Streaming Music Isn't a Free Market. It's a Regulated Monopoly.

Today's guest is David Lowery, the legendary frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, digital copyright crusader, and longtime Reason reader.

He dives deep into his sprawling, deeply personal new record Fathers, Sons and Brothers and the postwar California dream, talks about how the music industry broke, and suggests ways to maybe, just maybe, fix it.

He's sued Spotify and other streaming services, teaches business at the University of Georgia, and he's dropped what might be the best one-liner about selling out since The Who.

If you care about music, creative freedom, and getting paid for your work, this one is for you.

 

0:00—Intro

0:52—Lowery's Reason connection

2:34—Fathers, Sons and Brothers

15:25—Lowery's musical inspirations

19:25—Camper Van Beethoven

28:31—What it was like being indie in the '80s

35:48—Cracker and alternative rock

42:26—What does it mean to "sell out"?

48:56—Streaming music and artist compensation

58:01—Lowery's class-action lawsuits

1:01:07—Royalty rates and copyright protections

1:07:30—Has the DTC model improved the music business?

1:15:50—Optimism for the future of music

 

---

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: So, David Lowery, it is a pleasure to be talking to you. Thanks for talking to Reason.

David Lowery: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

And you have told me in a different conversation, when you were a wee student at UC Santa Cruz, you had a roommate or a dorm mate who was a Reason reader. Can you remind me about that?

Yeah, well, there was a couple of connections to that. But yeah, I had a—he wasn't really a roommate, but he lived in the same building—was a guy that we just called Scott the Anarchist. And that was sort of where my introduction to the magazine came from. And then I later, when I was in college, I worked at a farm, which is detailed on this solo album. And the owner was just a full-blown anarcho-capitalist, I would say.

Did that mean you had to pay to leave the job every day or something like that? That could be a brutal regime.

Right. That's my description of him. We got along actually pretty well. But considering Santa Cruz was so lefty, my calculation is that I probably found the two libertarian anarchists in the whole county, right? And they sort of were influential to me in a lot of ways.

Well, it's always good, when you're in any kind of monoculture, to hang out with the people who are not quite fitting in.

Absolutely, absolutely.

We're going to talk about your experiences with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker and the music industry more broadly, especially issues about IP as music shifted from kind of record stores and analog needles dragging through vinyl to streaming. All kinds of the interesting IP battles and the way that record labels went from being villainous for one reason and then for other reasons. We'll talk about that in a bit.

But first, I want to talk about the new record Father's Sons and Brothers, which is a musical memoir, a musical autobiography that you've released on vinyl as well as online. And you're writing a Substack where you explain the background of each song. Can you explain what you're trying to do with Father's Sons and Brothers and why now?

Right. So, I started this shortly before COVID. I sort of felt like there were some people in my life that deserved their own song or a little explanation or something like that. So, that's sort of a memoir-ish type thing. At the same time, I'd had several people urging me, like, "Now's the time of your life when you do the autobiography." But there's definitely a formula to doing these sort of rock autobiographies, and I didn't have a lot of the elements there, in my opinion.

I didn't struggle. The first album Camper Van Beethoven puts out is played on the BBC. So, there's a lot of tension that isn't there.

There's no airplane crash that wipes out half the band or anything.

That's right. I didn't have the parents that shipped me off to some sort of indoctrination camp because I became a punk rocker or something like that. None of those things happened to me. Everybody was supportive. I got lucky all the time. So, the shape of the written autobiography, to me, wasn't there.

Also, too, you write all the time, that's a very different skill than writing music. I only have to worry about five minutes. I just felt like this was going to be a whole new skill I was going to have to learn, to write an autobiography. So I thought, "Well,why don't I just do it with— I'm already checking some boxes, writing about some people that I need to write about. I'll just start recording CDs" essentially, and "I'll be done when I'm done. I'm recording these songs"

So, that's how it started.

Then, the other element of it, though, was interesting to me, because for me, it's easier for me to write music than it is to write lyrics. I know it may not sound like that, but it's hard to find things to sing about. I keep a little notepad file in my phone where I write down titles or an idea or something, just because I need those.

