Story #7 "Eye of Fatima" -- Camper Van Beethoven
"He's got the Eye of Fatima on the wall of his room"
I don't understand people who say they just listen to "whatever's on the radio," when it comes to music. As if they had no choice in the matter.
I grew up in a house where music was always on and always eclectic. Frank Sinatra ballads followed psychedelic sounds and exotic foreign language music like the album "An Evening in Beirut." It was all over the place.
Neither parent had musical ability, but paid for my piano lessons and supported my switch to drums. Technically, both instruments are percussion instruments. But at least in my case, playing by ear is a hell of a lot easier on the drums. To be fair, I did have several years of sheet reading for percussion in the orchestra and marching band.
But when it came time for the drum set, even my perfectionist teacher dispensed with sheet music and was basically like "Okay here's a simple beat. Kick drum on 1 and 3, snare on two and four, keep the highhat playing eighth notes the whole time." The first song I learned how to play was Talking Heads' "Wild, wild life," a song made up of avertising slogans. Basically I live at the center of own venn diagram.
When I was in seventh grade, a girl who was a junior in high school and played bass got me in to Camper Van Beethoven. I had a crush on her so I'm fairly certain I'd have gotten into R.E.O. Speedwagon if she'd played it for me. Thankfully that was not the case.
The very first album I played along to on the drums from start to finish was "Telephone Free Landslide Victory." Far from being told to shut the fuck up, my mom encouraged endless practice sessions and would flick the basement lights when I was playing to get my attention so she could yell down the stairs to "play that Greek-sounding song again."
When the bassist let me borrow their major label debut album I moved on to "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart." Songs like "Oh Death," tapped into the country gothic that R.E.M. was mining with arguably less college rock and more traditional sounds. Despite being on Virgin, the band didn't give up its restlessness. "She Divines Water" devolves into psych strangeness, "Change Your Mind," sounds like they hired a drunken high school trombone player to carry the tune, and "Life is Grand," is a vintage David Lowery "fuck you," celebrating life with plenty of snark.
As an opening track, "Eye of Fatima (part one)" announces its weirdness with pride, setting the tone for the rest of the album. "And I am the Eye of Fatima on the wall of the motel room, and cowboys on acid are like Egyptian cartoons." And also telling the listener to "Take the hands off the clock we're gonna be here a while."
Cowboys on Acid? Huh? Okay. I'm not even old enough to drive at this point in time, and haven't had acid let alone cigarettes. This is a new world.
Decades later, I'm living in Los Angeles, and start seeing the Eye of Fatima (or hamsa) everywhere. It's also when I learn it isn't pronounced Fa-TEE-ma, but FAH-ti-mah, and I still need to correct myself when I'm talking abut the artifact and not the song.
I saw it at a wine store in Manhattan Beach. It showed up in graffiti murals in Venice. Someone at work had an adult coloring book and was filling an eye of fatima in one day. Suddenly it was everywhere I looked.
And while the song seems like a druggy ride featuring a couple with coke holed up in a motel watching cartoons, with a lot of non-sequiturs thrown in for good measure, I was more drawn to what that symbol actually represents: Superstition. Religion. Spirituality. Some kind of belief system ancient or otherwise.
In the story "Eye of Fatima," the protagonist who is still processing the death of a parent, ends up taking another loved one (their wife) to a hospital around Christmas time where they encounter a prisoner, a flurry of nurses, and an older Middle Eastern woman who wears the eye of fatima like a talisman. Death weighs heavy throughout, but so does faith.
The majority of the stories in the book are about technology including this one, in a sense, because it asks the reader to ponder this question: Why in the most modern of times, do these ancient religions still exist?
A-Sides and B-Sides is available on iBook as well as Amazon and also Kobo and Nook. You can preview a nice chunk of it, too. Hope you'll consider buying if you like what you see. Here's what the cover looks like.
How on earth was this released on a major label?
By the way Bradley Nowell of Sublime covered this. And later on, for a tribute album after his untimely and tragic death, Camper covered "Garden Grove."