Whether playing Camper Van Beethoven’s lysergic brand of cheerfully insane indie rock or prying Cracker’s bourbon-stained mother lode from roots rock, David Lowery has always been an American storyteller. Cracker was twice anthologized in 2006: Once by its former label, Virgin, in the form of Get On With It: The Best Of Cracker; and the other courtesy of the band itself, which re-recorded its songs for Greatest Hits Redux. Cracker also has a new studio album, Greenland (Cooking Vinyl), which weaves gritty blues, country folk and even Indian raga into its dusty, grand design. MAGNET caught up with Lowery to get his take on the group’s warring best-ofs.

So how old are your kids now?
Almost four and almost seven.

They’re probably old enough to have sorted out what it means to have a working musician for a father.
Well, sort of. One guy was a friend of mine before I moved into this neighborhood—it’s a neighborhood in Richmond, Va., that’s pretty square, doctors, engineers, lawyers, people like that—this one neighbor across the street was an environmental lawyer. One day we were hanging out and one of my sons looks up at him and says, “Hey Mr. Raine, what song do you sing?”

And what was his answer?
He named a song from Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü—something to sing in the shower, but I can’t remember which one.

Not to insert the obvious lawyer joke, but that’s pretty damned cool, for an attorney, anyway.
[Laughs] Well, if you’re a hipster, eventually you have to get a job.

I’d like to get your take on the whole Virgin vs. Cracker greatest-hits fiasco. We’ve been having a debate here at the magazine about which best-ofs are truly the best, and which are dross.
Our original greatest-hits package was (2000’s) Garage d’Or. That fulfilled our contractual obligation (with Virgin). At that time, the guy who babysat us at Virgin was this great guy, who was like, “Let’s do two CDs! Let’s do some odds and sods!” So we did the greatest hits, put a couple new tracks on it so we’d have something to work to radio, and then we had a whole disc of b-sides, live tracks and oddities. It was cool. The packaging was nice, the photo was this throwaway thing that Danny Clinch did on the cover. It had a good vibe to it.

Anyway, we found out through the grapevine that Virgin was going to put out another greatest-hits CD and DVD (titled Get On With It). So the first thing we tried to do was intercept the DVD footage before Virgin could get to it and buy the rights. [Laughs] But we were too late. Originally what happened, I think us and Virgin Records ... [trails off] I mean, there can’t really be any personal animosity between a band and a corporation, especially a corporation that changes all of its key personnel every two years or so, right? So there’s no real animosity. When we found out they were putting out this greatest-hits record that we didn’t really want them to do ... we first tried to reason with them. They said, “We can do whatever the fuck we want” to one of our managers. He’s not really the kind of guy you say that to. He’s been a promoter for many years, and those guys are all like being one step away from the mob, basically. And also he’s Southern, and felt like they were treating him like he was out on the porch in his overalls, drinking moonshine and playing a banjo. Anyway, he got it stuck in his craw, so to speak, and really wanted to fuck with them. Oh, and they wanted to put it out a month ahead of our new record, Greenland, so our release schedule was screwed, and we were kind of bummed about that. So he essentially put the whole thing into a question that has long been a Camper and Cracker tradition: “What would Andy Kaufman do?” [Laughs] So, that’s essentially what we’ve been doing with Virgin for the past year. Now we’re on another label—an English one we like a lot—so it’s as if we created this Andy Kaufman the wrestler versus ...

Jerry Lawler, his supposed foe?
Exactly, Jerry Lawler. The great thing about that whole thing is that they secretly conspired on all of it, you know? Except that no one at Virgin was quick enough to realize that this could be a lot of fun.

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