And this was easy because I'd be like, "Ok, talk about my sister now. I want to talk about my grandfather on my mom's side when I talk about this." It was a good plot device for me to do this. And then it matched the COVID shutdown where the music business sort of went away.

About a year into this, we had the COVID shutdown, and then it's like, "Okay, well, this is really personal." It's just me sitting with my little tiny digital eight-track recorder.

The opening song recollects your first memory or something close to it. But you write—you're in Georgia now, you've spent time in Virginia—but fundamentally, the musical space that you seem to occupy generally, but especially on this record, to me anyways, is California.

Can you talk a little bit about California? Like you mentioned in a song, a super bloom of a certain kind of flower or weed in the Coachella Valley. Talk a bit about that. What does California mean? Because California, in rock music, California is the backdrop for a lot of stuff. It seems like things very quickly left Philadelphia and New York—and being up on the rooftop in New York or being real hot in the city or something like that—to this California, which can mean a lot of different things. But what does California mean to you, and what does that super bloom represent to you?

Yeah. So, the super bloom was doing two things. The super bloom is the late-winter, early-spring burst of wildflowers that you will get in the desert if the conditions are right. Not every year. Sometimes it skips 10 years. And it's this explosion of life.

So in one way, I'm talking about the explosion of life in that it's my age—I'm like 14 years old, boys are growing, you're sort of getting elements of being an adult, and stuff like that. It was also California at that time, which had gone through kind of a super bloom. Everybody that was around me where we lived in California—my father was in the Air Force, he got stationed in California. Was in an area called the Inland Empire, which is right next to a separate area called the Coachella Valley. It had exploded with people, mostly immigrants from other parts of the United States, specifically a lot of people from the South, from Texas, from Oklahoma.

You had this wild blossoming not just of life but of the economy and culture and things like that. Most people tend to focus on San Francisco and Hollywood, at that time, or coastal LA, but the same thing happened inland in the deserts.

My grandparents came out there, and cousins came out there basically to work in the agricultural industry, and then shifted to servicing the rich people on the golf courses and the Hollywood celebrities in Palm Springs and stuff like that. It was just a really fascinating time—a good time to be alive in California. I have a more positive spin on it than, say, Joan Didion.

The dreamers of the dream and…

I have a more positive take on it than she does.

Yeah, talk about that. Because the Grapes of Wrath, of course, ends with the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl. Then you kind of skip ahead and get to Joan Didion or, before her, James Cain and hard boiled that—or Nathaniel West. California, particularly Southern California, is kind of the asshole of the country, and all of the bad people get shaken down into there. And it's a hard, grubby, déclassé life of endless yearning and dissatisfaction. You have a different view of that.

Well, yeah, my family came out of such poverty in Arkansas and personal tragedy as well too, which I go into on the record. My grandfather didn't read or write. He signed his name with an X. He basically took care—he was like horses, farming, agriculture. Figured out how to service people's pools—a little side business for him.

Swimming for a cement pond. Right.

Yeah. The cement pond. And for them, this was a wonderful life. They made decent money. They bought a house again. Eventually their children and the grandchildren heard about the wonderful life in California, and they all followed them out there. At first, they really were literally in the fields picking fruit. Picking dates was a big thing to do.

Amazing. 

It's dangerous work. And then, eventually, I don't think nobody ever got rich—although my uncle was the marshal of Riverside County at one point.

And you had a couple of cousins who got—

Who were on the other side of the law.

Yeah, that's right. You know, the album, though, is not some kind of super feel-good album. There's a lot of darkness and tragedy, but also hope in it. It reminded me a lot of another California transplant—who it didn't end up as well—Gram Parsons. But there's a touch in this album of what he used to call "cosmic American music," which is very rooted in Americana tradition, particularly blues and R&B and country, and what used to be called "hillbilly music". It's both uplifting and sad at the same time.

Does that resonate with you? It seems to me there's a whole vein—Brian Wilson died recently—and the Beach Boys, on the one hand, they're the happiest band on earth: they're upbeat, they all look good, have white teeth, blue eyes, and blonde hair. And yet there's something unbelievably sad and depressing about their music, I find. The Byrds are like this too. I don't think this album is not depressing, but it has that mix—it's upbeat, it's yearning, it's positive, but it's also deeply kind of riven with sadness and tragedy.

