Nearly as nutty as the notion of camping with Ludwig himself, Camper Van Beethoven, NorCal's finest goofball rockers of vast experience, will be at Zoey's in Ventura on Monday night. This is the band, you might recall, that gave us "Take the Skinheads Bowling" and "The Day Lassie Went to the Moon" off their 1985 debut album, "Telephone Free Landslide Victory."
While the old cliché "whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" might be a bit extreme, the band did survive several bouts of the dreaded creative differences and now they're back with a new album on the horizon. In any case, the band is well rested -- their last album, "New Roman Times," is from 2004. The breakups and resulting downtime were not spent at home moping about Days of Camper Passed. All the members have side projects or were in other bands, perhaps most famously, frontman David Lowery, who started Cracker in the early '90s.
