By Matt Holland; Actor/Screenwriter
I came of age in the 1980s. I entered high
school at the dawn of that much-maligned decade and graduated from university
before the sun set on it. In the fall of 1989 Camper Van Beethoven released
their fifth album, Key Lime Pie, a
tight, tart, bittersweet musical confection that, together with a shocking,
shattering episode, brought the curtain down on that formative decade for me.
I’ll tell you how, but first, a little context…
I grew up in a house without music. Our
family did have an old stereo from the 1950s; the kind that was a piece of
furniture, but it was always tuned to the radio, and that was invariably a news
station. My father didn’t appreciate music at all; books were his thing. My mother
had a few albums, which she never played, the most rock’n’roll of which were Christmas with Elvis and Neil Diamond’s Moods. My older sister and our female
cousins listened to disco, but only at birthday parties. So when I began to
develop an interest in music at around age ten or so, I was on my own. I wisely
aligned myself with older acquaintances who knew what passed for cool back
then. I entered the requisite
Beatles-Stones-Zeppelin-Floyd-Hendrix-Who-Kinks-Bowie cycle, with Prog (Yes,
Rush) and early cock rock (Aerosmith, T. Rex) phases thrown in for good
measure. By the time I started high school, my tastes were much in line with
other boys my age: conventional, but with occasional creative flourishes to
keep it interesting.
And then I attended my first-ever concert
in December of 1979, a cyber-iffic, otherworldly performance by Gary Numan,
zipping around the stage in a one-man electric car, blasted by strobes and
shrouded in the dense fog of dry ice. At the time, he had a number one hit, but
he also unleashed his eerie, tense, synth-epic Tubeway Army back-catalog on my
impressionable ears that night. It rocked, but in a peculiarly futuristic way.
It was also around that time that I first heard punk and heavy metal together,
on a mix tape blaring out of a boom box during basketball practice. As a good
Catholic boy, I was taught to fear even the name of those sub-genres: violent,
disgusting disobedience on the one hand; violent, disgusting blasphemy on the
other. But I was fortunate enough to have that energy, that anger, that
undeniable musical power bore through my skull and nestle in my brain stem,
where presumably tastes are born, formed and housed. And, while I wasn’t prepared to jettison all
that came before in my musical education, I was definitely moving forward,
making room for new sounds and genres while continuing to build on the
old-school bedrock.
Given that I was bereft of music in my
childhood, I think it only made sense that in my adolescent years I went a
little overboard in terms of studying, learning about, collecting and absorbing
all kinds of music. To my parents’ dismay, the zeal and passion I had for music
never carried over into, say, physics class, but they were tolerant, patient,
and even a little accommodating. I pestered them to buy a second-hand but much
more modern stereo, which they did, and they, in turn, pestered me to use the
headphones that came with it. I trolled the second-hand record shops (there
were plenty back then) for all the vinyl my allowance could afford. I would
glean nuggets from those early high-school dances where my galvanized ears
picked out The Clash, Elvis Costello, Grandmaster Flash, Soul Sonic Force and
other non-sequiturs from among the deadening mix of disco anthems and rock
ballads. I had friends with expanding tastes as well: one high-school buddy
introduced me to reggae, dancehall and dub, while another would go to Europe every summer and come back with early-Industrial,
Goth and Krautrock records to share.
By graduation year, I was deejaying school
dances, which led to college radio, where I found myself plundering an actual
record library. It was there that I first became aware of Camper Van Beethoven,
as many did, through their wiseass slacker anthem, Take The Skinheads Bowling, a jangly, folk-tinged track about
licking knees and sleeping next to plastic that a lot of critics dismiss as an
“alternative novelty song,” but which deftly defines the early Camper sound:
eclectic irreverence. My identification with CVB was immediate: college guys
who listened to and loved a lot of different kinds of music, yet were able to
repurpose those influences and combine them with hilariously sardonic,
political, social and nonsensical lyrics to create something wholly original,
sometimes goofy and entirely fun. They also performed inspired covers of Pink
Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Sonic Youth and Ringo Starr songs.
Coincidentally, the mid to late ‘80s was
when my musical appetites were reaching their zenith. I had started acting in
high school plays and by college had moved on to appearing in student films.
After performing in one particularly arty-obtuse flick, I received payment from
the music-geek filmmakers in the form of six 90-minute cassettes filled with
obscure British pub rock, punk and post-punk; ska and reggae from the ‘60s and
‘70s; Appalachian folk and country from the 40s and 50s; early electronica; and
Bernard Herrmann film scores. I was the proverbial pig in slop as I waded
through the sounds, but something was beginning to dawn on me: my appetite for
music could easily outstrip both my bank account and my capacity to process all
of it if I didn’t plant a stake somewhere. After all, I had other interests:
acting, writing, filmmaking, women (not necessarily in that order). While I
can’t claim to have imposed a moratorium on music collecting, I did slow down
significantly in my acquisitions at that time.