Yeah, so the song that probably does that the most is "Piney Woods," which discusses this area of Arkansas, Louisiana, and East Texas. I have a song that's kind of a study of the area. But specifically, if you listen to the melody of that song, it is almost totally major-key, almost straight-up melody. It's a very positive melody, but the subject matter of it—it got better and better the more I dealt with the details of the song, which is the suicide of my dad's brother.

That was the contrast that really made that song work. It's almost so folky, it harkens back more to the Celtic roots of the American forms. It's almost there. It's so folky. That's part of it. A lot of my perspective is an Inland California perspective, which is much more—Bakersfield, obviously—but it's much more infused with the Southern and the country rock music, whereas the Beach Boys have less of that in what they do. So that's a bit of it as well.

Who do you count as your musical icons? Because it was also interesting listening to this record—Neil Young during COVID, who, Canadian by birth, Californian by choice, I suppose—he released a bunch of performances as well as songs during COVID that were somehow set in a psychic California. That can be both upbeat and downbeat at the same time.

And I was thinking, you're like occupying the Riverside County—or, the Inland Empire version of Neil Young's Northern California. Who are your musical heroes that guide you?

Well I think I'm probably pretty influenced, honestly, by the classic rock artists and stuff like that. But if you want to talk specifically about this sort of little niche I've moved into, I would say the biggest influence probably was Kaleidoscope. With the American, with David Lindley…

One song of theirs I know well, I believe, is "The Sky Children."

I don't know if I know that. There are two Kaleidoscopes. There's a British Kaleidoscope, and there's a Southern California…

Oh, okay, so this may be the other one. But talk about Southern California Kaleidoscope.

So California Kaleidoscope—they were also from the Inland Empire. It was David Lindley, who's a fiddler, guitarist—he played with everybody from Jackson Browne, did television themes, all kinds of stuff. But this was his '60s psychedelic folk band. They all played different instruments. They all play fiddle at some point on the record. I remember I started Camper Van Beethoven, and I gave a tape to Ray Farrell from SST, and he goes, "Oh, so you guys loved Kaleidoscope growing up?" And I was like, "Who?" "From your neighborhood, how do you not know them?" Right?

So in a way, that's the big Camper Van Beethoven influence.

And then from there, I suppose, I had to retroactively discover stuff. I had to discover Bruce Springsteen in the mid-2000s. Things like that would happen to me just because, I don't know, I had some impression of what he was about, and it was wrong.

So in a way, there's some of Bruce Springsteen's "Ghost of Tom Joad" in this album. In fact, to the point where I accidentally took a chord progression. But the progressions aren't copyrightable.

Well, give it time.

Give it time, yeah. So it's kind of all over the place. But for this record, I'd point to those two—literally Kaleidoscope and… I know Bruce Springsteen is sort of playing characters, and then telling their stories. In this, I'm not playing a character, but sort of his randomness where he'll talk about really specific things—like a woman's shoe, he ties her shoe, as he fits her for a shoe. Really small details that makes the song come to life. So I've got to say, there's some of that in there as well too. I could go on and on listing…

Let's talk about Camper Van Beethoven, because they were a band—I wrote for the American version of Smash Hits, which was, if you ever wanted to confess to a murder, that was the magazine to do it in because nobody read it. But I remember coming across Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I reviewed it. I gave it a thumbs-up—or we might have used two fingers up or three fingers up because we were cheeky and different.

But Camper Van Beethoven was one of the archetypal indie rock bands of the '80s, when that mattered. And there's an irony that is infused in that music that is—you know, I don't know how to describe it. Can you talk about where that came from?

And one of the songs on Father, Sons, and Brothers, you reference "Take the Skinheads Bowling," which became this mass hit. That was life-changing for you because that made the band popular in a way that meant you were going forward in the music industry. Can you talk about where the ironic sensibility of Camper Van Beethoven came from, and then how "Take the Skinheads Bowling" being popular changed the direction of your life?

