CAKEd-On Memories with John McCrea

This special installment of the West Coast Sojourn comes to you from the suburbs of lovely suburban Sacramento. Carmichael, to be precise. It’s the right place to file from, considering the subject.

My relationship with musician John McCrea is of the kind that allows me to occasionally forget that his band CAKE is a going concern, that the band still plays 6,000-seat venues on the regular.

I spent a good deal of my thirties chafing at being called the guy who discovered CAKE. By music critics. Not because I didn’t really enjoy the band, but because they were so fresh back then it was a matter of time before someone scooped the group up.

I used to feel like the Christopher Columbus of discovering CAKE.

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In case you aren’t aware, I am talking about the rock and roll combo from Sacramento. 

A very strong description of the band’s early essence comes from Mindy LaBernz of The Austin Chronicle —via Wikipedia. She described the album as "a quartet made five by a trumpet player, CAKE carry themselves with the snittiness of technically proficient, lyrically aware music lovers, who are almost anachronistically untrendy and brazenly proud of it".

In 1993 the group joined the musicians and rappers and DJs in my culture coverage zone. I’d just started my San Francisco Bay Guardian nightclub column, Scene-n-Herd. New in town, I knew not nearly enough about what was going on in Bay Area music , except that it was a lot. So much music to sort through back then, before bros turned cover bands into San Francisco music’s best paying job outside of drug dealing MC.

So much to sort through.

I’d actually come upon CAKE in May of the previous year, before I moved to The City from Chico. They played The Cattle Club, a modest club in East Sacramento. The headliner was Basehead, from D.C. Michael Ivey was essentially Basehead and his album Play with Toys was a little like Cody Chestnutt’s The Headphone Masterpiece, but more than a decade earlier.

Ivey’s band would eventually get decent, but on this night Basehead was badly outshined by the opener. This band I had never heard of had a drummer who was older, but swung like a motherfucker. Bass and guitarist playing lead had this driving, compelling relationship. I think leads were being played on a 1965 Guild Starfire III. (Thank you, Internet!)

There was a trumpet player, and he added SO much to what these guys were cooking up.

Fronting and conducting it all was John. His guitar was different, acoustic and, apparently, from the early 20th century. Deadpan, mostly, McCrea sang lyrics that were self-conscious and melancholy even when the material turned to social concerns. He owned the small room, and when the singer did the falling birds part of “Mr. Mastodon Farm” a kind of church was achieved.

And the kid played a mean vibraslap. 

I caught the band again at the Cattle Club—with Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy—before ditching Chico for SF. In my back pocket there was this band. When I saw that CAKE was playing a shitty Haight Street Club called Boomerang I mentioned it in Scene-n-Herd. When the CAKE demo cassette showed up I reviewed it.

The Guardian had a monster crew of critics, and I was struggling to get anything outside of the club column into its music section. G-Funk and heroin rock was what was cool in 1993, and I caught much guff for devoting column inches to this unfashionable band. When I got the alternative weekly’s publicist to put CAKE on the Demo of the Month show and the crowd was small, the publicist friend who put it together gave me still more guff.

But people were getting it. The talented Bonnie Simmons took CAKE under her wing. They began getting better venues and stronger publicity. Motorcade of Generosity came out and then came out again, supported by a radio play. 

And just like that, CAKE—accumulation, not the birthday treat—was a medium-size band.

They killed live, toured hard, and built a loyal fanbase 

Hip hop became increasingly became my focus with a move to Hollywood, and as the 21st century began I wasn’t much following CAKE. I took a sports gig in New York that put the Sacramento band even less on my agenda.

Then one night in maybe 2000, I decided to see a CAKE show in Indianapolis, expecting a venue bigger than Slim’s, but nothing too major. Dude, it had to be an 1800-person venue. Minimum.

And the crowd was going apeshit for John McCrea’s band.

One day John reached out on social media. This was around 2012, and it around this time that I started thinking of him as a friend. We embarked on a Don Quixote gesture that, on at least one level, succeeded.

To be more precise, we have comradeship. Hopefully that comes across in the conversation that follows. John spoke slowly and at times with great consideration. If you sense he does not care for stardom, well no shit Sherlock. Reluctant does not begin to describe my friend’s feelings about participating in the music industry. We didn’t discuss CAKE’s early loss of its first guitarist and bass player. However, he and I did have a strong off-the-record conversation about mutiny—I recently lost a film crew on a road shoot—and it contained a lot of solid advice.

The author of this Substack and the leader of CAKE, on a porch somewhere in the greater Portland area.

Donnell: What do you remember about playing The Cattle Club?

