![[album cover]](http://songotheday.com/uploads/2007/07/c73470q22mw.thumbnail.jpg)
It’s really weird how bands develop identities. Like, who the hell is Cracker? What are they? Alt-country? Pop? Adult-oriented rock? Bad? Awesome? Ridiculous? A Serious Band that People Think About?
I always felt that, for whatever reason, Cracker was kind of shit on. No respect. Known by frat guys for ‘Euro-trash Girl,’ known by MTV watchers for Sandra Bernhardt boxing in the ‘Low’ video, known by cool kids for their pretty uncool succession of radio hits in the nineties - ‘I Hate My Generation’ and ‘Nothing to Believe In,’ mostly. They were always kind of…just…lame.
David Lowery didn’t help. A lead singer that is both ugly/dorky and arrogant/a dick doesn’t work with the media. They’ll let you be one or the other, maybe - but not both.
Lowery has a special place in my heart, though, in part because he’s the guy who started Camper Van Beethoven. Lowery, like me, went to UC Santa Cruz, and it was there that he started one of the more interesting and bizarre bands of the 80s. Songs about Lassie flying to the moon and skinheads bowling, styles that ranged from Eastern European folk to Grateful Dead jams to SoCal punk to ska, often in the same song. Great stuff.
When I lived in Santa Cruz, towards the end of my time there, Cracker played a show at the Catalyst – a great, great venue if you ever get the chance. And there was this mini-Camper reunion show as an encore, with some of the guys from the band that still lived there. I ran into Camper’s old bassist, Victor Krummenacher, in a liquor store afterwards. It was my first run-in with a musician I respected since I shook Ian MacKaye’s hand as a freshman in high school. I was similarly dorky with Krummenacher, though at least this time when I shook his hand lamely and said something along the lines of, “You guys rule,” my face wasn’t covered in acne.
In any event, Cracker was quite different than Camper, more cynical, more serious, more refined, more pop, more focused. There were some diehard Camper fans in Santa Cruz, people who would, mostly out of respect for Camper but with a bit of distain for their local music scene, call them the best band to every come out of the town. And they immediately dubbed Cracker sellout crap.
But I’ll be damned if Cracker didn’t write some absolutely gorgeous songs, many off the album ‘Golden Age,’ on which this song is the title track. My favorite is probably ‘Big Dipper,’ which is all about Lowery’s Santa Cruz days. A couple lyrics from that song still make me miss the place, even though I never liked it much. They are ‘cigarettes and carrot juice,’ which perfectly encapsulates the people of that area of California. And ‘from the top you can see San Jose, though I know it’s not that pleasant,’ a dead-on depiction of the view from the top of the roller coaster on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
The song ‘Golden Age,’ though, is to me the best representation of just how good Cracker was, and how strange it seems to me that when I mention them to other people, they either don’t recognize the name or kind of sneer.
The song always makes me think of summer in my old hometown of Millville, California. ‘The flaxen light off the dying wheat’ perfectly describes the fields of yellowed grass that stretch for miles all around my parents house. The idea of ‘your round whiskey mouth and your dandelion teeth’ sounds like every summer romance I’ve had since I started to drink.
But the sentiment that always gets me is the line “This is the Golden Age, it’s hard to imagine, with the way I feel today.” It had a double meaning for me – the first being that I grew up in the Clinton era. In high school, it seemed every other period in history I learned about, there was famine or death or war or scandal. All we had was Monika Lewinsky. I often felt like the world was a good place and getting better, that we were safe and there were no major problems on the horizon, that perhaps we were reaching a Golden Age, and I should count myself lucky for living in it. Yet there I was, a misanthropic high schooler upset and hating everything.
The second layer of meaning was the way depression can grab you and pull you under during the summer in a way that it can’t during the winter. You’re living in this Golden Age of sun and beauty, flaxen wheat and dandelions, but your insides are so out of step with the outside world, you feel like you’re in an alternate reality. And you feel guilty about it, or at least I did. Another line from ‘Big Dipper touched on this – ‘the terrible green green grass, and violent blooms of flowered dresses.’ Back in high school, these lyrics made me feel a whole hell of a lot better about being bummed out in the beautiful California sun
This particular summer so far is rad. I am truly digging it. I’m playing in bands again, Fourth of July party coming up, I get to see my brother and mom and dad in like 4 days, and we’ll be spending a week together on an island off the coast of Washington. Life is good, etc.
But when it gets bad, and it always does, even if only for a little while, I’ll take comfort in the Golden Age, and David Lowery, and Cracker.
-Casey Mills
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Gay.
What’s so amazing about Cracker, I think, is how hard the ass they sucked was, and yet people still listened to them. Still considered them a “real band.”
Not. When ‘Low’ came out I was crazy in love with it. I thought Cracker meant someone who was on crack or someone who did crack, and I swear I remember looking at whatever album that single was on in Tower Records in El Toro and seeing drug paraphernalia on the cover. So I felt pretty subversive humming it around the house, especially since he says “like being stoned” in there several times. This was during the record-songs-off-the-radio period, which later period saw me obtaining, inadvertently, during one of those “I’ll just record this shit for an hour, see what I might find” periods, a recording of ‘Kryptonite’ by Three Doors Down, and keeping it because at the beginning it had Katie Holmes going “Hi this is Katie Holmes and you’re listening to The World Famous KROQ” and I thought that was pretty sexy. I was way into Dawson’s Creek now, had a huge crush on Joey Potter, and totally wanted to date her, even though she didn’t exist. This was also the time I started getting really depressed and adolescenty, pissed off and holed up in my room, wishing I had a girlfriend and writing song lyrics that went along to either Rage Against the Machine or Third Eye Blind songs.
And speaking of Kryptonite, on Friday I bought a bike lock for my, well, for my bicycle, of Kryptonite brandage, and tossed the packaging since, you know, it’s trash. (I actually recycled it.) Anyway now the thing’s pretty much a paperweight, since the fucking combo was totally written on the packaging. Rad.
I’m really glad I was never into this song when I was younger, because it’s already dripping in nostalgia — it makes me hurt just listening to it now, for the first time. My childhood was pretty much wasted just being a total dork at all times.
July 17th, 2007, at 8:47 pm #Also, speaking of crackers, I swear to God there is none more inconsistent than the Ritz. I love Ritz, but seriously, they sometimes blow. Like name a better cracker than Ritz on a good day. Impossible. But there’s no way to know whether you’re going to get a good batch or a bad one. No way. And now they’ve got this New and Improved like Best Tasting Ritz Ever thing going on, which I wrote about on my old blog, but I’m “enjoying” a tube right now and I’ll tell you what, it’s far from the best I’ve ever had. Tastes more like an unconsecrated Eucharist than the salty, buttery goodness I’d expect from such a fine American institution as the National Biscuit Company. Jesus.
July 18th, 2007, at 5:13 pm #