Yeah, so Camper Van Beethoven was a reaction to the seriousness of hardcore punk rock—which hadn't started that way, by the way. Hardcore West Coast punk rock and post-punk British stuff—everything was heavy. And there's a little bit of the punk rock spirit that always forces you to talk about whatever the status quo is.

In our case, our status quo had become punk rock and the post-punk rock scene that we all grew up in. I remember our demo tape at some point got reviewed by the punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll—

Oh wow, yeah.

—where they just said, "Hey, these guys don't sound punk, but they're absolutely the spirit of punk," in a way. So that encouraged us.

It was us being ironic or tongue-in-cheek while still trying to be serious—maybe the way that Kurt Vonnegut writes. There's some humor, or non-seriousness, in his serious writing. That's also a very postmodern sort of thing. We're of second order. There's a second-order meaning in the songs.

We really don't want to play lacrosse in the song "Club Med Sucks". It's tongue-in-cheek is what we're saying. That just worked for us immediately, and we felt like, "well, we could be a serious band." The Beatles did that sometimes. Kinks did that a lot. So it just didn't frighten us away.

Why do you think punk got so serious? Because when it started—and it's useless to get into strict definitions of punk, etc. It started as a burst of energy and a reaction to prog rock or over-serious mega productions done by hippies, let's say. And it was fun and exciting. And it was short. Then it itself became really serious, especially the Southern California punk scene. It seemed to, you know—like with Ronnie Reagan and everything was serious and political. Why did that happen?

I'm not really sure. But I mean, there is a tendency, when you belong to a group, to want to dress the same or with a similar sensibility, and that gets more and more refined. There's a Substack and long-running blog called Punk Turns 30—which I think now it's probably Punk Turns 45 now. I believe it's Teresa Karyotis and Pleasant Gehman who still run that blog.

They have a lot of photos—Tracy was a blogger and she photo-documented it. And there's a point where like the '78—the way people looked in '78 in the LA punk rock scene, what they were wearing—it was a wide platter of styles. It narrows down over the next few years. I assume something like that also happens with music. It sort of the building of a community out of something anarchic causes that.

And that's what Camper is reacting to. It's like, "Okay, let's do that. Let's wear the hippie clothes. I'm going to wear a poncho—punk rock." That's us trying to take it apart again.

So "Take the Skinheads Bowling." Talk a little bit about how you came to write that song and then how it was successful.

Yeah, so it's kind of the same—it's part of that impulse. So that's when a lot of us— say '83 or something like that— are noticing that some part of punk rock had become very dogmatic. You kind of got the skinheads, and they'd got their look. Not all of them were—there was just a kind of moral panic about nazi skinheads. I never saw any, but they were sort of seen as a bad part of the movement.

So this is us kind of mocking them at first, in a song, in a single line, that doesn't really mean anything. And because it didn't mean anything, it became a little project of mine to take this song idea we had come up with and just make it so that it didn't make any sense, didn't say anything, and didn't mean anything—in reaction to everything that came before us.

So I'm like really carefully with each line going,"Okay, I'm going to say something now, and it seems like I'm going somewhere. Now I'll say something else and it doesn't lead you anywhere." It was just completely an absurdist impulse or something like that.

But that song being so much that way and being so different, and also just having a catchy hook on the chorus. When we mailed it out, and this is us really mailing it out to BBC DJs, I think it just stood out. I think it just really stood out. They looked at it and they saw that title on the record they were like, "Well, what is this?" Then they put it on the turntable and like, "Oh, this is catchy. We can play this."

There's nothing else on that record that is as catchy and also as a fun chorus. So, my take on all of this is: the fact that, that went on the record—and it's kind of buried on the record; it's like track seven or something like that—the fact that that song took off really changed our trajectory.

I could have easily seen us— we were a very hyperactive, creative group of people, not always on the same page together—but the fact that we kind of had this single, we had to go around and play that song, as well as our other songs, focused our mind. I think in a lot of ways, without that song, we wouldn't have gone on to do— we might've made a couple of records and then wandered off and done other things. That song really made it so I was, me at least, I was at least on a professional musician-songwriter path. From on the first record I think, "My life is different." And that's kind of what I talk about in that song.

