The Santa Cruz alt-rock veterans are 25 years strong and coming back to where they started

Camper Van Beethoven started in Santa Cruz. What is it like for you to play here over 20 years later?

It’s great. It’s really funny because strangely Santa Cruz doesn’t change that much so there are members of the audience we recognize from the ‘80s. We once played at Kresge College at UCSC and we saw miniature versions of ourselves, same style and everything. We could look at them and pin-point who looked like who.

You’ve maintained a long career. What are the major themes found in CVB’s sound that you feel still appeal to people today?

Besides the absurd and sort of taking the piss out of people who take themselves too seriously, there are also elements of political satire which are still as applicable today as they were in the ‘80s without having to change the words. Our current work is informed by a lot of the past 25 years that we have been a band, so we appeal to the older audience, but there are always people who are just discovering us.

What was it like to reform the band in 2000 after such a long break?

In the ‘90s we all did a lot of different music on our own outside of Beethoven so we learned a lot as musicians during that time, but when we got back as CVB I remember feeling so comfortable playing because those were the guys that I really learned to play music with.

‘New Roman Times,’ CVB’s first studio album in 15 years has been so well received by critics and fans. Were you surprised you could all still work so well together?

In the last 10 years there has been such an explosion of music downloading and people making songs on Garageband … I didn’t expect our stuff to stand out because there is so much for people to wade through to find the good stuff.

What were you trying to accomplish artistically with ‘New Roman Times?’

It is like a rock opera. At least that was our intention. It seemed so far fetched, but two years later it seems less abstract and more relevant. Prog rock purists would say it was a concept album … It’s more like we are continuing what we started in the ’80s and just picking up where we left off.

Why did you part ways?

It sort of comes down to the fact that we were having a lot of personal differences and Virgin Records wasn’t really helping that. They like to have a frontman and we didn’t want to realize that. When we got back together I think we were just a lot mellower. When we were younger we were still sort of asshole, young men.

What are the biggest differences in working with CVB from your other bands?

Just the way ideas go back and forth between members. The funniest thing is that everybody has clear strengths that they can play on when manufacturing a song, but people always think I am responsible for some ethnic melodic influences.

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