Cracker & Camper Van Beethoven – Live in 2019

Every January for the last handful of years, Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have toured the Northeast....
Cracker

Cracker

Every January for the last handful of years, Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have toured the Northeast (after playing their native California the month/year before). Sharing singer/guitarist David Lowery (QRO interview), the nineties and eighties (respectively) alternative acts give something to go to in the winter that starts each year. In New York, they play relatively more upscale places in Manhattan, as befits their older crowds, often new spots like B.B. King’s (QRO venue review) two years ago (QRO live review), Stage 48 (QRO venue review) in 2013, and particularly Highline Ballroom (QRO venue review) going all the way back to 2010 (QRO live review). They’ve been doing it long enough to soon outlive their first spot, as Highline closes next month. For 2019 – Sunday, January 20th, to be exact – they catered at Sony Hall.

First things first, it was freezing outside. Not, ‘Oh, it’s cold,’ but the kind of wind that could both freeze you and knock you over. Lowery joked at the start of Camper’s set that friends of theirs at Sony Hall from Winnipeg (that’s Canada, and well up the Great White North) said it was cold. The wind had thankfully died down a bit by the time the evening ended, but that was only after waiting on the extremely long coat check line that went down Sony Hall’s stairs.

For the actual stage at Sony Hall (QRO venue review) is down two flights, past the coat check. Also, this night it was a seated space. There are tables and chairs installed on the VIP sides, but even the central stage floor had tables & chairs set up for this evening. While these bands aren’t foreign to playing seated spaces (QRO live review of Cracker at seated space last summer), and the audience was old enough to enjoy a good sit, it was still kind of odd, particularly as most seats were perpendicular to the stage, meaning sitting sideways or turning one’s head the whole night. Moreover, seated spaces quiet a crowd, and take away the natural ebb-and-flow one can experience at a concert, going up close for your favorites, heading back to the bar for the stuff that you don’t know.

[note: your correspondent also had a hell of time getting his drinks, always a key issue. It was waitress service, and perhaps the new space didn’t have assigned tables, but he had to request from multiple servers multiple times (other attendees, maybe not as persnickety as your correspondent, did seem to enjoy their service). Prices there aren’t cheap – there’s a very extensive wine list that points that out, and gratuity is automatically included on the bill. Plus your correspondent never got his photo pass, thus the photos are only from his seat]

Camper Van Beethoven

Maybe it was the cold Northeast weather that led Camper to open their set with “Northern California Girls” off of their latest, La Costa Perdida (QRO review), to warm things up before their usual opener, classic Status Quo cover and Key Lime Pie opener “Pictures of Matchstick Men”. As Camper had basically broken up between “Pictures”’s Key in 1989 and 2004’s New Roman Times, there is a distinct break between ‘the old stuff’ and ‘the new stuff.’ After “Girls”, the group went into their classics such as the rambling “Tania” and both parts of “Eyes of Fatima” (all of which, with “Girls”, were heavy on violinist/guitarist/keyboardist Jonathan Segel – QRO interview), the beautiful “All Her Favorite Fruit” (where Segel shifted from playing violin to keys mid-song, holding his violin between his “chin and shoulder,” like the woman in that song, albeit during Lowery’s line about “negroes” in the “colonies”), and charming “Good Guys & Bad Guys” (with a tropical segue, maybe also in response to the weather).

The seated nature of the place stood out for “Sad Lover’s Waltz”, but it’s not like Sony Hall needed a bowling alley for hilarious favorite “Take the Skinheads Bowling” (of course a guy with a beer got up for that one). Costa closed things out with “Summer Days” and “Too High For the Love-In”, but in between was their updated old “S.P. 37957 Medley”, called a “rock opera” because they were just off Broadway (Sony Hall is literally on the same block as Hamilton – and the Church of Scientology…), which included Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” & “Dazed and Confused”, plus klezmer classic “Hava Nagila”, which had the crowd clapping along like it was a bar mitzvah (no seated people in the air, though…).

Cracker

After an intermission where the stage was rearranged and the line for the men’s room was much longer than that for the women’s, Cracker came on. Lowery’s alt-rock hit after Camper, up there it also shared drummer CoCo Owens, who has long played in both, but also Segel on keys (taking the role usually held for the NYC show by Kenny Margolis). Unlike Camper’s set, which started & ended with new material and had old in between, it was old material at the get-go. The group opened with classics like Gentleman’s Blues’ “Been Around the World”, “Seven Days”, and “The Good Life”, plus Cracker’s great anti-hero “Mr. Wrong”, not to mention hit single way back when, Kerosene Hat’s “Get Off This”.

While Cracker never went on a decade-plus hiatus, their twentieth century material is still also their most-loved. Indeed, 2014 autobiographical rural Berkeley to Bakersfield (QRO review) songs such as “King of Bakersfield”, “Almond Grove”, and guitarist Johnny Hickman’s (QRO interview) “California Country Boy” seemed almost as much for the band than the crowd, but that’s always the way with newer pieces. Of course, there were lots of shouts for “Johnny!”, even when he wasn’t singing, as he’s an expert at playing to the crowd. What was notable were all the shouts for pedal guitar player Matt “Pistol” Stoessel, despite being in the back.

The older hits did return in Kerosene’s “Low” and Cracker’s “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”, plus some killer solos in an extended version of Forever’s “One Fine Day”. But for the encore return, Cracker returned to Berkeley with “El Commandante” (a wandering, wry piece perhaps more fitting to Camper Van Beethoven) and the catchy “Beautiful”.

As the crowd headed out in to the cold of the extra weekend night, thanks to federal holiday Martin Luther King Jr. Day falling late this year (his actual birthday was five days earlier), any one of a whole host of Cracker & Camper songs were stuck in their greying heads.

Camper Van Beethoven

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