Lowery dons rocker garb for latest Cracker tour

David Lowery wears two hats - sometimes quite literally - as lead singer of the rock bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven.

"Sometimes we actually do Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker together, the same bill," he says, "and I got into where I'd actually change my shirt or something or change hats or change one thing that would vary things and freak people out if they're really paying attention."

This weekend, however, there will be no such confusion when Lowery brings his more boot-stomping, manure-kicking and now more than ever occasionally punk-rocking band Cracker to Durty Nellie's, 180 N. Smith St., Palatine, for a show at 9 p.m. Friday. The four-piece group is touring in advance of its new album, "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey," which finds it taking an approach closer to old-school punk. (See the typically comically caustic new song "Hand Me My Inhaler" on youtube.)

"It's fairly stripped-down," Lowery says, on the phone from the studio where they're doing final mixing for the May release before hitting the road this week. Yet in that the new album is true to the band's roots.

Lowery and his old Santa Cruz, Calif., teenage guitar pal Johnny Hickman formed Cracker in 1992 after CVB had for the time being disbanded. They'd long been planning to get back to doing music together when they both suddenly found themselves free. "Both Johnny and I had come out of bands before that that had like six people in them," Lowery recalls. "And in the case of Camper Van Beethoven it was largely a collective. We made decisions collectively and stuff like that. And there were a lot of things about that that were really unwieldy and counterproductive.

"When we formed Cracker," he adds, "it was, 'It's me and you, and we're just gonna hire everybody else and we just have to work it out between us what we want to do, and that's fine.'"

That's indeed how it has worked over 17 years and eight albums, including hits like "Teen Angst," "Happy Birthday to Me" and "Low." This time, however, there is more of a group feel, as they wrote and recorded the album more or less live with bassist Sal Maida and drummer Frank Funaro (who like Lowery doubles up playing with CVB as well). That too, however, has only returned the band to its roots and a sound closer to its 1992 eponymous debut album.

"That was made when the Manchester sound was big," Lowery remembers, "the dance-rock revolution that was coming out of England, which was very quickly wiped out by the wave of grunge that hit about six months later."

At the time, people commented on what a reactionary move "Cracker" was as a country-rock album with an emphasis on the rock.

"To me, it's not really a throwback record," Lowery insists. "It's not a roots record, it's just that our sense of 'now' is not the last 18 months. Our sense of 'now' is the last 30 years of rock music.

"What's cool about that is you put that record on now, and I guarantee you it doesn't sound like anything else that came out that year. But it doesn't sound dated, either."

That's what they're trying to achieve with "Sunrise." "It's just our sense of what 'now' is," Lowery says. "It's a bigger sense of time and playing what we feel like playing right now and what we think sounds good right now and not playing what everybody else has been doing the past 18 months."

It's also their sense of what will sound good on a club tour of smaller venues like Durty Nellie's. So look for Lowery to be wearing his curl-brimmed cowpunk hat this weekend - if not a Napoleon Bonaparte chapeau befitting a trip through the coldest part of the country at the coldest time of the year. No, on second thought, that would be more fitting for the Campers.