You were saying earlier that you don't have the ingredients of the classic kind of Behind the Music documentary biography. But on Fathers, Sons and Brothers, you do have a song about the end of Camper Van Beethoven, which takes place on ferries and going to Sweden and whatnot. So, there's a little bit of that.

What was it like to be an indie darling in the '80s, though, as that concept was— When you go back and look to the '60s, nobody wanted to be a boutique indie artist in the '60s. They wanted to be on Top of the Pops, or the Top 40. Even through the '70s, when you think of somebody like Bruce Springsteen, he doesn't matter if he's not on CBS Records or something, or he matters less.

In the '80s, with the rise of what was called college rock—and we'll get to the high point of alt music in a bit—being an indie artist where you could be quirky and inventive and offbeat and get compensated for it, that seemed like you were living the life, right? I mean, what did it feel like to be like that? And what kind of pressures go into maintaining that, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again?

Yeah, so you actually hit on something. There is an economic component to this '80s indie rock, '90s indie rock thing. The reason that folks in the '60s and '70s—you may have been underground, but you were trying to rise to the top of the charts was because that was where the money was. You needed money to keep the whole thing going. Even if you're driven by an intense artistic vision, you do need that.

In the '80s, the independent music systems kind of blossomed and came of age. Indie music was called "indie" at first because of how you organized your band business. You went through independent distributors, your records were sold at independent record stores, and you were probably only on college radio or non-commercial radio.

Suddenly, you could make a decent living. Maybe you weren't rich, but you could be a middle-class artist off of the system—and we were. We bought a car. I didn't buy a house—it was Santa Cruz, California—but that was one element of it.

But it also began to have a lot of rules that went along with it. I didn't feel like it had those rules at first. But eventually, sort of, rules developed. I remember there was a backlash to the fact that Camper Van Beethoven covered Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and kind of had a hit with it. A lot of critics grumbled at us on that album because, "Hey, you're doing a cover song that's not even your own song."

So there were odd pressures like that. I remember a couple years later, Cracker's first album, an ad agency came to us and they wanted our song for a beer commercial. It was Coors, actually, I think. Which, at that time, seemed to be a real no-no. But it was so much money, we were like, "Take it. Take it."

There were literally op-eds in the music trades about whether we should have taken that commercial.

And both because it was a commercial to begin with, and then because it was Coors, which was associated with—Coors went from being cool when Paul Newman drank it in the '60s and '70s, before it was available nationally, to being a dangerously right-wing beer because the Coors family somehow were funding the Contras against the Sandinistas or something.

Well, it was something like that. And so, we kind of stepped in it. But we were like, it was so much money. You get record advances, but you have to spend the record advances on the record. Sometimes some of that money goes to touring, too. You might get additional advances for touring.

The pressures of being an indie artist—it's not that you're totally free of pressures. It's a different set, right?

It was a different set of pressures. And then I think the music sort of became stylized. At first, what was "indie" was all over the map because it literally was, it was just describing a separate economic system for distributing and selling records. That was based on punk rock methods.

It wasn't punk rock anymore.

That's much more do-it-yourself, you record the records, you produce the records or, go to the record pressing plant, get it out, and then literally are mailing it out to smaller record stores and things like that. 

Or using an independent distributor to do that. We used Rough Trade, which was a vertical stores, a distributor, and a label as well. Eventually, we sort of had a deal with them exclusively for a while.

And then did Camper Van Beethoven sign with Virgin?

We signed with Virgin, which at first was the largest independent in the world.

It has an interesting history. Richard Branson's an interesting, charismatic figure in the music business—before he was known for his other ventures.

A guy who became a major record label owner by doing Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, right?

Yeah, the soundtrack to The Exorcist and selling it out of the trunk of his car. Us signing with him—even though he was basically considered part of the major label world when we signed—was to us like, "Well, here's the bridge." This guy is the bridge between worlds. And literally, I talk about it in one song on Fathers, Sons and Brothers.

