28. Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988)

“I got very tired of the fact that indie record labels sell to very specific audiences,” David Lowery, frontman of Camper Van Beethoven, told the Orlando Sentinel as his band toured in support of their major label debut, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. “There are all these kids who boast, ‘Well, we go to the alternative record stores.’ A lot of these people are seriously into the music. The rest of them claim they’re into the music, but they say they don’t like bands because, well, they’re no longer cool or too many people like them or they’ve sold out. It doesn’t have anything to do with the music.”

The bustling band that formed in Redlands, California — and was then based more or less in Santa Cruz — had a stronger claim to indie cred that most of their contemporaries. To that point, all of their recordings had been released on their own label, Pitch-A-Tent Records, though a few of them were given an extra push in the marketplace under an agreement with the distribution arm of Rough Trade Records. They developed an ever-growing fan base without compromising one iota of the esoteric aesthetic they carried with them from the jump.

None of those outsider attributes meant that Camper Van Beethoven were content with scuffling along in obscurity. They understood that the second syllable in showbiz stood for business, and they wanted to make a living at their art. Arena tours weren’t a necessity, but getting music they made into as many ears as possible was a clear shared goal among the members. That desire undoubtedly informed the decision to sign a major label deal with Virgin Records right in the heart of the boom years of college radio titans getting scooped up by corporate entities. Whatever grumbling the pact might have inspired among more judgmental scene observers, the guys in the band understand the opportunity of that moment.

“We had been dealing with a pretty insular scene, I think” observed bassist Victor Krummenacher at the time. “We’ll see what happens. This is an attempt at moving outwards and maintaining our credibility. There are people who manage to do it, and I think we’ll give it a pretty good go.”

Virgin execs thought they saw an opportunity, too. Camper Van Beethoven’s 1986 self-titled LP had done well enough on the left end of the dial to convince Virgin that the group had a shot at crossover success, and they thought they had the perfect partner to make that happen. For Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, Camper Van Beethoven went into the studio with producer Dennis Herring, who served the same role on the first two albums from Timbuk 3, a similarly wry and offbeat act that had transcended an air of novelty to score a major hit and earn critical plaudits. With a recording budget increased at least tenfold from that of their earlier albums and a sympathetic producer who nonetheless coaxed them into being more diligent and exacting in the studio, Camper Van Beethoven hit the sweet spot for a major label debut, remaining true to themselves while simultaneously making the leap in quality afforded by having more time and resources at their disposal.

The songs on Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart are uniformly rich and marvelously freewheeling. The group basically lays out their thesis across the first three cuts: the flinty college rock of “Eye of Fatima (Part One),” the gypsy-tinged instrumental “Eye of Fatima (Part Two),” and a convincingly traditional and yet fiercely modern take on the traditional lament “O Death.” The band’s material is vibrantly alive with unique instrumentation and a general sense that there are no limits to what styles might be roped into a basic pop song structure. There’s a similarly freewheeling style to the topics they address in the lyrics. The zingy “My Path Belated” tells the tale of a family contending with werewolves among them (“Mother’s plucking eyebrows, seem to grow while she is fast asleep/ There are explanations/ That seem to matter less and less each passing day”) and the raucous “Turquoise Jewelry” throws some jabs at performative hippies (“Come down from your treehouse condominium/ Stop driving around in that station wagon with the wood on the side/ Take off that jumpsuit, you look like Grace Slick”).

Because Camper Van Beethoven ranged widely, they were sometimes difficult to pin down by a music press that craved reductive labels to keep word counts tight. That element of their approach combined with the sense of humor that poked through on many songs sometimes led to characterizations of the band as a bunch of weirdos. They themselves thought that what they were doing was right in line with a whole slew of predecessors.

“A lot of people think we’re not a serious rock ‘n’ roll band, but pop music in general has always taken a lot elements and made new things,” lead guitarist Greg Lisher told The Atlanta Constitution. “That’s what the Beatles and led Zeppelin and Kaleidoscope and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention did, and that’s the whole point of what we’re doing.”

Maybe “Tania” (inspired by Patty Hearst, whose fame and infamy also gives the album its title) sounds like an Eastern European jig played by smart alecks and the tuba-plumped “Change Your Mind” similarly carries the mystery of an ancient folk tune from an imaginary nation-state. Just as often, Camper Van Beethoven traffics in tones that have long been part of the syntax of rock ‘n’ roll; they simply do so with a little more panache. “One of These Days” is lilting folk rock, “Never Go Back” is twangy psychedelia, and “Devil Song” manages to be slinky and bouncy at once, which is basically the Camper Van Beethoven super power. None of it is particularly, jarring and all of it is grand.

