In today’s postmodern, narrative-driven world, what 30-plus-year-old band led by a college professor hasn’t released an anthology presenting its own career in a parallel universe?
Ok, well, maybe there’s just one: Cracker.
Fronted by singer/songwriter David Lowery—also of Camper Van Beethoven—Cracker has had a lengthy, decades-long career, even if some listeners only associate them with early ‘90s hits like “Low” and “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now).”
Lowery and Company set out to change that perception and highlight the wealth of music they’ve created throughout the years. The result is Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective, which recently dropped via Cooking Vinyl as a double CD and triple vinyl package.
The band throws everything from roots to punk into a catchy catalog based on strong songcraft. Not surprisingly, the set includes re-recorded material, demos, outtakes, and live tracks and has something for fans who have followed the band for years, as well as something for the aforementioned fans who may know a track for two.
We talked to Lowery—a senior lecturer at Terry College—via Zoom about the collection and his career.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Many people might be surprised to learn you have a doctorate in higher education. How did you choose that path?
I had been guest lecturing and teaching at the University of Georgia and then got a more permanent gig. The hardest thing about a doctorate is writing the dissertation, and I had the dissertation in my head. I knew what I wanted it to be about, and I sort of needed a place to fit it, and it fit really well with higher education. It was actually about public policy and copyright but in particular, this thing to do with the Higher Education Act. So, I took the classes I needed to take, and turned in my dissertation. It was actually a great experience because the former head of the university, Charles Knapp, had sort of come back to fill a temporary position at Terry College and he was kind of the one who talked me into doing it. He ended up being my major professor.
Being in academia, I’m sure you know the phrase “publish or perish.” Do you get some credit for putting out albums, or are you expected to publish academic papers?
I’m in the business college. Our music program is a business program. We don’t deal with any of the creative stuff, which makes it a whole bunch easier. So, there’s a lot of people who are professionally qualified. I do publish things every once in a while. Actually, I wrote a piece for a Stanford conference on AI that was sort of commissioned by the Justice Department Antitrust Division. So, I do write real papers, but most of the time I’m professionally qualified. That is, I’m in the business. I manage a large catalog of songs and recordings.
What made you decide to put out the new Cracker anthology? I know something about the genesis of it, which is the majors own the original recordings, and it would be a lot to license them. But it probably costs you more money to put it out than you’re going to make back from it, or at least conceivably. What was the motivation to re-record and re-release the material?
Well, it’s not all re-recorded. We had re-recorded things over the years for when we had commercial licenses and stuff like that, or film licenses. We had sort of methodically re-recorded a bunch of our stuff. It sounds really good. And then that allowed us to sort of have one of the greatest hits (packages) that came out in, like, 2004. It allowed us to keep a lot of royalties. So, what this really is, is there’s about two or three songs that we re-recorded for this.
I thought it was more than that.
Well, there are re-records, but we had done them for other reasons, right? And then specifically for this project, there were three that we did re-record, and they’re re-recorded in a very kind of stripped-down way. That’s “Merry Christmas Emily.” Well, sort of stripped down, like not necessarily in a studio. It’s using our home gear and stuff like that. It’s “King of Bakersfield,” and it’s the version of “Almond Grove,” which I had basically had redone by John Keene, who did a bunch of R.E.M. stuff, and is my neighbor, lives just down the street. And John’s kind of notorious. If you give him something to work on, he just replays a bunch of the instruments because he can play everything, and it’s fantastic. But it’s cool. I mean, he’s a good player, right? (Laughs). So that was “Almond Grove.”
So, what the record is alternate takes that were things that were never released. They might have been done for some reason but never came out. Demos, live tracks, rare things, things that might have only been released, like physically on a B-side and went away. Probably about half is rare and completely unheard stuff, right? Then, the rest is our other alternate takes that people might know, like the stuff we did with Leftover Salmon. We took three of those. And there were a lot of things like that that we did. And so, this is a compilation of a lot of the great songs from Cracker and fan favorites, as well as hits and stuff like that. But a lot of these are versions that people are not aware of.
You had a ton of material to choose from. Why this and not that? How did you narrow it down?
Well, in a way, we had a lot of material. But when you start sort of building the disc, you might say, “There’s this fantastic live version of ‘I Ride My Bike’ from, you know, WWAV in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1996.” And then you go, “well, that’s a great version.” And then you put it in the context of everything else. You’re like, “huh, it just kind of just sounds too different.” Or it isn’t really as hi-fi as I thought it was when I compare it to these other ones. And it’s just kind of really hard to find a spot now for this, you know, because it sonically sounds so different. So just because you have a lot of material, I mean, it sorts itself out, especially if you spend a lot of time trying to sequence it.
At first, I thought, oh, we’ll do this chronologically. And then I’m like, wait a minute, that’s the stupidest idea in the world, because you’re going to cram all the radio hits up front. And no, no, no, no, no. You want to kind of really kind of tell a different story and make it into a record that has its highs and lows and its quiet spots and loud spots. And that sorts itself out as you’re building the flow of the record.
A wide variety of sounds here might surprise people who only know the radio songs. It’s not on this anthology, but you released a cover of “Loser” from the Grateful Dead on Kerosene Hat. At that time in the early 90s, the Dead were kind of aversion to the like alt-rock scene. I mean, Kurt Cobain had a t-shirt that said kill The Grateful Dead. Were you not a part of the alt rock movement in the same sense as Nirvana?
No, we did not consider ourselves necessarily a part of the alt-rock movement. We thought we had some songs that fit into that scene. And, we definitely, you know, played into that scene at certain times and stuff like that. But when I delivered our album to Virgin Records, we had a really great A&R guy named Mark Williams. He signed a ton of bands that you’ve heard of. He’s like the most unknown legendary A&R person in the music business. He signed Smashing Pumpkins, Lenny Kravitz, just on and on and on. He doesn’t self-promote. He loved our band. He loved Camper Van Beethoven. But I brought him this record. He’s like, “hey, I really like this record. But I got to tell you this. You know, essentially, you’re giving me a country rock, southern rock album, when like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, this is the biggest stuff in like the rock world, right now. So, if you’re happy selling like, you know, 60,000, 70,000 albums, I’m happy to put it out.”
I mean, I’m really paraphrasing and shorting the whole thing. But we were lucky. “Teen Angst,” the first song on the first album, was immediately picked up by MTV, rock radio, and alternative rock radio. It was rock enough that it fit. If you listen to those first two albums, they are more jammy, southern rock, and country than they are alternative. And the songs are long. They’re all over the place. There’s lots and lots of guitar hero solo moments in those records. I’d always avoided the Grateful Dead because I went to school at Santa Cruz, and that wasn’t my scene. But towards the end of Camper Van Beethoven, I discovered the Jerry Garcia album that “Loser” is from, right? And I was like, I really like this record. I just listened to it all the time. With “Loser,” I was just showing that to the guys in the band who sort of knew it, but not really in the studio. And that’s just direct to two track. We weren’t even really recording the record yet. You can hear me in the background talking to the band and telling them what changes to go through.
You’ve said that in other interviews that a lot of artists mellow as they age and that you haven’t. So what’s your artistic trajectory?
Well, I enjoy like getting on stage and playing probably a little too loud and stomping around kind of in the Neil Young and Crazy Horse vein. His songwriting does not super influence me, but just his persona and how to age in a certain way. Like Neil Young’s the shit to me.