John: We really didn’t start playing at that place for a while. It took us a long time to get to where we could fill a place. What does it hold, five hundred people? We were playing around town at very small places. Like, cafe-size places. And before that I was playing acoustic at cafes.

I think Old Ironsides is still there, and we played quite a bit. 

When I saw you at The Cattle Club you opened for Basehead. I was there to see Basehead. That had to be a big room for you.

I think so, but who else was playing?I think it was just Basehead. 

Are you sure it wasn’t Disposable Heroes?

That was a separate show. 

I thought there were three acts on that one. 

That would have been a pretty good bill. 

These might have been two events or one. Who even knows anymore?

The Internet will tell me. 

Right. You can figure it out.

(Ed: After our talk, the web did indeed tell. There were two Cattle Club shows in ‘92, but not with the lineups that we thought.)

(Ed: On this ninety two night, the oft-overlooked, journeymen Northern Cali rap crew Midnight Voices was sandwiched between CAKE and Basehead. Then, apparently, Disposable Heroes opened for CAKE on Halloween. Whether the sequence is correct is not for me to say—I was pretty drunk that night. Danced with my sister a lot.)

Sactv.com 

So do you remember that gig? 

I do. I remember there was no escape exit for the artist.

What I remember is that you had an old guy, what seemed like a very old man drumming.

That was Frank French. He was kind of a Sacramento fixture who had really good style and really good sense of which fills to… just really intuitive. He had all that skill that jazz players have, but was able to play rock. (Ed: French, 71, was 40 in 1992. I was 24 when he played the Basehead show. Hence him appearing in my memory as “a very old man.”) 

We started doing something vaguely more sort of… relentless. And I think that his drumming wasn’t perfect for it. And also he didn’t really care for touring.  

Did you guys think you were onto something?

At that point? Oh yeah. I was deluded enough to think that it was possible, and I think that actually helps–if you can convince your subconscious mind that you can do something it’s very helpful… let me be specific about what I thought was possible. I never wanted or thought there would be some big explosion of success. I only wanted to make a living, and I think I said it at the time. “We just want to be a bar band.”Like, that’s noble. We were saying that it’s not a problem, to work at that level and serve people in that way. And we ended up doing a little better than that, I think, economically. At the very beginning, I knew it was a drag…. I could see it with other people and what was happening in their lives as they hit “success”  So I was wary of it at that time. People who exerted unfriendliness at you six months earlier were suddenly obsequious.

Even before you skipped Sacramento?

Yeah, it started happening as soon as things started getting played on the radio. It became like a hall of mirrors a little bit for me, which for a kind of sensitive person is deeply unsettling. Like, somebody who’s already sort of emotionally damaged? To have no one you can believe is pretty fucked up. 

I just had to explain that.

I have never felt more famous than I did in San Francisco. I had a column and it was a small scene. I barely made it to the part where I got married. It was just chaos. What was it like for you guys when you had that first success?When I first caught you guys it was at Club Boomerang on Haight Street, which was not a good bar? 

There was that. And there was Bottom of the Hill, a little bit of that. Eventually we made it to Slim’s and that felt like a big success. You got pretty big pretty fast.It didn’t feel like it. Relatively, I suppose.

Was there a part in San Francisco where you saw that things were changing?

Certainly. There’s a sense of wow, people are remembering us, and they’ve all come back. And they brought some friends, it felt like. 

There was college radio, maybe. 

I reviewed your demo. We got together because I was going to write something about you. (Ed: Probably for Pulse or Thrasher magazines.) And you said that— well, the first thing you said was that when I wrote about you more people showed up—you didn’t know how my sentences were going to end. And that made an impression on me.

It’s one of those things where you go, This guy. Okay, he can write. He sees it. Maybe I’m onto something. I want to say thanks for saying that very early on.

That’s cool. I don’t remember saying that. But that’s true. You still have, at certain times, an angularity to the rhythm of your sentence structures. 

Well, I was just trying to figure it out back then. I don’t want to harp on those old days, but in that window of this band which has taken a lot of… personnel changes… was there a glory days? Or was it just this job you got assigned?

I would say both. I don’t think there’s a set period: These are the glory days! You get glory moments [laughs] And that’s all you can hope for is a moment, a feeling of agency or even transcendence. Then back to normal. But that’s come and go… and continues to come and go.

I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for that feeling that I’m connected to something that’s bigger than myself. That feels good, but it doesn’t last very long. It just comes and goes when it fuckin’ feels like it.

Just like everybody, in a way, and that thing they’re proud of doing. 