Moving along the baton of the preceding paragraph’s last word, I think it’s telling that the album closes with the defiantly optimistic “Life Is Grand”: “And life is grand/ And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor/ With those of you who have appointed yourselves/ To expect us to say something darker.” Camper Van Beethoven knew they would be slagged by some for their openness — eagerness, really — to strike out from the small-scale, hardscrabble place where they toiled. They were determined to stand up to that criticism and insist they were meeting the situation on their own terms. Mirroring the discoveries of many acts before and after them, Camper Van Beethoven soon found that there will major pitfalls for an act of middling popularity on a major label. In the moment, though, they believed they were bound for better things.

27. The J. Geils Band, Freeze-Frame (1981)

The J. Geils band were finally out of the hole. The Boston rockers spent most of their career operating in significant debt, largely the result of an onerous contract with Atlantic Records, the label that released their first seven studio albums. Recording the albums they were obligated to deliver incurred costs that they tried to recoup through relentless touring, efforts that were mostly unsuccessful. At their most dire point, in the middle of the nineteen-seventies, the band estimated they were collectively about a half a million dollars in debt.

The band’s financial woes started to turn around when they were finally freed from Atlantic and signed to EMI, a far more supportive major label. Their first album in their new corporate home, Sanctuary, was a solid hit, and its follow-up, Love Stinks, proved to be even more of a commercial bonanza. Without the smothering burden of dollars owed prodding them to finish quickly, the J. Geils Band spent nearly a year in the studio recording their next album, which they dubbed Freeze-Frame. Like its immediate predecessor, the album was produced by keyboardist Seth Justman. He was the driving force behind the adoption of synthesizers on Love Stinks, and the unprecedented mainstream success they enjoyed only empowered him to integrate more of the instrument, as well as other slick studio effects. More than a plain attempt to capitalize of the currents of pop music, the tactic was positioned as an artistically responsible means of remaining relevant.

“With all that new energy in rock, a lot of the top bands began to seem embarrassing,” noted lead singer Peter Wolf. “Here they were touring around the country in their sloppy t-shirts, making music that was prefabricated and comfortable, not having much to say that wasn’t filler. It was really evident to the J. Geils Band at that point that we had to continue to grow, that if there was any music out there that could inspire us, we were going to have to search for it.”

By the evidence pressed into the record, what the J. Geils Band found in their hunt was new wave music. Much of the album strays from the group’s well-established bar band roots. The fervent, electrified “Rage in the Cage” and pulsing, shout-along title cut wouldn’t be mistaken for Gary Numan or Blondie, but they do sound like the product of an old-time rock ‘n’ roll band taking notes when listening to the records of the up-and-comers. “Insane, Insane Again” even comes across like the J. Geils Band version of agitated art rock in the mode of Devo. The funky “Flamethrower” almost sounds like something Ray Parker Jr. might have rushed out to have a close-enough-soundalike follow-up to the Ghostbusters theme song. There are other instances that hew more to how the J. Geils Band operated previously — tepid ballad “Angel in Blue” and the bluesy, doo wop–flavored “Piss on the Wall” (which has hideously sophomoric lyrics such as “Some folks say the world ain’t what is is/ All I know is I just got to take a whiz”), but the album mostly finds the group in a state of reinvention.

The pinnacle of their approach is heard on “Centerfold,” an incessantly catchy song about being startled to come across a photo of an old school crush in a dirty magazine. Released as the album’s lead single, it was a smash, topping the Billboard chart for six weeks. It was the track that changed absolutely everything for the band, the one that would remain in regular rotation on all manner of retro-inclined radio stations for as long as transmitter towers stood. The album hit the same peak on the equivalent Billboard chart. It was head-spinning success for the band, still comprised of the same six dudes who were on their 1970 self-titled debut.

“Success is like the weather,” Wolf told The Cincinnati Enquirer when the band was still riding the crest of Freeze-Frame. “It comes and it goes. It makes some things easier and some things harder. It gives us the opportunity to keep on going. It also gives us a lot more attention. And people start expecting more. But that’s all right. It goes with the territory.”

The brave face presented by Wolf wasn’t an accurate forecast of the band’s fate. They capped off 1982 with the release of a live album and announced intentions of heading into the studio again. Instead, Wolf was at odds with his cohorts about the direction of the band. He left the group to make solo records, and the J. Geils Band released only one more studio album, the poorly received You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd, which largely featured Justman on lead vocals. They formally disbanded in 1985. Their last released recording was the title song for the horror film Fright Night.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.