From the Post<P>Camper Van Beethoven<P><BR>Ironic rock and the digital age don't make for fast friends. Camper Van Beethoven's Saturday show at the 9:30 club fell victim to the non-relationship.<P>A reformed Camper, an outfit that first popped up in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1983 and broke up seven years later, is now touring in support of both a box-set retrospective and a self-consciously quirky remake of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" -- not just the song, the entire album. That sort of patent absurdity was, from the start, a part of the band's manifesto: Camper was perhaps the only act of its generation that had a violinist and covered the same turf as the Southern California punks.<P>Singer and frontman David Lowery, whom longtime fans remember as quite a between-songs banterer back in the day, let the laptop computer that sat on a desk beside him onstage do most of the talking on this night -- "Regime change in Washington!" the digital voice kept repeating. Lowery likewise traded e-mails across the stage with violinist Jonathan Segel, also equipped with a laptop, during song breaks. (Lead guitarist Greg Lisher offered a possible motive for his mates' sullenness, explaining that the band had been "Maced" by fans a night earlier in Philadelphia.)<P>On a more positive note, Camper generously gave the old guard all the material it came for over the two-set, three-hour show. When rendering "Take the Skinheads Bowling," a college-rock power-pop fave from 1986, he delivered the line that served as a template for songs of the next generation of slacker rock bands, such as Pavement: "I had a dream / It was about nothing." Other highlights included "The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon" and "The Ambiguity Song," which despite the title remains almost pop enough for Tom Petty. But the show hit a brick wall when Lowery announced he wanted to do "Devil Song," a tune he said the band hadn't performed in 14 years. But first he needed to look up the lyrics on the Internet. Some members of the crowd began heading for the exits during the computer interlude, and all momentum was lost. Worst of all, "Devil Song" wasn't worth the wait.<BR>
