Camper Van Beethoven's Russian-Flavored Ska Tunes

Telephone Free Landslide Victory

Camper Van Beethoven’s brilliant 1985 debut album Telephone Free Landslide Victory contains 9 or 10 sprightly instrumental tunes - purposely faux approximations of ethnic folk music with a ska beat. There’s Tex-Mex/Norteña (Border Ska, the almost instrumental Tina), Islandy Surf (Yanqui Go Home, Opi Rides Again), Eastern European (Balalaika Gap, Skinhead Stomp, Vladivostok, bonus reissue track Atkuda), Middle Eastern (Payed Vacation: Greece) and vaguely Oriental (Mao Reminisces About His Days in Southern China).

After Telephone Free Landslide Victory CVB became a little more song-oriented and/or the instrumentals were more sprawling and psychedelic. However the Camper tunes L’Aguardiente and RNR Uzbekistan are also in this pseudo-ethnic instrumental category.

The best of these types of tunes might be the minor-key polka Balalaika Gap, which could actually pass for a traditional Balkan or Ukranian melody. On their Facebook page, CVB recently shared an inquiry they received about this tune from a college student.

Message: Hi, my name is xxxxxx. My dad is a huge fan and I grew up listening to your music. I am in a college World Music class and I want to write a paper on your song 'Balalaika Gap'. Which member played the Balalaika, and why were you inspired to write this song? Thank you so much for your time!

(violinist Jonathan Segel replies) Hi. I’m sorry to say, nobody played the balalaika. In fact, what was used in its stead was a mandolin. The song itself came from a period of Camper Van Beethoven writing wherein we were purposely trying to make false representations of foreign musics, “ethnographic forgeries” as Holger Czukay called such things in his band Can. Our inspiration was the basic universality of popular culture, where things were heard and then played back from different perspectives, such as pretty much all music does; people try to make what they have heard with what they have. For example, there are stories of the origins of “Dub” style mixing in rock steady and reggae where they say that they heard the hits on the radio coming over the ocean from America to Jamaica and there were radio drop outs, so they tried to emulate that. In our case, we grew up in the 1960s and 70s and LA television had its own idea of what “ethnic” music sounded like, we took that as much as the real thing into account when we merged the idea of eastern European melody with ska backbeats. Ska, as a back beat, of course, is much the same as polkas and so many other folk musics anyway. Our intention was to hit punk rockers with punk rock, that is to say, not to fit into any sort of dogmatic idea of genre, but go to punk rock shows and play whatever we thought was a punk attitude to play, which included annoying the skinheads. They liked the beat, regardless of the pseudo-ethnic melodies (and I have to say, there was a sort of kick of putting klezmer-ish melodies to back beats that potentially Nazi skinheads would dance to, back in the beginning.) --Jonathan

CVB in 1985 - photo by Jock Hamilton

In a former post to his blog, CVB front man David Lowery explained how these fast Russian-flavored ska tunes were an important part of their live set.

Many of these songs came from two of the earlier post punk collaborations I had with Chris Molla. One was Sitting Duck the other was the Estonian Gauchos. Sitting Duck often played with punk bands at The Ritz - the short lived punk venue in The Inland Empire (an area east of greater Los Angeles). If you unearth tapes of these bands I’m NOT the guy with the fake English accent. These two bands were like Camper, they were not punk rock but needed to be understood in the context of punk rock. In Southern California there two thing the hardcore punks and skinheads would tolerate other than punk rock. Surf (hence Agent Orange) and Ska. In order to get away with playing in front of these audiences we would pepper our set with fast surf like or ska-like instrumentals so the punks and skinheads could commence to skanking.
As the bands evolved into Camper Van Beethoven these songs took on a distinctly Eastern European sound. Especially once Jonathan Segel joined the band in 1984.
Camper Van Beethoven often found themselves in actual physical danger playing in front of sometimes hostile hardcore punk audiences.
Camper Van Beethoven were fake hippies (maybe not Jonathan… he might have been a real hippy, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t any less brave). We grew our hair out long. We wore thrift store ponchos, beads, carried those hippy shoulder bags and wore clogs. Anything punk rockers would not like. Despite this some of the punk bands took a real liking to CVB. (So did Maximum Rock n Roll, the bible of west coast punk). One early vocal supporter was Jello Biafra from The Dead Kennedys. He invited us to do a few shows with the Dead Kennedys shortly after the release of our first record. One of the shows was at an American Legion or VFW in Chico, California.
In the big cities there were enough irony-enabled punk rockers that the audience would quickly get that we were more or less one of them and at least tolerate our set. Here in Chico that day in front of 800 hardcore punkers and skinheads that did not seem like it was gonna happen. Usually when we launched into one of our country-hippy-folk versions of a classic hardcore song, something like Black Flag’s Wasted, the punkers began to warm to us. This audience did not. When we launched into Wasted the audience stood there motionless and the skinheads right in front of me became very hostile. I watched a little knot of them as their eyes began to fill with white hot hate. This was like the early days of CVB back in the Inland Empire except instead of an audience of 50 it was 800 and we weren’t on our home turf. We had no homeys in the audience to protect us. After the song, the littlest of the knot of skinheads right in front of me points at me and says something like “fucking hippy, we’re gonna fuck you up”. BTW it’s always the little guy who says shit like this AND actually means it. I looked over at Jonathan I think because Jonathan grew up not far from Chico in the Central Valley. Fittingly Jonathan is chewing tobacco and spitting back into a beer bottle. He stares right back at me. He’s got this look on his face that says “Dude, I knew all along there was a 50/50 chance we were gonna get our asses kicked after the gig. Did you really just figure that out?”
We knew we had only one hope. I’m not sure if this is how we ended the show but it’s pretty much how we avoided getting our asses kicked. We played 3 or 4 fast Russian ska songs in a row, then played Take The Skinheads Bowling. Like the scene in the Blues Brothers, when they play Rawhide for the rednecks, somehow this little mini-set of ska and Skinheads Bowling converted a large portion of the crowd to our side. I don’t really remember if they were all skanking happily at the end of the show but we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us with steel toed Doc Martens. That’s as close as it gets to a happy ending.
To this day there is always an little echo of this gig in our sets.--David Lowery

Whatever the reason for their existence these CVB instrumentals are great tunes! Every bit as good as the actual Russian folk melodies like Korobochka and Katyusha that they are reminiscent of. I'm in the process of learning some of these, starting with Balalaika Gap, Opi Rides Again, Mao Reminisces, and RNR Uzbekistan.

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