He’s the Rockin’ Wing of the GOP

If you want to meet the very incarnation of earthy, raw-boned, dusty-booted, deep-rooted American rock ‘n’ roll, drop by Linda’s Doll Hut one of these Tuesday nights.

You’ll find Jimmy Camp strumming hard on his old Guild acoustic guitar, both arms sleeved with tattoos, including gothic script proclaiming this black sheep son of a preacher to be “white trash.”

A Yorba Linda resident who spent his childhood in southern Virginia and moved to Orange County in time for his wild teens, Camp--in his torn, flannel work shirt and frayed, faded jeans--looks like 6 feet, 4 inches of bumpy road. His leathery face is long and craggy under dark, tousled hair, and would be Lincolnesque, except that its broad, flattened nose smacks more of a prizefighter who has taken some hard punches.

But speaking of Lincolnesque. . . .

Who would guess that this 32-year-old has made a mark for himself as a driven, tenacious and determinedly loyal grass-roots campaigner for the conservative wing of the Republican Party in California? For a rocker, it’s a shocking other life.

“Jim is a true believer. He very much believes in conservative causes and conservative candidates,” says Michael Schroeder, the GOP state chairman who has worked side-by-side with Camp in such important campaigns as the successful recall in 1995 of maverick Republican Paul Horcher from the state Assembly. Schroeder could think of no other Republican activist pursuing a career in rock music.

A glance at his personal dossier shows that Camp’s rock ‘n’ roll wanderer’s look isn’t just a look. He cast himself out of that preacher’s home in Orange at 17 because it had no place for his passion for punk rock and could never tolerate the drugs and drunkenness that commonly went with the highly rebellious early-’80s O.C. punk scene.

Camp lived in a friend’s backyard treehouse for a summer, moved on to seedy Hollywood crash pads and then, with unanswered traffic warrants piled up against him, turned himself in for a two-week stay in the Orange County Jail that he used, at age 20, as a lull to wean himself from pills and cocaine.

He hung with local punk hero Mike Ness, who prodded him to get into his first significant band, the Earwigs. Later, Camp hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he lived in a Mission District welfare hotel for six months, sang in the streets, discovered that he wanted to be a songwriter and got stabbed in the hand defending his guitar from a would-be robber.

These days, he fronts a sharp, experienced band called the Airstream Deacons, singing in a tobacco- and whiskey-stained but gruffly tender voice that’s like nails tipped with cotton. His songs are memorably tuneful and always tell a story--about going on a cheap-wine bender, about facing the slings of love and fate with either quiet introspection or wild abandon, and about roving ceaselessly while wondering, “Where on God’s green earth do I belong?”

Camp thoroughly upholds the rock ‘n’ roll troubadour tradition, typically the domain of sons and daughters of Woody Guthrie who are anything but conservative Republicans. So it’s more than surprising to hear somebody like GOP activist Paul Hernandez say that Camp’s “reputation among Republican circles, and especially in the campaign management business, is as high as it could possibly be.”

Hernandez and Camp were opposing campaign managers last year in one of the most bitter elections in recent Orange County history, the nonpartisan race for the Board of Supervisors in which Hernandez’s candidate, Todd Spitzer, beat Mickey Conroy, the oft-controversial Vietnam air-combat veteran of whom Camp speaks with familial fondness and respect.

But now, after more than seven years of political activism, Camp says he is moving on.

He always kept politics and music separate--most Republicans he worked with had little more than an inkling about his musical life. Serving two mistresses as demanding as grass-roots politics and grass-roots rock ‘n’ roll stressed Camp’s marriage nearly to the breaking point last year. And Camp came to realize in the sour aftermath of Conroy’s defeat in November that the confrontational, polarizing nature of politics was feeding into a long-standing inner anger and bitterness that he knew he had to overcome.

When the next California Senate or Assembly candidate calls, when the next backer of a ballot proposition asks him to run the street-level, get-out-the-vote campaigns for which he is admired, Camp is determined to say no.

Instead, his next move involving a public issue will be a performance June 1 at the annual AIDS Walk Orange County benefit at UC Irvine--a cause he says he “would have laughed at a year ago.

“I’ve made a lot of changes in the last six months,” the soft-spoken Camp said recently as he sat in a restaurant in Fountain Valley, wearing worn jeans, a white T-shirt and a necklace hung with a silver cross and a tangle of fishing lures made from metal or brightly colored feathers. Camp believes that a lure lucky enough to have caught him a trout or a catfish is lucky enough to wear around his neck.

No, he isn’t turning into a liberal or even a moderate. But, while maintaining bedrock values he now characterizes as libertarian rather than Republican, he says he has tried to shed the anger he once felt toward advocates of such causes as gay rights, and public health assistance and schooling for illegal immigrants.

“I was just angry and wanted to put the blame on other people, mainly Democrats,” he said. “I went through a hard time last year, especially after the election. I started looking at myself, and I just had to make some real changes. I don’t know where the anger and bitterness came from, but it was easier to take out on other people.

“I’ve sort of had a ‘come to Jesus’ on those issues. I’m glad to be in a place within myself that I would do something like [perform at the AIDS Walk]. But I won’t be playing any Greenpeace rallies soon,” he added with a chuckle. “I haven’t come that close to Jesus yet.”

*

While he was diving into GOP politics in the early ‘90s, Camp tried to make musical progress fronting a hard-driving, hard-drinking, volatile band called the El Dorados.

Those were frustrating times for Linda Jemison, who owns Linda’s Doll Hut, Orange County’s leading grass-roots rock venue. One of Camp’s earlier bands, the Rattlers, had been the first to play at her club when it opened in 1989. Despite her own liberal politics--which sometimes led to friendly teasing from Camp, and more serious discussions that he says were rare for him in rock circles--Jemison became Camp’s close friend and most trusted musical advisor.

“There have been times he’s walked away from music, and if I were a man, I’d have kicked his butt,” Jemison said. “Over the last seven or eight years he’s gone back and forth. When we were at the edge of getting something accomplished, he had to do something in politics. You have to pick and choose what’s more important.”

Now, Camp says, he has chosen. He gets up early these days to drive a forklift in a warehouse, finishes his workday by midafternoon and spends the rest of his time on music and trying to patch together a six-year marriage, with two small children, that he says nearly fell apart last year under the strain of his political commitments and his inner anger.

In his quietly intense way, Camp speaks of finally having put together his dream band--John Nichols on lead guitar, Rocko Occhiato on bass and former Walter Trout Band member Bernie Pershey on drums. Record companies are starting to show interest, based on an excellent demo tape that ranges from aching acoustic balladry to charging rockers while concisely illustrating some of life’s humorous pitfalls and emotion-fraught hard choices. Stylistically, Camp often recalls such respected, roots-informed rockers as Steve Earle and Graham Parker.

Some of Camp’s Republican associates think he may reconsider his abdication from politics and rejoin the cause. It is common, they say, for young political operatives to go through periods of disillusionment and disgust with the nastiness of the game, especially after a losing campaign. But if you watch Camp stand at a microphone, narrow his eyes and grit out one of his insightful, homespun songs, it really isn’t that hard to tell where on God’s green earth he belongs.

* Jimmy Camp and the Airstream Deacons are playing every Tuesday in May at 9 p.m. at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $5. (714) 533-1286. Also June 1 at 10:40 a.m. on the AIDS Walk Orange County stage at University Drive and Campus Drive at UC Irvine. Free. (714) 955-1400.