I remember at some point trying to give a theory of our album, our upcoming album, Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, to one of the executives there, who was the president at the time—Jeff Ayeroff—who immediately was just like, kind of didn't have time for me but didn't want to be mean. It was just like, "Look, look, don't worry about it. Just write songs. You'll write a hit."

That's the old-school music business, right? Throw 10 records against the wall, see what sticks. "Just give us a bunch of songs. Don't stop writing. Don't stop recording. Give us a bunch of songs. We'll worry about everything else." That was a great time to transition into the major labels because there was still that approach to creativity. Not everybody, but there were still a lot of people like that in the business.

And then as Camper Van Beethoven ends at the end of the '80s and you transition to Cracker—can we talk a bit about, by that point, alt music or alternative music became to the fore. And it seemed as if not just in the music industry but more broadly that things like rock music were fading in their cultural hold, and stuff was opening up.

The labels—this happened to the movie studios certainly at the end of the '60s, and it continues to happen with publishing houses, etc.—where they realize they no longer understand their business, or they don't understand their audiences. And they either get rigid and say, "No, we're not doing anything different," or they go all in on trying all different types of things.

But it seems like when you look at the early '90s music scene, so much is going on. And you came into it with Cracker in a really good position, right? Because you kind of got to punch your own ticket economically within the mainstream, which was desperately trying to appeal to something known as an "alternative nation." Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven had gotten onto MTV in regular rotation—not just on the special shows, although the special shows were hugely important. 120 Minutes was landmark. That introduced the underground to middle America.

We were on—not really heavily—but we were in regular rotation on MTV. There were also about 30 commercial stations, maybe 50 around the country, that were playing modern rock. I don't even know if it was called alternative rock yet, but they were commercial radio stations. And we were one of their bands.

When Camper Van Beethoven breaks up and I then I create this band, Cracker, with my friends, we put out a record. We sort of get the seat that Camper Van Beethoven had been holding, in a way. Even though we're different, we do kind of, you know—and what had happened was that those 30 to 50 stations with Camper Van Beethoven had now expanded to this panel of 200 or 300 stations, because rock radio—AOR rock radio—was dying, and they were looking for something else.

There was also probably the deregulation of the radio business, where you suddenly had chains of radio stations

Part of it was, we made good songs. We made good records. Plenty of people make good songs and good records and get popular. We were kind of in the right place at the right time. We were in this modern rock radio format. We were a core band. And it explodes nationally. That's really when we're in a pop star part of the music business, although we were alternative rock stars.

But then the center can't hold, right? The early '90s—it's fascinating looking back on it, and it was kind of evident—you have bands like you, Nirvana and the grunge sound coming up big. You have Guns N' Roses, which is obviously about to destroy itself.

There had been a kind of resurrection of straight-on American rock and roll, or whatever they were claiming to do. And then you had all this other stuff—in terms of rap and hip-hop really coming into its own. How did you navigate that, musically?

When you're playing in something like that do you become more experimental, or do you become more focused on what you are doing alone?

There's always the impulse to make sure—coming from management, from labels, and just you as an artist—you're like, "I've got to be aware of what other people are doing, what the audience wants," to a certain extent, while not pandering to it. And that's always a tricky line to walk.

So you hear on Cracker's 1996 The Golden Age, in a way, that's sort of the most alternative rock album that we make. But it's almost a year or two behind, by the time it comes out,  it's almost a year or two behind what alternative rock had become. Alternative rock had become much harder. It was leaning toward metal, it was leaning toward metal rap.

The first two Cracker records are very Americana, roots-oriented, but they had songs that fit on alternative rock radio. Golden Age tries to lean into the alternative rock stuff a little bit. But we do clever things—like we hire Beck's dad, David Campbell, an amazing string arranger, to arrange a lot of this stuff. So it's cool and weird and angular strings on it and all kinds of stuff.

By the time we get to the fourth album, Gentleman's Blues, we're like, "Ok, alternative rock radio is going off someplace else. That's not the style of music we write. It's not our strength." And we just completely make, essentially, roots rock record.

Kind of coming into its own as well—or finding an audience.

