Ex-punker politico plays against type
When I got Jimmy Camp's new CD in the mail, my first thought was not, "Oh, how nice of Jimmy to think of me." It was, "Now I have some leverage to get him to let me print The Jimmy Camp Story."
Maybe it isn't uncommon for a rock musician to live on the streets of L.A. and San Francisco, to drink to excess, to take a lot of drugs, to rob people out of desperation, to get stabbed in a seedy hotel room, or to disappear for days while loved ones don't know whether you're dead or alive. But it is uncommon among Orange County's in-demand Republican political campaign managers. And that's what Camp is.
This morning, for example, he'll be working for Janet Nguyen, monitoring the supervisor race recount. He expects to spend the next two years working for Rudy Giuliani's California campaign. And while he and Mike Schroeder are on opposite sides of those races, they have worked together on many campaigns, among them the historic recall of a turncoat Republican who helped keep Willie Brown in power.
After amicable negotiations about what I couldn't print – only one thing, basically – we met for breakfast yesterday at Watson's in Orange, a couple blocks from his house.
Camp was born in 1964 in Germany, where his father was stationed. The family moved back to the states and lived in Virginia and West Virginia. When he was 14, the family moved to Orange County, where his father attended a non-denominational divinity school. Jimmy went to the Melodyland (Christian) High School in Anaheim, but hung out with kids from Troy High in Fullerton, with whom he had more in common – namely, skateboarding and punk rock. One Troy student was Mike Ness, who would found Social Distortion.
Camp had started out playing Top 40-style rock guitar, "but in '78 I heard The Clash, and that was it." He became a full-on punker, playing in local clubs and writing songs. At 17, he left home for L.A. "I literally stood on Hollywood Boulevard playing guitar for money."
He moved to Huntington Beach and lived in one of the flophouse rooms above the Sugar Shack and became part of an increasingly debauched '80s scene on Main Street. (That's when I arrived in H.B. I'll bet Camp was one of the punks I'd think about making a permanent fixture in the pavement when they skated off the sidewalk and into my path.) On a typical night, Camp would play the Golden Bear then cross the street to Perq's. Drinking heavily and doing drugs, he'd get into fights with the punk-hating surfers. He remembers waking up after one fight to discover he had a smashed eye socket.
Musically, he was starting to fuse the sounds of The Clash, The Sex Pistols and The Ramones with the "roots" stuff his father had played, like Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash. In the late '80s, Camp left O.C. again and did the street-musician thing in San Francisco and Austin. One night in S.F., a junkie broke into his room in a welfare hotel and tried to steal his guitar. They fought and the tweaker slashed Camp's left hand. Unable to play guitar, he had his mother send him bus fare and he came home.
By 1988, he was ready to tone it down. He played in O.C. bands, but he'd stopped the drugs and cut back the booze. During this period, he scored a job working political phone banks for former O.C. Republican Chairwoman Lois Lundberg. He had no interest in politics. He'd never even voted. He took it strictly for the hours – the 5 p.m.- 9 p.m. shift let him play and party late and sleep all day. But something happened. He became a supervisor. Then Lundberg started farming him out to GOP campaigns around the state. He got hooked on politics.
"It's the sport of it. The adrenaline rush," he says. He went to closing down campaign offices as often as he closed down bars. And people like Schroeder, then chairman of the state Republican party, took notice.
"He's one of the great political gym rats," Schroeder says. "If you didn't stop him, he'd work deep into the night." And while unabashedly maintaining his rocker trappings – he still makes his raw, earthy music; he still has the tattoos he collected as a punker; you rarely see him in a suit.
"Some of the more conservative (politicos) are taken aback by the tattoos and leather jacket," Schroeder says, "but that goes away as soon as they realize how good he is at what he does." |