In 1988, I had a part-time job and was
saving money to move out of my parents’ house. But Camper Van Beethoven
released their major label debut, Our
Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, that same year so I decided to splurge at
Phantasmagoria (ask your parents) and pick up a vinyl copy, new. I put it on
and, though I made every effort to appreciate it as the masterful album it is,
I was disappointed. It was well-crafted, clever, bouncy, unusual, with
multifarious influences and kick-ass instrumentals– quintessential CVB - but it
didn’t grab me. When Key Lime Pie
came out the following year, I couldn’t be bothered. Yet somehow (I was so
indifferent I really do forget how) a copy on cassette made its way into my hot
little hands.
Surprisingly, from the moment the record
first rolled across the tape heads and blared out the speakers, I was a goner.
At the time, I think I felt like these sounds were what I’d been waiting to
hear for the past ten years. There was an unsettled quality to the record; its
songs were rife with tension and punctuated by pregnant nanosecond pauses that
emphasized space, and the lack thereof. That absence, those moments in between
sounds or words or images are what make works of art particularly compelling to
me, because the audience becomes more active in their consuming. Their brains
do more than let the work wash passively over them, they spark into action,
conjuring questions, demanding answers, growing a little unsettled in their own
right.
Camper Van Beethoven’s hybrid approach was
perfected on Key Lime Pie; the
influences were seamlessly integrated into what appeared on first blush to be
straightforward but edgy rock and roll, but which after repeated play revealed
itself to be angry, quirky, incisive, beautifully crafted mini-epics that told
stories piecemeal and somehow managed to sound monumental and claustrophobic at
the same time. After the plucky, middle-European sounding Opening Theme lulls
you into thinking another playful CVB record is about to unfold, the tense,
angular riffs of Jack Ruby pummel your senses, dragging you into the chaotic
scrum in front of the Dallas police headquarters on the morning of November 24th,
1963. Lead singer/guitarist David Lowery’s vocal attack is confident, sardonic,
slightly menacing, and his words splice together a skewed, wrenching character
portrait of an ignominious American historical figure. It sets the tone
perfectly for what’s about to follow: Camper Van Beethoven’s scathing, morbid,
pissed off take on Americana.
This sat particularly well with me at the time.
My first trip to the U.S. in the early ‘80s yielded my first broken
heart when I was invited to join my girlfriend and her vacationing family at a
cottage in coastal Maine.
Unbeknownst to me or her folks, she had fallen for a lifeguard in the two weeks
we’d been apart, but decided it would be okay to have me come down for a long
weekend anyway (for a proper face-to-face breakup, I guess. Thanks, baby.).
That and 8 years of Ronald Reagan’s Republican rule (and more to come from
George H.W. Bush) had given me seriously ambivalent feelings about our
neighbours to the south and their dominating (domineering?) culture. So, when the
third track, Sweethearts, chimes in with its sweet country melody and nostalgic
lyric, you’re anticipating a comedown, which pays off with a closing dig at
Reagan and images of destruction of a few of the tropes of American capitalism,
commerce and military might. They manage to both celebrate and skewer in the
same lilting tune. That approach continues in When I Win The Lottery’s
dirge-like cadence, which complements the dark humour and threatening imagery
of the lyrics perfectly.
After the jaunty, ska-inflected Borderline,
the remaining tracks cast such a saturnine pall that I tend to hear them as a
medley. “I’m alternating, between heavy
and light, between meaning and nonsense, and having a drink.” Lowery
intones on ‘The Light From A Cake,’ and the sentiment captures his band, who
were experiencing personnel problems and were, in retrospect, on the slow road
to a bad breakup by the time Key Lime Pie
was released. Heaviness is in the air, literally and sonically, in June, All
Her Favorite Fruit, Flowers, The Humid Press Of Days and (obviously) Come On
Darkness. The ‘80s were over, the band had grown up, and so had I. It had been
a blast, but it was time. Responsibility, solitude, survival, failure,
mortality and a whole host of other adult concerns were staring us in the face.
And when society hammered home the point in one tragic and horrific outburst, I
found new comfort in CVB’s stark, cynical world.
On December 6th, 1989, 14 women
were massacred at the University
of Montreal’s École
Polytechnique, and for a while afterwards I didn’t know where to put myself.
