by Jed Gottlieb, Luke Baumgarten, and Leah Sottile

What's the best concept album about Bush's brave new America? While Green Day's American Idiot is no doubt the most popular, Camper Van Beethoven's New Roman Times is equally acerbic and twice as witty. What's more, it features lots of pedal steel, fiddle and lyrics like "That gum you like is back in style / Haven't seen you for a while / Spent all of Saturday pining away / For that strange Quebecoise girl in Cirque du Soleil."

If you think of Camper Van Beethoven at all, you probably think of 1985's college rock favorite, "Take the Skinheads Bowling," and not of 20-track concept albums complete with the de rigueur spaced-out instrumentals. That's why now is the perfect time to think of Camper (again).

New Roman Times has the usual concept-album plot — disillusioned boy from dysfunctional family joins radical fringe group, then does a 180-degree turn and joins different radical fringe group and/or becomes a Christ figure (see: Tommy, Quadrophenia, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Wall, etc.). Only this album also relates to the Patriot Act, and it's also down-to-earth in a way prog-rockers can't be.

Camper and Cracker founder David Lowery says the boys didn't sit around listening to a lot of Floyd or Yes while making New Roman Times — he sees the effort more akin to Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.

"To a certain extent, we did listen to the Who, which I think you can hear in songs like '51-7,' but we didn't really listen to a lot of concept albums," says Lowery. "In fact, we didn't even know we were going to make a concept album."

But Lowery and his cohorts were eerily fascinated with the patriotism and nationalism that swept the county after 9/11. Many of the songs started as ideas Lowery was working on with Cracker guitarist Johnny Hickman, but as Lowery toured with the Camper reunion, the project evolved. As the band members went into the studio after their reunion tour, they found the new American zeitgeist had crept into their music.

"All the songs just happened to be about the same subject matter as we were writing them," says Lowery. "That is what led us to believe that we were making a concept record, which in a way is very Camperish, even though we've never done one."

Eventually, the songs came to tell the story of a young misfit-turned-soldier for the Fundamental Christian Republic of Texas — a country that's on the verge of invading California.

"I grew up on military bases, so the main character could have easily been one of my cousins," says Lowery. "I don't know who said it, but all fiction is autobiographical."

When the band began the album, there was not yet a war in Iraq. Instead, the album was about what Lowery saw as the new American McCarthyism. But it's also about extraterrestrials and illicit pharmaceuticals because, well, that's just the band's thing.

"Every Camper record has to be in part about space aliens and hallucinogenic drugs," says Lowery.

The album and the Camper reunion have been such an underground success even kids have tuned in. Now everyone from Wilco to Widespread Panic cite the band as an influence. Phish has covered their songs and Modest Mouse — one of Lowery's favorite bands — has even snatched up Camper to open for the band on their summer tour.

"We're not just considered part of the punk and indie-rock crowd," says Lowery. "We've been adopted by hippie and jam bands too."

And Camper's returned the favor with a few jammy-type tunes at their live shows. What that translates to is a free-for-all and rockin' good time with songs about Bush, aliens, drugs and teen angst — which, when you think about it, are all pretty similar.

Camper Van Beethoven opens for Widespread Panic at the Gorge, Saturday, July 2, at 6 pm. Tickets: $35. Cracker opens for Widespread Panic on Sunday, July 3, at 6 pm at the Gorge. Tickets: $35. Visit: www.ticketmaster.com or call 325-SEAT.

Stuck in Neutral Wants You -- After about six years of helping make other people's movies, the crew at North by Northwest Entertainment is preparing to make one of their own again. Stuck in Neutral is set to begin filming in 2006, but the pre-production work is gearing up in earnest this summer — including an opportunity for local bands to help create the film's soundtrack.

It's the story of a kid with cerebral palsy. Shawn McDaniel's body is twisted and prone to involuntary spasms and seizures. Psychiatrists estimate his IQ at 1.

What his parents don't know, though, is that he has a photographic memory and is easily the most articulate person in the story. More so even than his father, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He has poignant things to say about the way his condition affects those around him, but is ultimately helpless to express these things to those around him.

The film is based on the book by Northwest author Terry Trueman, and writer/director Juan Mas says the adaptation process was difficult from the beginning. First, since no one else can communicate with him, Trueman's Shawn does a lot of first-person narration, explaining himself and his situation to the reader. This works well for a novel, but for a screenplay, Mas says "it's like the kiss of death," because lots of narration usually means lots of voiceover work. And too much voiceover makes a movie about as compelling as vacation slide show.

