In Which I Stick Up for Cracker

Everybody gets all snooty about Cracker.  "I was not into those dudes," they sputter.  "They were lame.  Now, Camper Van Beethoven?  Those guys were, like, innovative.  But Cracker?  No fucking thank you."  And I'm with them to a certain extent.  The first Cracker record: biiiiig disappointment.  "Teen Angst"?  I know everybody wants to have a radio hit, but come on.  How low do you want to stoop?  And, from the third record on, periodic high points, lots of sludge.  (Their ironic honky-tonk tune "This Dick Ain't Gonna Suck Itself" being the Everest of the period.)  No question they were a step down from Camper—how could they not be after losing two musicians as versatile and identifiable as Greg Lisher and Victor Krummenacher?—but you can't deny that David Lowery was always the guy writing the actual songs in that band.  The other guys could give you faux-Slavic instrumental polkas all day long, but how much of that do you really want to hear?  How often have you listened to Monks of Doom lately?

My point is that the second Cracker record, Kerosene Hat, is really fucking solid.  You probably know the modern-rock singles, "Low" (the one with the video where Lowery gets his ass kicked by Sandra Bernhard) and "Get Off This."  These are not the best songs on the record.  You might also know the hidden bonus track "Eurotrash Girl," which is about loser trust-fund expatriates wistfully pursuing debauchery across the Continent and contains lots of understated, dissolute, imagistic couplets like "Took the train down to Athens/And I slept in a fountain."  In 1993, I lived in St. Louis, and the modern-rock station there apparently was trying to push "Eurotrash Girl" as the "Free Bird" or "Stairway to Heaven" of the current generation, playing it every hour on the hour.  This was too much weight for the song to bear, but I still enjoy it.  Anyway, those songs are okay, but the rest of the record, the part you likely haven't heard—it's mostly pretty great.  I am so into the chorus of "Sick of Goodbyes."  I know it's readymade for the lawn of a corporate-sponsored amphitheater just after dark on an August night where sweaty dudes pump their fists ever so slightly out of time, but I do not care.  Likewise for "I Want Everything."  I already have my lighter out, man; I could care less that it would not sound out of place on the soundtrack to the new Sandra Bullock movie.  As a bass player, Davey Faragher has serious limitations, but he kills it on "Sweet Potato" to the point that the rest of the song is irrelevant.  You should be able to dismiss "Take Me Down to the Infirmary" as yet another Sticky Fingers knockoff to be filed away, but it's way more despairing and committed, and less detached and fatalistic, than anything the Stones could ever manage, and that gives it an energy of its own.  "Kerosene Hat" is spooky, a tumbleweed blowing across a filling-station parking lot miles from anything.  "Let's Go for a Ride" rocks with more reckless commitment than anything else the band ever did.  And don't forget the cover of "Loser," the Dead's more rueful Wild Wild West ramblin' gamblin' man companion piece to "Deal."  Lowery doesn't try to inhabit the song, the way Jerry Garcia did, but if anything his disembodied vocal entombs the proceedings in an extra layer of hopeless.  Canonicists should not trip; I'm not saying it's five-star Rolling Stone Record Guide flawless or anything.  But you oughta recognize.  David Lowery is a talented guy.

Comments

[Maya Gurantz]

Thank you. Thank you very fucking much.

Because I, too, have a long kept secret yet deep appreciation for "Kerosene Hat".
In 2001 (a digression you'll understand in a moment), I went on a roadtrip across the States. During the trip, my entire CD collection was stolen from my car. In a suburban neighborhood in St. Paul where a bunch of 'hoods broke the windows of only Hondas for a 2-block radius. Like they 're going to enjoy my 15-CD collection of PJ Harvey ephemera! Goddammit! I'm still in agony!

Point is, they took "Kerosene Hat," I never replaced it, and occasionally think do on it. The cover of "Loser" is one of my truly favorite things.

Can I come over and burn a copy? Forgive me for taking so long to get to your blog?

[Willoughby Johnson]

Apropos of not quite nothing:

Just remembering a hot summer night at the Blue Note in Columbia, MO in the latish eighties and through the sweat and smoke Dave Lowrey whining on about how if there was somebody in the crowd who could take him for a ride along the Missouri River in a 1965 (?) red convertible Camaro they should come see him after the show but if it wasn't that year and it wasn't red and it wasn't a soft top they better not bother talking to him. And the pretty violin player and her blue lucite violin.

This would have been about three years before Uncle Tupelo started playing the Blue Note all the time and I never went to see them, not once.

Damn.