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 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0143039431/reasonm