You still maintain a degree of reluctance. Even though you’re stuck. You’re doing this.

The reluctance is just pragmatic, just knowing how unhealthy putting yourself forward like that is. In Buddhism they talk about focus on the self leading to unhappiness and focus on others leading to happiness. So, I have sort of known this all along, especially as I was getting closer to it. Like, Holy shit. I can see how this won’t work. But I was already committed to it and felt like I was getting better and better at it. 

At the same time as I pulled in for a landing on this weird planet I started to say, Whoa, this is kinda unsustainable. And shitty.And the weird planet is being in a popular band?

The laws of physics are slightly different. And you have to appreciate what you get, and a lot of that is contingent upon the Mickey Mouse costume that you’re wearing. And your connection with other people sometimes doesn’t feel real, because you’ve got a big Mickey Mouse head over your head and it’s, like, dark under there. And the batteries are wearing out for the fan.

[Here is when my good friend Sydney exclaimed “Wow!” She’s responsible for that photo of John and I sitting on a Portland porch.]

You know what I’m sayin’? That’s what’s fucked up about it, but there there are moments when you feel like you are helping people? That’s the thing that can be good, but there’s no real connection with other people. There really isn’t. There’s no reciprocal… where the power dynamic is, like, level. That’s what causes people anguish. Again, I’m not complaining. I’m super grateful. But I also feel, sometimes… trapped. 

What’s your writing process like these days?

I have to kinda jump into it without thinking too much. A big white sheet of paper still freaks me out. I’ve been doing the thing—and I’m doing it partly for my own mental health—where you just stream of consciousness spill for three or four pages. Or five, if you can do it. It can be nonsense. I find that it primes the pump for the subconscious to feel like it’s being heard, 

Sometimes you can pick through good little bits and it’s a lot less terrifying than a blank, white sheet of paper. 

More like editing?

Yeah. Or like being a, uh… rock collector. Finding shiny things on the ground. I like this and that and making a collage. It’s a lot less stressful than being Pablo Picasso. 

Can you tell crowds apart? 

I can certainly from country to country. Certain countries are really raucous and loud and others are really quiet. In Holland I love that they’re having a good time, but they just talk and yell through your whole show. They would applaud enthusiastically at the end of the song.

Contrasted with Japan, where you could hear a pin drop when you were playing. You could hear a pin drop for about three seconds at the end of the song… and then there’s the applause. It’s really weird. They’re super polite. Really respectful, but it’s almost like they’re viewing… an alien life form? Like you could be in The Cowboys and Indians Show in England, in 1849. It feels a little like that in Japan. But I love how quiet and polite they are.

I made the mistake of suggesting onstage in Holland that they might want to consider mating with the Japanese and to create a perfect audience. That did not go over well with a certain long-haired Alpha guy. He spat onto the stage, he was so angry.

What about audiences these days? When I saw you in Bend in 2013 or something like that, [smart] phones were just becoming a thing and I remember [you] chastising and thinking, This is a losing battle, I don’t know how this plays out, but it doesn’t end with everyone putting their phones away.

Every once in a while I’ll see someone just stuck in their little rectangles. And I’ll say, You know what? You should join us. Be with us right now. You may never go back to this thing that you’re recording. Let’s be honest. And if you post it and someone presses a button on it, that’s not going to improve your life, your real, visceral life. Why don’t you hang out with us? This isn’t ever going to happen again, like this. This is it. Sometimes I make my case and it sometimes kinda works. Or sometimes they maybe just hate me.

There’s a list of bands that are making people put their phones in these little bags. A lot of comedians feel really, really strongly… just frustrated that they can’t play for the audience their in front of. It has to be this thing that’s posted and monetized by some fuckin’ billionaire corporation with advertising. But also the material they’re working on gets hatched before they’re completely done with it. I feel a lot of empathy for that. I would like to just play for the audience that I’m in front of. 

Can we talk about the Content Creators Coalition?

[Laughs]

We don’t have to get into the weeds of things…

Who was the most rude on our conference calls?

I’ll pretend that you’re our reader, Sydney. John and I—I think John originally—came up with this idea of an organization that would protect the rights of people who, in a meaningful cultural sense, were creating content. 

This was a long time ago. You brought me to the basement of the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco and… Tom Waits was there and John Doe was there… our good friend East Bay Ray from the Dead Kennedys was there and David Lowery, Thievery Corporation, and just a lot of sincere people who were trying to do something about… what inevitably happened. 

In my opinion, it was a Don Quixote gesture. 

[Laughs] Definitely a Don Quixote gesture. 

