CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
CVB, with Greg in the middle
Greg Lisher interview by John Wisniewski
(June 2023)
The unlikely story of a bunch of would-be ethno-musicologist jokesters gigging among the early '80's SoCal hardcore punk scene is still kind of strange to recollect. Camper Van Beethoven (singer/guitarist David Lowery, bassist Victor Krummenacher, violinist Jonathan Segal, pedal steel player Chris Molla) was an anomaly yet found their place among the skinheads, even making a name for themselves with a song about bowling with them, not to mention covering punk songs in their own sardonic way. After their first album, guitarist Greg Lisher joined their ranks and stayed among them up to their signing to Virgin Records and break-up in 1990 and then becoming a part of their subsequent reunions starting in '99 and continuing on for the last few decades. Here, we hear his story and their story.
PSF: What kind of music were you listening to before you were in any bands?
GL: When I was a lot younger, mostly a lot of hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc. but by the early '80's a lot of English bands like XTC, Japan, The Cure, Gang of Four, The Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, King Crimson.
PSF: Which groups did you play with pre-Camper?
GL: I was only in one other band before I joined camper called the Stick People. We were a four piece band with a saxophone player and a girl drummer who sang lead vocals. We never had the opportunity to record.
PSF: What did you think of Camper when you first heard them (before you
joined them)?
GL: David Lowery had invited me to come up and see them open for the band Rank and File at UCSC but I had unfortunately gotten there late and missed their set so I had actually never seen them play before I joined the band.
PSF: How did you come to join Camper? Did you find it easy or hard to fit
in with the band?
GL: I had met David Lowery at a party my girlfriend had taken me to and he had said to me that he had seen me play guitar and mentioned that Camper had been looking for an additional guitar player and asked me if I was interested.
By that time, I had already been seeing David play bass in a band (with Chris Mola on keyboards) called Box of Laughs which were really good and one of my favorite bands at the time in Santa Cruz.
I never felt like I had a hard time fitting in with the band. At the time, I was pretty musically open minded and was just really into learning as much as I could as a musician. Before I had joined the band, I had been taking music classes at a junior college so I think I just saw this as a another opportunity to learn even more as a musician and as a guitar player.
PSF: How did the band juggle having three guitarists at the time in the band?
GL: Chris Mola was playing a lot of lap steel and pedal steel so he wasn't always playing guitar and there were also many shows we did at that time where Chris Mola wasn't even present and we just played as a five piece.
PSF: What were the crowds like for CVB shows? Did some of the hardcore
crowds not appreciate the humor?
GL: The crowds in the early days were kind of a mix of college kids and people that were into alternative music or kind of like from the outer fringes of the punk scene.
I don't think we ever had a problem with people not appreciating the humor. The crowds were usually there to begin with because they liked the humor.
PSF: What was it like recording the II & III album?
By the time I had joined the band, their first record had already been recorded so this was actually my first time in a recording studio making a record so I remember being quite excited. We recorded the entire record on 8 track reel to reel.
We were constantly playing shows and rehearsing at that time and I remember it being a bit like capturing what we were doing live in the studio.
Some of the record was recorded up in Davis California where they had recorded their first record and then we eventually ended up finding a studio in the Santa Cruz mountains that was closer to where we lived. [That's] where the rest of the record was finished.
PSF: What was different about working on the 3rd/self-titled Camper album?
GL: After II & III was released and we had finished our first national tour, I had temporally quit the band after having some issues with anxiety attacks so I think I'm only on about four songs on that record. Even though I had left, they invited me to come up and play on some of the songs that we had been playing live.
PSF: How did Eugene Chadbourne work with the band?
GL: I don't think I was there when he showed up to record his parts for the third record.
PSF: How did the band come to sign with Virgin? Did the band entertain
other offers and that one was the best?
GL: Yes, I think I remember that we were talking to different labels at that time, (IRS being one of them) but ended up going with Virgin America, thinking that was the best choice.
PSF: Did that change Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart compared to recording the earlier records?
GL: Absolutely! Only in the sense that having a bigger budget gave us the opportunity to go into better studios, work with better engineers, and work with a record producer as well (Dennis Herring).
We were still making the music and records that we wanted to make just on a larger scale.
PSF: Did you find that the Virgin years provided a bigger, different audience?
GL: Absolutely. They were able to kind of put a machine behind us with a team of people people to work radio and promotion so things definitely started to pick up regarding touring and audience attendance at our shows.
PSF: For Key Lime Pie, David said you were the only band member (outside of him) to significantly contribute to the album- why is that, if it's true?
