Van Beethoven were largely known as "the skinhead bowling band", a reference to "Take the Skinheads Bowling", the 1985 college radio hit that appeared on their debut LP Telephone Free Landslide Victory.

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The Santa Cruz, California band's first three independent records were released within 18-months and with songs such as "ZZ-Top Goes To Egypt", "The History Of Utah" and "Opi Rides Again - Club Med Sucks", were popular on college radio charts for quirky lyrics and instrumentals featuring ska-beats and Eastern European, Mexican or Spaghetti-Western influences.

But CBV were more than the Dead Milkmen with a string section, and after signing to Virgin they released two more mature albums and enjoyed some mainstream chart success with a cover of Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" from their 1989 album Key Lime Pie.

But the album standout is "All Her Favourite Fruit", a stunningly beautiful song based on Roger Mexico, a character from Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. Lengthy, complex and featuring a large cast of characters, the book's narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military.

Written by Lowery, bassist Victor Krummenacher, guitarist Greg Lisher, and drummer Chris Peterson, "All Her Favourite Fruit", builds around a slow march that rises with lush string arrangements and Lowery's yearning voice. Full of sexual tension, the lyrics paint the ill fated love story between Mexico and Jessica Swanlake and reference tropical fruit and rising heat.

Key Lime Pie was to be band's last album. Lowery later formed Cracker and several other members played in Monks of Doom. Beginning in 1999, the former members reunited and made several new records. The band continues to play shows.

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Noisey: The lyrics do a great job in conveying sexual tension. Certainly the best that reference corn! Can you remember writing them?  
David Lowery: My recollection is that the first two lines are loosely paraphrased from the book. But the rest is just something I came up with. It's funny you ask specifically about the "corn" line, because I thought a lot about this. It's such an awkward word to sing, but it somehow made everything else that came before it more natural. Also since it's loosely based on the two English characters in the 1940s, they wouldn't actually have said "corn." They would have said "maize" or "Indian Corn." But that would have really been too much.

In a 1990 interview you said that the song came from a line that popped into your head, "and does he ever whisper in her ear all her favorite fruit?" How did it go from this to being about the character Roger Mexico and his love interest in Gravity's Rainbow?
I imagined this to be a direct quote from the book. In fact I'm not sure it isn't but a quick Google Books search of the phrase or anything similar doesn't come up with anything. Although there are large number of other segments that reference fruit, as it was in short supply in wartime.

Can you remember first reading Pynchon's book?
I was 19 and working in the pressroom or press plant (the actual machine that does the printing) at a newspaper. There was this odd job I was assigned that required me to come back two hours after my normal shift. Sometimes I stayed and read in the storage room surrounded by these 800 pound rolls of newsprint. One of the executives noticed me in this room one day reading Kafka's The Trial. He said, "You know that book is considered funny by native German speakers." A few months later he walked up to me, abruptly pulled the book out of my hands and looked at the cover."Gravity's Rainbow?!! I don't know why you do this to yourself."

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You studied mathematics but you were also interested in literature. Roger Mexico was also a mathematician. Was this a reason you were interested in the story?
Yes, I completely related to Roger Mexico and I was going through a similar patch in my life where I was slowly losing my long time girlfriend. The weird thing about it, is that I related to myself still more as a mathematician. In 1988 I had only been a pro musician for two years and through much of that time I would still work odd jobs at the farm I worked at after college. Actually farm sounds too rustic, it was really more of a packaging and distribution facility. I was always assuming things were about to end for my music career.

The imagery flits between the exotic and mundane. "And we are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof" is amazing lyric in an amazing song. Do you have a favourite lyric or part of the song? 
Well that would be one of my favorites. But I feel that no history of the song should ignore the use of the word "negro" in the line, "And negroes blink their eyes, they sink into siesta." This was subject of a lot of discussion between our manager at the time. In Gravity's Rainbow the word is used repeatedly. It was in common usage and regarded as polite by many at the time. Further, the southern destination the narrator is imagining was always in my mind Belize. If you are not aware Belize has a long history as a British colony. The official language is English but because of the repeated waves of migration there are also a lot of Spanish words in common usage.

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On a trip to Mexico in the 1980s I went to Belize thinking that I'd be able to visit a cousin who was at the British military base there. I was unsuccessful but the strange British/Caribbean/Spanish polyculture made an impression on me. The local English was strange and stilted and they referred to certain areas as "Negro" towns or settlements. I imagine in the song the narrator is dreaming of a foreign service posting here on the coast. The people in siesta are the descendants of the mahogany plantation slaves, the free Kriol or perhaps the Garifuna people who had fled to Belize from Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. In the end the historical nerdiness of the reference won out of considerations that people would misunderstand the usage.

I've broken down two important parts that make the song so powerful. At two-minutes when the register of your voice rises with "And I'd like to take her there rather than this train". Then around the three-minute mark when the string section really kicks in. Were they used deliberately to raise tension? 
Well, I can't claim that octave or "fifth lift" in the third verse as my own. I think that is a part of the stylistic musical commons of rock and pop music. It's odd only because CVB didn't usually pander to those conventions. But in this case it works really well. The whole song is masterfully produced by Dennis Herring. We had quite extensive pre-production rehearsals and Dennis really got down in the weeds on this track, especially working on the dynamics of the drums. Notice before the strings kick in, to set the tension he and Chrispy figured out how to pull the drums backs into something a business management theorist might call "minimum viable drum part."

So it's like the beat is tightly coiled and comes unwound once the strings kick in. There are also the subtle organ and backing vocals that are straight classical countermelody under the strings. These are elements I never imagined in the raw songwriting, but are production and arrangement elements that came from the band and Dennis Herring. I'd like to claim them but I had little to do with this.

The book is regarded by many as the postmodern novel and one that helped redefine the novel. But the song is very sensual in the way that it builds. The kitchen and the cooking evoke a sexual tension. Was this deliberate?
A lot of what I might say here would probably be subject to the narrative fallacy, a false narrative that makes logical sense when looking backward at events, but is completely made up. But, this is certainly clear. The main character is in the cold wet and non-tropical UK, and he is imagining himself with her only in tropical warm places. So the general vector is from cold and dark, to sunny warm and tropical; it's from yearning and loneliness to reunion and love;  and a physical movement from latitudes in the 50s to latitudes in 20s or teens. Gravity's Rainbow is filled with cooking and food references. I think that probably had more of an effect than anything on the references to food and cooking.