Why radio stations didn't want to play Cracker's 'Low'
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I cite my sources and they may differ than other people's accounts, so I don't guarantee the actual accuracy of my videos.
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.”