So Mas and Trueman, along with writing partner Robert Caisley, had to figure out a way to make the thought processes of a severely handicapped kid engage an audience. "That was the first big hurdle," Mas said.

Their solution is part American Beauty, part Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The movie will begin at a moment of crisis. Shawn will look back over a period of weeks to figure out how he got to that point. Guiding the tour, Shawn's brain will be represented by an able-bodied person who lingers on camera, talking directly to the audience, as the rest of the actors (including his handicapped self) move around the screen.

Having an able-bodied Shawn, though, obviously means the actor who plays him can't have cerebral palsy. The next big hurdle, then, is finding a young actor capable of tackling the unbelievably difficult task of playing a person with a condition as debilitating as Shawn's. The search will begin later this summer in Spokane. If no local drama club standouts pass muster, the search will move on from there.

The soundtrack, like the part of Shawn, will be homegrown. Beginning July 7, North by Northwest and the Blvd. will audition local acts, battle of the bands style, for inclusion in the movie. They are interested in all genres of music but warn cover bands to stay home — ruling out any possibility of hearing a screamo version of "Tommy" playing as the McDaniel family confronts its crises.

Mas is looking for artists to produce new material to fit the film. He promises the winners an important role in the creative process, saying the bands will be given scripts and will help choose where and how the songs are presented.

The Blvd.'s general manager, Jeff Maahs, says he has bands for the first two weeks, but he's leaving room for late entries. He wants to try and group the bands by genre, "so we don't get an acoustic act playing against a punk act." That means that while there's no real deadline for registration, spots are limited.

Maahs said the competition so far includes area stalwarts Mourning After and Jupiter Effect. It is expected to last eight weeks, the last two serving as a finals round.

The decision to release the soundtrack as a CD isn't up to Mas or his team, but he suggested a release was possible if the movie plays well enough to generate that kind of crossover buzz. It'll depend, ultimately, on how good the songs are.

But Mas has faith in the area's bands, saying, "I think there's a great music scene in this town, and I wanted to reach out to it and say, 'Help me make this movie'." Beginning July 7, we'll see if that confidence is well placed.

— Luke Baumgarten

Bring demo and registration to the Blvd., attn: Jeff Maahs. Auditions begin on Thursday, July 7, at a time TBA. Call (509) 218-6735.

Foxxy Music -- I don't know about you, but it's rare for me to walk into any building in Spokane to see a guy in three-foot tall Pope's miter and basketball shorts, calling himself Pope Diddy. Especially on a Sunday.

Or to see a young man, dressed head to toe in black, talking to a shrunken head. Or to see a guy in a blood-splattered shirt, casually sipping a Miller Light listening as a negligee-clad young woman calls for her sausages.

If these are common occurrences in your world – well, you're probably a part of the show.

All of that, plus much, much, much more makes up Saturday night's Foxxy Moron and the Sexxy Revolution show – a cabaret revue of singing, dancing, music puke, pasties, booze and blood.

We were innocently typing away one day when a hot-pink flyer for this performance-art nightmare came marching across our desks, promising a night of topless dog grooming, free hunchback rides and pope ventriloquism.

Our reaction: Where, when and how can we ride a hunchback?

Turns out the Foxxy Moron show is the opus of some of Spokane's finest, with members of Burns Like Hellfire, TFL and Velvet Pelvis at the reins. Some of the ideas are old jokes; some came from the brains of the late Dan Ellis. Most are just sick and twisted ways to get an audience to laugh, to mix up Spokane's nightlife and simply to gross people out.

All of it – the puke, the shrunken heads and sausages – is just a way to see people in Spokane turn out for something other than a boring old local concert.

"We just thought, 'What's the stupidest thing we could actually pull off?" Bart Templeman, aka Foxxy Moron, says. "It's like, how do you get people to respond in this town?"

Over the years, Templeman and his friends cooked up this show as they bitched about Spokane's stagnant nightlife scene. They told their friends, who told their friends. Slowly more people jumped on the idea, contributing their singing voices, instruments and impeccable gag reflexes to the show. With a cast of nearly 25 people, the Foxxy Moron show is everything you won't see on your average Friday night. Actually, it'll be unlike anything you've ever seen before.

"We'll knock [you] off your blocks with sheer weirdness and hammer so much beer down [your] throats," he says. "People can have the time they've been wanting to have for 25 years."

Whatever. We just want to ride a hunchback. — Leah Sottile

Foxxy Moron and the Sexxy Revolution Cabaret Show appear on Saturday, July 2, at 9 pm at the B-Side. Tickets: $5. Call 624-7638.