GL: That is true. At that point, Jonathan was out of the band so by default, me and David just ended up spending more time working together and writing. By the time we had made it down to LA and finished up the basics with Chris and Victor, the majority of time working in the studio down there was just me and David doing overdubs with the producer and working with the violin player (Don Lax) we had brought up from Santa Cruz to play on the record.
We never did any shows with Don Lax- he was just used for the record. As we were in the process of finishing up the the record, we started auditioning new violin players to play live shows which is when Morgan Fichter started playing with us.
Once the record was handed to Virgin, they didn't believe there was a single they could promote so they had us go back and record "Pictures of Matchstick Men," which we had been playing at our shows, to add to the record. I think Morgan is the one playing violin on that song.
PSF: Why did CVB break-up after that?
GL: I unfortunately can't really go into detail about how the band broke up. It was just personal differences.
PSF: How did Monks of Doom set out to be different than Camper?
GL: We started the Monks of Doom as an opportunity to try and experiment musically and play different types of music that we felt we couldn't really do in Camper.
PSF: How was Monks of Doom different with and without Chris Molla and with David Immergluck?
GL: That's hard to say as Chris was only in the band for such a short period of time. I don't even think we ever performed a show with him in the band.
I just remember Chris being very schooled in things like classical guitar and just approached things from a very different angle. David was much more of a blues based rock player. Both great players in their own different ways.
PSF: How did your first solo album Handed Down the Wire (2001) come together?
GL: That record was compiled from two different recording sessions I had done at two different studios in the '90's. It was my first time writing songs and singing.
I had already done demos for all of the songs on my four track before I had gone into the studio with everybody. It was kind of my first time writing songs and singing lead vocals so it was fun to be trying something different and trying to find my own musical voice in the process.
PSF: How did CVB reconvene in the early millennium?
GL: I just think David had started throwing around the idea of working with us again and came up with the idea of doing these apothecary shows where me, Victor and Jonathon would go out with Cracker and play Camper songs with Cracker's rhythm section, which eventually led to Camper getting back together again on its own and touring extensively for a couple years before we recorded New Roman Times in 2004.
PSF: Why did you choose to record an instrumental album, Songs from the Imperial Garden (2020)? What were the sessions like?
GL: A few years after the release of my second solo record Trains Change (2019), I had thought about trying something different and was looking for a project to cut my teeth on recording at my house using ProTools and just spending more time learning how to do more things on my own.
I was also interested in trying something different than the singer/songwriter thing and started to thinking about trying to make a record where the focus was just more on the instrumentation itself.
I had sent the demos to David Immergluck and he really liked the material and showed a real interest in the songs and thought what I couldn't do at my house we could do down in L.A. where he was living at the time. He had made a lot of connections with other musicians down there while doing studio work and so we just brought these other musicians in to record things like drums, upright bass, violins, and what not.
We worked at a studio where a friend of David's (Seth Horhan) had been working called Phantom Vox and ended up mixing it there as well.
PSF: What was it like being in Filthy Thieving Bastards?
GL: I knew some of those guys from living in Santa Cruz and they had just asked me to come up to a studio in Oakland and play guitar for their first record. Never ended up playing any live shows with them.
PSF: How often does CVB reconvene? How different is it from its '80's days?
Any plans for a new CVB album?
GL: We're having a bit of a hiatus at the moment as we haven't played a show since January of 2020 so am I hoping at some point we can get together and do some shows but I don't know when that will be. No plans for any record at the moment.
The biggest difference between the '80's and now is that In the '80's we were always rehearsing and always writing constantly as well as touring. Most of what we had been doing recently was just mostly touring and since these days none of us live close to one another, we would just be flying to meet up for the tours.
PSF: What kind of things are you working on now?
GL: I have a new solo record getting ready to come out on the record label Independent Project Records this year.
Around the time that me and David immergluck were finishing up Songs from Imperial Garden in 2012, I had been listening to a lot of electronic music and started experimenting using software to write and compose music. It's part of the reason it took so long for Songs from the Imperial Garden to come out- I just immediately got sidetracked learning new things and started focusing all of my time on this new project. It's very different from anything I've ever done. I wrote the entire record on keyboards using Reason software.
In general, the majority of my time these days is spent playing keyboards. I felt like this project was a good opportunity for me to learn more about modern music production as well. I've really gotten into programming synthesizers and spending time sharpening up my keyboard skills. Compared to Songs from the Imperial Garden, it's a much darker sounding record and much more electronic. In addition to playing all of the keyboards, bass and guitar on the record I'm also working with a drummer as well as a violin player for some string parts I had arranged for the record.