We did a lot of phone calls and we  did a lot of meetings that seemed to have a lot of impact. Someone seems to have benefitted from it. 

And an organization still exists. The Content Creators Coalition turned into Artist Rights Alliance. , which is actively lobbying against some of the worst ideas, legislation, that’s being thought up by the tech industry.  But it’s all reactionary. Like, Oh here’s another horrible thing that they’re lobbing at us. Let’s have some meetings with senators so that they can explain why that’s not fair. 

Something came of it. It’s not what I wanted to see. It is part of what I wanted to see, but what I was more interested in is a two-prong sort of approach: Having the ability to aggregate our economic power, in terms of negotiation leverage, on one hand. Like a union. Like the musician’s union should be doing but is not. And that would have been great. We would have found ourselves competing with this, I think, rather feckless existing union. That could have been weird and ugly. 

The other part of this is why the hell can’t artists and content creators generally, including journalists, all get together and do like the cotton farmers in Texas did when cotton was pretty worthless? They went in on the means of turning cotton into denim and they basically all started making money. I feel if we content creators could go in on the cost of distribution in the form of a coop or a non-profit... I know as a consumer of music and documentaries and journalism I would switch over in a heartbeat If something like that existed. 

That was the other part of the dream that was crushed, the idea of creating an alternative to Spotify and YouTube and everything else.

I think we’re learning in this moment from watching the writers and actors down in Los Angeles that a lot is possible. But it always seems harder for musicians. 

There’s the problem that our file is very small. And a television show or a movie is a very large file. And I think musicians have always been betrayed by our handlers. That’s exactly what happened when Spotify was about to be sued out of existence for taking with permission all of this catalogue by the labels. They basically made a backroom deal with the heads of the labels and gave them equity shares of Spotify in exchange for not crushing them. That equity share was not shared with the artists, on whose value everything was predicated. 

For some reason, this is the way the music business always has to be. I hope that that can change, but it just won’t get better though until artists find a way of acting collectively. There’s nothing that will save us. It will just get worse.

For you too.

Oh, are you kidding? It’s terrible out there.

For journalists and photographers and filmmakers. Everybody. It’s just not going to get any better unless somebody fuckin’ puts their foot down. Collectively.

[Laughs] Not collectively, but what’s the last thing you took in that gave you a lot of joy?  

[Pauses] I don’t actually… [Laughs] I’m not expressing any joy from the book I’m reading right now, but I will mention it. It’s that book Ministry of the Future, —

(Ed: “Such a good book!” whispered Sydney. “by Kim Stanley Robinson.”)

By Kim Stanley Robinson. Thank you. I can’t say that book is bringing me a lot of joy, but I think it’s well done and super thought provoking. Everybody should read it.

(Ed: Sydney added that the book brought her joy in that it showed paths to the future, where before she didn’t see so many.)

Totally. I’m in the middle of it, so I haven’t gotten to that point yet where I’m like, Oh yes. Here’s a path. But it came as a result of talking to my next-door neighbor about this need for humans to do something we haven’t really evolved to do? Our survival has never been predicated on turning things down? It’s always been, Let’s just turn things all the way up and maybe a hurricane will kill some of us off, but let’s just have as many babies and just eat as much and consume as much and now we have to do this thing that is so antithetical to all these years of evolution. 

We also have to find a way to romanticize or idealize collective action and cooperation, more than we ever have. There has been research in the last 20 years, about our origins being more about the ability to cooperate. Like, our success being more based on cooperation than has been previously acknowledged. Less to do with tool use and more to do with our ability to share ideas across large numbers of people. 

I’d like to have hope. I hope that book doesn’t make me too bummed out.

Do you like Portland?

I’m starting to. I’ve been here for a while. I don’t know very many people here because I’ve been pretty insular in a nuclear family situation. I don’t know if your remember what that’s like, but your friends are that narrow band of people who have kids the same age as yours. 

Not necessarily based on your common interests. That’s kind of challenging, but I’m okay.

I saved this one for Sydney:

My son knows the guy who produced a CD for you here. What’s his name… David Pollack. So, I’m curious: What’s your latest project?

Thanks Sydney.

He engineered a song of ours called “Sinking Ship” that we released during the Trump era. 

That’s the song you played for me in the [Holman's] bathroom.

Yeah. I don’t even even necessarily want to play that anymore because it reminds me of that. I think I’ll put it our next album, because it should go somewhere. Hopefully there will be something to help balance out its pessimism. 

Sydney asked if this means another album is in the works. 

I have a lot of songs. I was just working on a song on piano. I have the capacity to really enjoy songwriting and I’m thankful for that.