Most of the victims were my age, and were studying at an academic institution
similar to one I’d recently graduated from. I had been to concerts many times
at their university’s auditorium, a few buildings over from the slaughter. I
was glued to the TV news that evening: dumbstruck, emotional, impotent,
devastated. It wasn’t fun anymore; it didn’t feel safe. I couldn’t listen to
any music for days. Come On Darkness indeed.
When I celebrated Christmas a few weeks
later with my family, it felt lacklustre, like the beginning of the end of
something. I could no longer look forward to it like a child does. The
crassness of the commercialism and my own impecuniousness were wearing on me.
Romance was at a standstill too: I had recently begun seeing a girl again with
whom I’d broken up 3 or 4 times before, and I walked in on her making out with
some other guy at a New Year’s party. Not long afterwards, some female friends
of mine, who’d been out of town for the holidays, returned and invited me and a
few others over for drinks at their St-Urban street flat. I can’t recall if we
talked about what had happened at the U of M that night or not, but as the
evening wore on and we were in our cups, we pushed aside the furniture in the
living room, cranked up the stereo and danced. CVB’s (I Was Born In A)
Laundromat came on and I lost complete control for 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
I haven’t been over Laundromat yet; I was
saving it because, for my money, it is the standout track of this exceptional
album. A driving, insistent, incessant, knock-you-on-your-ass riff, running for
life from a pulverizing drum attack and being wailed over with sharp solo
bursts from a guitar in obvious pain. The lyrics are a typical clear/obscure
CVB pastiche: in this case, part first-person narrative, part character sketch,
part blue-collar imagery and sense of oppression. But the protagonist of the
song is trapped by dead-end circumstances, in fact he was born into them, and
feels like he’s going nowhere. His plea for succor is simple, universal: “we
all want some release.” Yet the stress persists until the guitar phrase opens
wide, allowing the “queen of the trailer
park” to glide in momentarily on ethereal, wordless backing vocals. And
then that scary riff, which sounds like it had been alternately tumbling down
and scrambling back up a ravine, returns with a vengeance, and we’re off again
with sweaty abandon. My feet never touched the floor as I careened back and
forth across the room, slamming into a buddy of mine over and over as we
drunkenly shouted “Just give me some tension release!”
The geekiness of that scene
notwithstanding, it felt incredibly cathartic to me. The decade had finally
turned, and I was back, in more-or-less recognizable form; but I felt changed,
matured. It’s not that I wasn’t having fun anymore, but I began to look at it
differently. I was unprotected by academic institutions, but I didn’t feel
vulnerable. I was pissed off about how my last relationship ended, but I didn’t
feel despondent about my prospects for meeting someone new. I had found some
peace with the polarities of life, and found balance between what I wanted and
what I could reasonably attain. Like the emotionally-involving,
musically-bracing songs on Key Lime Pie,
I felt like I had terrific recourse going forward. Music was comfort, sure, but
also an armament of sorts; a way of working out problems and feelings, a small
step to surmount obstacles, like it had been for the composers, I would imagine.
A month or so after that night, I went to
see Camper Van Beethoven in concert at a place called Café Campus, which,
fittingly, was the U of M student watering hole, a couple of blocks from the
École Polytechnique. It was a loud, boisterous, eclectic blast of an evening
and the Campers looked like they were having fun too. You couldn’t tell they
were on the verge of breaking up the band. But if performing was their “tension
release,” then, in its absence, they must’ve known there’d just be tension. I’m grateful that they hung on long enough to
play before the flushed, appreciative audience that night, and that their
tenacity in the face of internal strife and outward disillusionment engendered
such a beautiful, terrible, unforgettable last musical salvo in Key Lime Pie.
Matt Holland - August 2010
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Matt Holland is an actor, screenwriter and story
editor from Montreal.
Throughout his career, he has appeared in many films,
plays, television shows and commercials.
Credits include: Secret Window,
The Day After Tomorrow, The Terminal, I’m Not There, Surviving My Mother, Peepers, Piché: Entre Ciel et Terre and
Funkytown. He has lent his voice to such animated
series’ and features as Arthur, Creep School, Tripping The Rift, Pinocchio
3000, What’s with Andy?, and
video games such as Splinter Cell:
Conviction, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry Instincts and Deus Ex 3. His writing credits include short films: Drop Off, Whistleblowers
Anonymous; episodic television : Moose
TV; and feature film : Gone
Dark (a.k.a The Limit). Matt has also worked extensively as a development
executive, serving as a television content analyst for Telefilm Canada
and, more recently, as a manager of development and production for the CTV
network.
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