Cracker would be formed in the early 90’s and be born out of the ashes of another band
Camper Van Beethoven who had a cult following, had a record deal with Virgin and even opened
for REM, but musical differences led to the band dissolving in 1989. It was following
the dissolution of the band frontman David Lowery would reconnect with an old friend
named Johnny Hickman and the two began work on some new music and with Lowery still under
contract with Virgin they soon took the songs to the label and got a recording deal. The
band would release self titled debut record in 1992 and while it sold a respectable ¼
of a million copies thanks to the single teen angst which topped the modern rock charts.
But it would be the band’s follow up album Kerosene Hat that would be the band’s commercial
peak thanks to the song Low. However the song almost never made it onto radio stations because
of it’s lyrical content. Today let’s talk about the history of the song Low.
A musical salad of ska, polka, folk, 60’s psychadliec rock with flavours of middle eastern
music, the band Camper van Beethoven music would in sharp contrast to Cracker which was
more straigh forward rock n’ roll. Despite some calling Lowery a sell out for
abandoning his indie roots to write more commercial It would be his longtime hidden musical tastes
that served as inspiration for Lowery and Hickman’s new project telling LA Times
“For years I was in this semi-famous ‘alternative rock’ band,” “And people would go, ‘What
are your influences?’ So I’d usually start at about the punk-rock era . . . and edit
out a lot of things. You don’t tell people, ‘Secretly, I listen to the first four Tom
Petty records over and over again.’ “You don’t tell people that (ZZ Top’s)
‘Tres Hombres’ is a great record. I remember talking about Led Zeppelin a few times in
the earlier Camper days, and the reaction was always, ‘God, you like this horrible
‘70s bombastic thing? The single Low would be borne out a soundcheck
at a with Hickman telling Spin We were soundchecking in Portland, all a little
bit hungover, and I was just making noise. I started looping that riff over and over,
and David and Davy got up and started playing it, too. We kept playing until we had four
chords and David asked the front-of-the-house guy to record it. I probably would have forgotten
that riff if it had not been recorded.? By the band’s own admission they never thought
it would ever be a single but the record label pushed for the band to release it.
The song would peak at number 3 on the modern rock charts and 64 on the pop charts.The music
vidoe show in black and white was mostly memorable because of Lowery’s boxing match with actress
and comedian Sandra Bernard. Lowery would tell the buffalo news "I didn't want it to
look like a Blind Melon video," "I'm a different person than those people, I grew up in a different
era, in a different place. To me, the video represents the song really well . . . it's
a song about an obsession with a woman, comparing it to an addiction."
The idea to feature the actress and comedian would come from the director of the video
who interviewed lowery ahead of the shoot with him recalling to SPin “Carlos Grasso,
the director, is half-Italian and half-Mexican and he just can’t help getting really abstract
and theoretical. He interviewed me about “Low,” and finally decided it was a battle between
my masculine and feminine side. He asked who would be my feminine other and I said, “I
dunno, Sandra Bernhard?” Someone really sarcastic, snarky, gangly. He’s like, “Great,
we’ll call her up and see if she wants to box you.”?
Initially Bernhard said she would only do the shoot if she liked the song and she ended
up loving it and agreed to do it. But the song also landed the band in some
hot water. Due to numerous drug references the head of the band’s label forced David
Lowery to write a letter to radio stations denying the song had anything to do with drugs
with the frontman telling Spin Michael Plen, the label’s head of rock radio and a longtime
Camper and Cracker supporter, made me write a letter about that to pass out to radio stations.
It was practically an affidavit, swearing that the phrase was actually “being stone”
— not “stoned.” True story. It was like, “I don’t believe you and neither will
anyone else, but there needs to be deniability and this is what we’re gonna say.” It
was like pretending there was no paper trail, where a lawyer goes, “Hey, call me on my
cell.” The song would end up peaking at number 3
on the modern rock tracks charts and 64 on the billboard hot 100 charts. Kerosene hat
would be the band’s commercial peak and despite slowing album sales in the following
years they’ve still got a solid fan base and still have profitable tours to this very
day. That does it for today’s video.