Yes, jam bands were sort of reinvigorating that space or something like that. So in one way, yes, we did follow the trends a little bit. I mean, because we're like, "Hey, man, we're good musicians. We're good writers. We can write anything." We're not selling our soul by doing this. But we are following the trends a little bit—but it's really only for one record. And then we're like, "Ok, that didn't work."

These are kinds of conversations seem to have died, and I think that's generally a good thing—the idea that if you're an artist and you sell out…

I mean, The Who obviously have an album called The Who Sell Out from the '60s. And I guess The Byrds—"So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star"—talking about selling out to the company or whatever. We can go on and on. In the late '80s and certainly in the '90s, that seemed to be front of mind for many people. The main thing is man: "Don't sell out."

Did you guys worry about that—that you might be selling out? Or were you kind of like, "What the fuck does that even mean?"

Yeah, with Cracker especially, there's a little bit of, "We're just going to be iconoclasts." If selling out is uncool, we're going to do it. Or we're going to claim to do it—whether we are or not. You're kind of trolling people in a way. We didn't have that word then, but there was a little of that in our persona.

It even says in "Get Off This," the second, on the second album—I can't remember lyrics unless I sing them—but we talk about: "Is it true that you have sold your soul?" "I don't know, man. Lend me a quarter, I'll call my accountant," right?

I don't know if anybody can even tell what we're saying in that song. But we're playing with that. We're reacting against that.

Plus, a lot of the bands that were underground at one point and were deemed the coolest of the cool—like the Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam—were selling tens of millions of records.

That's right.

So by that point, we're like, "I don't know what 'selling out' means." Exactly what you're saying. And that's kind of what kills it. By '94, you're like, "I don't know what selling out is."

Right. I mean, being true to your school—if you're not selling any records, that might mean that you're just not making good music, which is not necessarily true.

Right. Not necessarily true. You might be ahead of the curve.

Yeah. I mean, you can be Alex Chilton, but nobody wants to be Alex Chilton when he's 40 or 45 years old.

That's exactly right

And he fucked up his second bite at the apple, I guess. To talk about trolling: What went into the making of Tusk—your cover of what is one of the most controversial and kind of bizarre Fleetwood Mac records?

Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven covers the album Tusk. It was partly because we had decided to get back together, but we thought it would actually be funny if we didn't really tell anybody.

I don't know why—this is just the high concepts that amuses us. So we released, first, this thing called Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven, basically telling people that we got back together in the song titles—but nobody getting it.

There were some outtakes, there were some leftovers from the early career that we put on this album, but a lot of stuff was new that we created. We released a fake-out oddities album as our first record back together. Even though there are clues all the way through it—including a thing in Morse code which explains what we're doing on the record—nobody got it.

So they were like, "Ok, that was fun. That kind of worked." People were like, "Oh, there's a bunch of Camper oddities that were never released." We're like, "Ok, that's fun. So what should we do?"

"Oh, I know what we should do—we should release a cover of an entire album." I don't know who came up with the idea—it might've been Jonathan—but someone came up with it and said, "We should release a cover of an entire album, cover the entire album, and say that we recorded it back in the '80s and we discovered the tapes."

What would that album be? And of course, everybody goes, Tusk. Because we were obsessed with Tusk by Fleetwood Mac.

So in some ways, what we're doing with that album is also trying to rehabilitate that album, because—even though it's spotty, and there's some bad stuff on it that really doesn't quite work on that Fleetwood Mac album. There's a lot of great stuff on that album. And it's just really an unusual work of art.

Oh, and I mean, they owned the industry at that point. They could do whatever they wanted. And on some level, it is a monument to self-indulgence, and on another level, it's kind of rock. But why not do whatever the fuck you want when you're coasting off of Rumours, right?

So what we did was we re-recorded that album but had this fake press release that said we recorded it in 1986 in California, staying at a friend's parents' cabin. We got snowed in, so we decided to cover Tusk on a four-track.

So we tried to record it on a four-track. We were recording on professional equipment, but we tried to keep it to four tracks. We couldn't. The law of tracks just comes in, filling them all up. But we did use a drum machine from that year to sort of give it the feel of that year.

