A full-length reunion album seemed like the logical next step. Lowery had some vaguely political songs he had demoed; whether they would eventually wind up as solo songs or Camper songs, he wasn’t sure. “Initially it started as a joke,” Segel recalls. “But David really took it and ran with it.”
LIFE DURING WARTIME
New Roman Times, it’s safe to say, was inspired by both the present Bush administration and the current Iraq war. “I wanted to do something about war, but from a different perspective,” explains Lowery, who knew that he wanted to talk about politics in a more concentrated, if not necessarily more direct, fashion. In the first incarnation of Camper, “we did manage to talk about politics in this sideways way, putting a political context on stuff but never directly [addressing issues]. Like ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’, which doesn’t really say anything. Most rock songs are told in a linear way without much flavor from the narrator. But I always looked at it like literature, where you would have an unreliable narrator.”
Lowery considers Cracker’s latest album, Countrysides, to be a direct influence on New Roman Times — “It explores the same ‘rednecks vs. longhairs’ stuff from the ’70s,” he contends — as was the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling novel The Difference Engine, about computerphobic terrorists in 1855 London.
Parts of New Roman Times, with its emphasis on right-wing terrorists, Christian fundamentalism and the oft-observed divide between the red states and the blue states, bring to mind the era of Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh as much as contemporary America. Whether this suggests a desire to avoid the controversies a more direct post-9/11 album might provide or is merely indicative of Lowery’s own preoccupations is unclear, but it’s probably more the latter than the former.
“There’s a really twisted side of the Christian right that believes in a perverted, twisted misreading of what the rapture is,” says Lowery. “That’s as present in Christianity as it is in fundamentalist Islam. When I got to visit my family in Arkansas, there’s a lot of people in my family [who think like that].” Pause. “Though I wouldn’t say they’re gonna go out and blow things up.”
New Roman Times (the title is a tweak on the typeface Times New Roman, developed for the London Times in the early 1930s) is also shot through with references to what Lowery terms a “creeping American fascism,” a topic the band had tentatively begun exploring during Bush I. “Key Lime Pie had a lot of [political] stuff on it,” he acknowledges. “I think that was the beginning of a time [similar to now]. Bush Sr. was there, and there was a radical right represented by Pat Buchanan that was just coming to power. A lot of Key Lime Pie has that sort of thing in the background, but there were other stories there.”
In addition to the second war in Iraq, any number of events helped nudge Camper toward the idea of a political concept album. Lowery mentions visits to the bar at the American Legion hall with his anti-war father, and the fact that he recently had to talk his mother out of hanging an effigy of Bush on her front lawn (while Lowery wouldn’t have minded personally, “I was worried that the Secret Service would put her on some list”). Segel cites Moore’s inclusion of “Take The Skinheads Bowling” in Bowling For Columbine as formative, one of the first true indications that a more politically-minded Camper might be taken seriously.
Though Segel characterizes the members of Camper as “all fairly aggressively leftists,” Lowery seems to view himself as more of a Clintonian centrist: Cracker played campaign rallies for Clinton, and Lowery even attended an inaugural ball. That New Roman Times might come off as overly preachy had crossed band members’ minds. “It’s difficult because you don’t want to be didactic,” Segel says. “It’s one thing to be the Clash and express your views heavily, and it’s another thing to be a folkie singer-songwriter and be telling other people what to do.”
With rare exceptions (such as Neil Young’s Greendale), concept albums had lately fallen out of fashion, especially political-rock-opera-type concept albums, and with good reason: They’re usually bad ideas. Not only can they seem instantly dated (there’s a reason Lowery and band wanted New Roman Times, two years in the making, to be released before the presidential election), but they bring with them a host of practical issues: How to incorporate the songs into the band’s live set, for example? (Lowery says it’s gone well so far.) How to ensure that each track is good enough to survive as an actual song, as opposed to merely a plot device?
“You don’t have to care about what the whole story of Tommy is to dig a song from the record.” Lowery observes. “We tried to make it so the songs stand on their own.” He admits, though, that “some of the songs, like ‘That Gum You Like’ [the phrase which signals the start of the invasion], are so oblique, they don’t make any sense directly.” Without a libretto you might not understand the entire album, but “it’s not a very happy story,” says Lowery, even if you do.
New Roman works better taken as a whole. The songs on it are almost evenly divided between strong, penetrating numbers with memorable choruses, and briefer, more fragmented numbers, many consisting of only a couple of lines. The disc’s strongest track, “51-7”, outlines the young protagonist’s decision to enlist (“Nothing to believe in except God and country/Can’t stand to see ourselves pushed around or fucked with/Well give me a chance to show the world what I’m made of”). Elsewhere, “White Fluffy Clouds” offers detailed descriptions of weaponry provided to Lowery by soldiers themselves; the vaguely Wilco-like “Flower” details the soldier’s work for TexSecurIntellicorp and his spiral into drug abuse (“And if I weren’t high on the flower/I could not work for the power/That stands for nothing decent anymore”); and the chorus of “Might Makes Right” (“They say that God is on our side/I don’t believe them”) pretty much sums up the whole enterprise.
