Wheres Jack Ruby now?
Back in the mid-to-late ’80s, during the rise of (and some would argue the heyday of) indie rock, college-radio rock, or whatever you want to call it, there was a slew of quirky, sometimes unabashedly goofy, bands seeped in spunk and irony that could be hip and childlike at the same time — groups like They Might Be Giants and Beat Happening, not to mention lesser-known outfits like Royal Crescent Mob, King Missile, The Swimming Pool Q’s, Mary’s Danish, and Thelonious Monster. Perhaps the most original and most vital of all of these was Camper Van Beethoven, a California “surrealist absurdist folk” (as they called it) band with one foot in roots rock and one foot in pyschedelia, plus a weird fondness for Balkan and Mexican music and ska. It was one of the first indie rock bands with a full-time fiddler (The Mekons created their own brand of violin-infused country punk with Fear and Whiskey, released in 1985, the same year as Camper’s first album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory). Campe
