Cracker's style remains unconventional

There's a song on Cracker's latest album, "Forever," that conjures up an image of Tarzan rescuing Jane from a tribe of mutant chimpanzees. "Guarded by Monkeys" is a rousingly good song, but think again if you assume David Lowery and Johnny Hickman were inspired by vintage Johnny Weissmuller flicks.

"It's actually an Internet anti-hacking term that David found," says Hickman, who will appear Saturday with Cracker at Club Laga. "It's kind of an obscure one, but the way the phrase is used is different, and part of the reason I admire David so much. There must be a thousand different ways to say you're infatuated with a person, and David found a new way that's very effective."

Admittedly, a song as smart as "Guarded by Monkeys" isn't going to gain Cracker more fans in the mainstream - although Hickman says, "The girls at shows in France got it right away. They loved the song." No, intelligent rock songs tend to slip into a netherworld of radio oblivion.

Not that the group hasn't had hits. Hickman rattles off "Happy Birthday to Me," "Get Off This" and "Eurotrash Girl" as Cracker songs that have, well, cracked the airwaves. But trying to write a Top 40 song is just a "roll of the dice," he says.

"The one thing we do is make it a point to never underestimate the intelligence of the audience," Hickman says. "We never shoot for the lowest common denominator. People have a much greater ability to understand even the subtler things we do, so we don't edit the things that we do."

Because Hickman and Lowery are the lone mainstays of the band, they are sometimes compared to Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who also fashioned a reputation for brainy, intelligent music. But while Steely Dan's music often was accused of being soulless, even sterile, no one would likely say the same about Cracker. The music is a wedding of textures and sounds, weaving violins, keyboards and accordions into a mix of alt-country rock 'n' roll that, at times, recalls Lowery's work with Camper Van Beethoven, one of the most underappreciated bands from the '80s-alternative scene.

Lowery asked Hickman to join Camper at one point during that band's runs. But Hickman, who met Lowery almost 20 years ago while auditioning for a new-wave cover band, had signed a recording contract that never came to fruition. When Camper disbanded, Lowery was ready to join up with his old friend.

"We kind of came from different camps," Hickman says. "I came from a sort of rockabilly-country-punk-rock place, with a little bit of heavy rock, and David came from an eclectic sort of alt-rock place. The styles of Camper Van Beethoven are very similar to Cracker in that respect as well. They would do reggae-flavored songs, Middle Eastern-flavored songs and Eastern European folk songs. They weren't authentic, it was just their interpretation of what that music sounded like.

"And Cracker does the same thing. We'll get on a kick where we decide this is like a Kinks song we're writing here. And in the end, it might not sound like that at all, but that's the basic idea."

Which goes back to the basic collaboration between Lowery and Hickman. They live on opposite sides of the country: Lowery in Richmond, Va., and Hickman in southern California. Prior to the release of "Forever," they met in Tucson, Ariz., to write songs.

Unconventional• Sure, but that's part of Cracker's appeal.

"We've always reserved the right for other people to play on the albums," Hickman says. "When you play with that many people, a cross-pollination of styles happens, which is really, really good. It gives David and me, as songwriters, the ability to not really genre hop, but blend from one style to another. I think it makes the music more interesting."