Cracker headlines Nashua mini-festival
Though he started two bands that found international renown and still tour decades later, David Lowery is an atypical rock star. He’s a trained mathematician who wrote code in Silicon Valley during its command line days, and he’s now a senior lecturer on business at the University of Georgia.
Lowery is also an erudite defender of artists’ rights who successfully spearheaded a class action suit against Spotify, and went before Congress to slam the federal government’s arcane Copyright Royalty Board, which sets streaming payments. In his view, the agency is captive to the industry it’s supposed to regulate.
“They’re saying, ‘we’re able to give music cheaply to consumers,’ but it’s literally starving the music ecosystem,” Lowery said in a recent phone interview. “Either the board that sets the rate needs to be completely overhauled, with new rules set for it, or the whole thing just needs to be abolished, because it’s what people would call crony capitalism at its worst.”
Musicians at his level, playing for 1,000 fans or less most nights, exemplify the gig economy, Lowery told the Radikaal podcast in June, cobbling together multiple jobs in the industry. His first foray as a performer was anything but ambitious; Lowery joked about Camper van Beethoven’s unexpected breakthrough in “Mom I’m Living the Life, 1981,” from his new album In the Shadow of the Bull.
“I had a band / it was a joke,” he sings, “then it was not / we got some real gigs / in San Francisco.”
Offbeat songs like “Take the Skinheads Bowling” and “ZZ Top Goes To Egypt” earned CVB a cult following that carried them away from their Northern California punk rock beginnings. It dissolved in 1990; he formed Cracker with Johnny Hickman, the name a nod to Lowery’s Georgia roots, and released a slew of country-leaning alt-rock hits led by “Low” and “Get Off This.”
Cracker tops a bill with the percussive Entrain and rootsy Muddy Ruckus at the upcoming Gate City Music Fest on Aug. 27 at Nashua’s Holman Stadium. The current touring band includes Hickman and a pair of players from their 2014 album Berkeley to Bakersfield. Lowery said recent set lists reflect a musical dichotomy.
“We are doing this tour with kind of the band that did the country disc, but they’re actually pretty much rock players,” he said. “So it goes from rock to sort of our pseudo soul or pseudo blues rock and then to the country stuff. It’s all over the place.”
The snarky definition of Cracker’s non-genre reflects “our unique stamp,” Lowery said. “We’re not trying to do exactly soul, or exactly blues rock, or any of these things. We’re borrowing parts, and bringing it into our format.”
Lately, they’ve twanged up a few songs from their nascent Bay Area days.
“Some of them fit really nicely into what we’re doing; adding the pedal steel to it, the songs are a little different,” Lowery said, adding that a reworked version of “Skinheads” will probably be ready for the Nashua show.
“The early straight-ahead simple Camper van Beethoven songs ended up being pretty interesting,” he said. “We try to play a good cross-section of stuff from across our catalog. We don’t leave out the hits.”
He’s keen to hit the road after the pandemic stopped the world for over a year, even more so because his wife is a promoter who books Atlanta’s 40 Watt nightclub and other venues.
“Here’s a lesson I told my kids — never marry someone in the same business you’re in,” Lowery said. “If things go wrong, everybody’s screwed. It was pretty crazy for us, because there were no concerts. She’s only really going back on salary Sept. 1, basically 18 months with no work. … We really had to get clever.”
Gate City Music Fest
When: Friday, Aug. 27, 3 p.m.
Where: Holman Stadium, 67 Amherst St., Nashua
Tickets: $25/reserved seat, $150/six-person pod at gatecitybrewfestnh.com
Featured photo: Cracker. Courtesy photo.
