Camper Van Beethoven: Telephone Free Landslide Victory

It’s weird when you only realize later in life what could have had a major influence on your tastes. And honestly Telephone Free Landslide Victory isn’t an album I’ve thought about in decades. But listening to it in 2024 I realize my young brain in 1985 really took a lot of the qualities of this goofy, slacker rock record to heart. The mix of inane storytelling, the tossed-off IDGAF playing style, the ska… The ska! Just the attitude that has such a direct line to things that steamrolled me into my future musical tendencies. Because I played this tape in my Walkman. Over and over again. And it stuck.

This most definitely led to my irreverent and asinine love of The Dead Milkmen a year later. And the ska of it all led me directly to Fishbone soon after and, to some extent, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not to mention other bands that informed my early love of weird indie rock that seem to directly sprout from the head of this album, like Thelonious Monster. It’s all of a piece. And, believe me, there is a direct slacker, low-fi No. Cal vibe through-line to Pavement. It’s there, man. And, if you squint, you can feel the early shambling of Built to Spill and even the oddball swashbuckling sea shantiness of The Decemberists. The point is, this is some diverse music we’re looking at. Or listening to. But it all feels like an amalgam of what’s to come; growing out of the mid-eighties rise of indie and alternative rock music as it diverges into the college rock of an R.E.M., the more punk-ish underground L.A. scene and the truly burgeoning indie rock thing that became the backbone of all Gen-X hipster nonsense that I ascribe to. A la Pavement.

And all of it is wrapped in the most lasting and influential track from this record, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” Yes, it’s silly. It’s honestly downright dumb. But the second I heard it for the first time on KROQ as a twelve year old, I probably said out loud: “This is now my shit.” Okay, I definitely didn’t say that because my mom would have crashed the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, but it spoke to me in a way not much else had. And then it got play on the Dr. Demento show. Another thing that all kids my age — or at least I thought at the time — listened to weekly. So, it was cool. But also a novelty song? And it eventually — and my sense of timing here is a little fuzzy, but I distinctly recall it happening — got video play on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Which was my touchstone for new music discovery and what was truly gnarly. A word that meant “cool/good” in Southern California in the 80s. The song itself is complete nonsense. But there is something about it that just hits. To this day I could listen to it on repeat 20 times in a row and not get sick of it. It’s an amazing pop song; it just is.

This is all to say that this was just a tape I liked back in the mid-eighties. It made me feel like I was hearing some adult art that wasn’t available to everyone else. They didn’t play it on the Top 40 radio. It was weird and quirky and employed that all-too-attractive thing called sarcasm. But unbeknownst to me at the time it made me want to seek out things that gave me that same feeling. That feeling that all the Wham!, Madonna, Huey Lewis and even Tears for Fears and Simple Minds didn’t. Like I said, it was my jam. And apparently I wasn’t the only one listening.