So we released this fake thing from our—this thing that wasn't really from our catalog—and put this album out. And it got everybody talking about that album. We did it in like three days, like we said, and got everybody talking about that album which was kind of the point of that album. We thought this was a great record, and it deserved its due so here's another look at that record. Maybe people will come to love the Tusk album, which I think we were part of. Yeah, we were imitating that album in the eyes of a lot of people.

Let's jump ahead to some of your criticisms and actual legal actions against streaming services and whatnot. Because you—and at various points, everybody in the bands you've been associated with—are incredibly tech-savvy. People have worked at places like Pandora and are computer programmers.

Your music is heavily, heavily indebted to technology and a knowledge and love of forward avant technology. You've been critical—particularly about 10 or 15 years ago—you were very critical of the way that streaming services did not compensate content creators. You pointed out in several interviews, I think, that for a million streams or plus of "Low," one of Cracker's best-known songs— it talks about a junkie cosmonaut in one line. And it is of the great rock lyrics that has stuck in my head forever, I'll probably say it on my deathbed. But for a million streams of that on Pandora, you would get paid as the writer and as a performer on it, something like $17.

So I think in that article I detailed that it's actually about $140 that goes towards the label, the publisher, the performers, and the songwriter. But my actual share of that, as being a band on a label, was $17. And I'm the major writer on that. I have the most writing on it. But I do explain that.

That is specifically with Pandora, which at that time was non-interactive streaming. So the royalties were very, very low on that. They're a bit higher when you get to interactive streaming.

This is one of the reasons it's great to talk about this on this podcast is that a lot of people don't realize this, but at least the songwriting part of the music business is highly regulated. For instance, in the digital realm, songwriters don't really set the price for their songs, nor do they negotiate with anybody.

There are these compulsory licenses. And the formula for paying those artists is set by an administrative law board in the Library of Congress called the Copyright Royalty Board. What happened was— always good intentions—in the '90s, the federal government saw the digital age coming and said, "What should we do about music and copyright with these new digital services that are coming? We'll make some compulsory licenses."

There's different ones depending on how it's being used, but I don't want to go on that. But effectively, those rates and the formulas determining the rates for songwriters, eliminated any sort of market for songs in the digital realm and also set the rates too low.

When you say they set the rates too low, what do you mean by that?

If I write a song 100 percent, and I own all the publishing on it—I don't sell any of it off to anybody—on a streaming service, on the best-paying streaming services, I might get a little under a tenth of a penny for each stream.

So take a five-minute song and you say, "Well, how long does this have to play for me to make a dollar? For me to make $12?" You end up with these enormously large—somebody's paying five bucks for three weeks of solid music or something. Maybe even three months, I can't remember what it was.

There's no free market, so it is hard to say what the value is. I guess that's a subjective opinion, but it doesn't seem right.

And the rates are certainly lower than they were for radio play.

Yes, but that's also—

But that's also complicated, yeah.

That's complicated in the sense that each stream is listened to by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, if you're lucky, on the radio. But you also have this real advertising business that has real money. Paying for radio ads is where the dollars were. Advertising supported streaming services, that's also a weird business, there's not very much money in that. I'm sure Reason needs subscribers, not just advertisers, because digital advertising rates are so low.

So, it's a subjective opinion that it's too low. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence—when you look at other things and how things behaved in non-digital markets—that it is a lot lower.

That's one problem.

The other problem was just sheerly that when the streaming services launched, the way the law was written, they had to go through a process to actually get the federal licenses. And a lot of them just didn't do that. What ended up happening was, they didn't really know who to pay.

So there was a whole class of independent artists that were never licensed and never got any royalties—no matter how low. The class actions were aimed at that—not the low rates—but just the fact that these services were not paying a large class of songwriters.

That involved platforms like Spotify, probably most notably. I've seen different class action suits that you were involved in or really helped lead, calling for $40 million or $20 million or being settled. And that was for nonpayment of royalties.

And Spotify or the platform would say, "Well, we're happy to pay these very low royalty rates, but we have no idea who they are or where we wouldd send the payment to, so we're not going to do it." 

How were those cases settled?

They were settled because we had them—hands down.

I'm