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From The Desk Of Camper Van Beethoven’s Jonathan Segel: The Electric Guitar

CamperVanBeethovenLogoLa Costa Perdida (429) kicks off Camper Van Beethoven’s 30th-anniversary year amidst an orchestrated (if deserving) surge in recognition for the group—everything from Paul Rudd donning a vintage Camper concert tee in the film This Is 40 to glowing quotes from members of R.E.M. and the Meat Puppets. The LP is CVB’s first album since 2004’s New Roman Times and was mostly recorded at multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel’s Oakland home studio a year prior to his move to Sweden. “The process was similar, perhaps, to the recording of Camper’s third album, in that we could experiment and had time to work on things,” says Segel. “The first two CVB albums were recorded in a weekend.” Segel will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.

Guitar

Segel: I love the electric guitar. What a great instrument! I mean, I know everybody thinks that since I play violin I must love that, but anybody who’s heard my solo records knows the truth. I’ve been playing the guitar for a longer time, anyway. The electric guitar is the shit. It can be anything, so many tonal possibilities. I remember some years ago Björk saying something about how the electric guitar was a 20th-century instrument that had limited possibilities for the future, and then she went on to use violins and harps and choruses. Whatever! I mean, yes, I like the violin, but no instrument is “timeless” in the sense that it evokes something that is outside of time more than the electric guitar. And yes, we can recognize the tones of the guitar from music in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, maybe even the ’00s (not sure about that … ?), and there are things to love in all of these eras of its development (yes, even the ’80s. I think.) There are so many ways that this instrument can sound nowadays, you can find anything in it.

When I was living in Oakland, our neighbor was a 95-year-old Slavic lady who complained sometimes about me playing the electric guitar, but in an odd way. She said, “When you play the acoustic guitar, you can express yourself, but with the electric guitar, you express only power.” I’m not sure I fully agree, but I have thought a lot about this and have taken it to mean that when I play the electric guitar, I have a power to express what needs to be expressed in a way that the acoustic instruments don’t have. And yes, I know that there is phenomenal beauty in acoustic music that cannot happen when it is amplified, but the addition of some wattage can increase some music beyond just the song. The electric guitar is an experience, in its playing and its being heard. It can even make lame lyrics seem meaningful (cf. most rock music).

A corollary to this is that I like vintage electric guitars. Not that I can really afford them, nor can most musicians. I have put together a couple of old Stratocasters from parts, after my 1971 Strat was stolen in Montreal on our New Roman Times tour in 2004, but to actually buy a ’60s Stratocaster now would be $15-30k. David Kalt from the Chicago Music Exchange told us when we played there last January that the flow of nice old instruments was definitely out of the hands of musicians and into the hands of lawyers and bankers and such. But he let me play a 1961 Stratocaster for the show. (Here, sitting in with Cracker after the CVB performance, and I got to play an even rarer 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard in the vault upstairs.)

I know some people who will always say how dumb it is to venerate old expensive instruments when “they are built the same way out of the same things” or even built better, with more accurate tools nowadays. Unfortunately, for me, this is not my experience! Maybe it is the “worse tools” that forced more variation in the hand-making of the old ones, but also that wood came from forests that don’t exist anymore and had been cut and drying for years. Certainly when Brazilian Rosewood was declared endangered in the late ’60s, Martin guitars never sounded quite the same. And that 1960 Les Paul was from mahogany that was so old and dry that it was not a heavy guitar, despite being a huge one-piece slab of mahogany. Ok, maybe it’s not “worth” the quarter-million dollars that it’s valued at now, but I thought it was a pretty nice guitar.

Video after the jump.

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