Cracker

“We’re right back where we were when we put out the first three Camper Van Beethoven records,” says David Lowery. “There are no rules.”
After more than a decade and a half on the megalithic EMI/Virgin Records label, a peculiar business relationship that started back in 1987 with CVB’s album Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, Lowery and his subsequent band Cracker have now had to step back and reassess their situation, having been booted out of the privileged major label club last year (alongside many others) with little explanation why.
The actual story of how they came to be label-less and in this realm without rules is an amusing one, but there’s little need to relate it here. With barely disguised malice, Lowery describes how he found himself standing in a Los Angeles parking lot trying to drag answers out of his A&R man’s laconic personal assistant in the song “Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself,” which closes the band’s most recent album, Countrysides – released, incidentally, on Cooking Vinyl after Lowery and his faithful manager Jackson Haring supposedly smuggled the master tapes out of the Virgin vaults.