Going the Distance

IIt’s been a long time since the Sacramento-born rock band Cake has regularly played a club like the Blue Lamp. The Blue Lamp is a single small dark room in East Sacramento, located on a nondescript stretch of Alhambra Boulevard across N Street from a Vagabond Inn whose Yelp reviews read like the back-cover descriptions from hard-boiled 1950s detective novels, punctuated as they are with mentions of drug dealers, prostitutes and the generally down-on-their-luck.

Inside the club, there’s no dressing room adjacent to the stage, which means musicians must wade through the dense crowd to get to their instruments. One rear wall displays six playful girlie watercolors (half devilish, half patriotic, all quite sexy) that nod to the address’s prior existence as the Club 400 strip joint. A poster behind the bar highlights an upcoming performance by a U2 cover band.

But for the second time this year, there on the modest stage is Cake—a five-man band with two platinum albums, one gold, and an early hit single, “Short Skirt/Long Jacket,” currently back in heavy rotation on what is arguably the most prominent broadcast spot in contemporary music—the latest Apple iPod Nano commercial. (The instrumental portion of “Short Skirt,” plus some “na na na na,” also serves as the theme for the geek-spy NBC show Chuck, and songs by the band have appeared in numerous multiplex-friendly films, among them the Farrelly brothers’ Me, Myself & Irene  and Shallow Hal, and more recently the Russell Brand breakthrough, Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)

It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-October, and fans, munching on foil-wrapped burritos and sustaining themselves with caffeine from Starbucks across the street, are already lined up outside the Blue Lamp nearly five hours before Cake will take the stage for a surprise show in this intimate venue. Back in the early ’90s, Cake honed its craft at numerous Sacramento-area clubs this size and smaller, fine-tuning its stalwart melding of countrified rock and mechanistic funk, topped off by lead singer John McCrea’s inimitable half-spoken vocals. The band’s economical alt-rock arrangements and understated musicianship have long put it in stark contrast with the hard rock sounds that dominate Sacramento’s other major musical legacies, like the Deftones, Papa Roach and Tesla.

Cake has long since graduated to large concert halls and arenas, to international touring (March 2011 dates are already booked for London, Paris and Amsterdam), and to not, as it did this night, lugging in its own musical equipment from the parking lot. The Blue Lamp show, however, provides a chance for Cake to test-drive its new material from a forthcoming album whose release is still months away. An opening set of favorites turns the haunted intimacy of “Jolene” and the acerbic observations of “Friend Is a Four Letter Word” into communal sing-alongs, and during a second set the crowd enthusiastically embraces a host of new compositions, notably the folksy “Bound Away,” which name-checks the Capital City. Hearing McCrea mention mid-song the town that the majority of the audience presumably calls home, people scream with such don’t-care-it’s-a-weeknight abandon that few likely make out the full lyric: “Sacramento, California, we are leaving again.”

It’s been a long time since the Sacramento-based rock band Cake released a full-length studio album. More than half a decade has passed since 2004’s Pressure Chief. Reminded of this over a cup of coffee at an Oakland cafe early last summer, McCrea acknowledges that he is feeling the pressure from friends and fans alike, but he doesn’t appear especially concerned.

“I made a point of making the process of this album as languorous and unhurried as possible,” McCrea says, “because I like to stay home. I’ve tried to give some energy to my home.” As if to emphasize the point, he’s brought along an unexpected guest: the aged family dog, a mix of Australian shepherd and border collie, who sleeps at his feet below the cafe’s metal table. McCrea likens the sweetly mannered pooch’s mismatched pupils to David Bowie’s. His own are covered by dark sunglasses below his usual brimmed hat, and he apologizes for the rock star affect, explaining that his newborn child (his first), just weeks old, has been depriving him of sleep. McCrea’s beard is a thickening, graying mass, which, combined with his sleepily erudite speech pattern, gives him the air of a mid-40s college professor just coming out of an extended sabbatical.

During Cake’s first decade of existence as a recording entity, it released an album every two to three years, starting with its 1994 debut, Motorcade of Generosity, which introduced the world outside California to McCrea’s sardonic consideration of what one song defined as the “Rock ’n’ Roll Lifestyle.” The new record, Showroom of Compassion, will be the band’s sixth studio release; it’s due out on January 11, 2011—which is to say, it’s taken about as much time to follow up Pressure Chief  as it did for Cake to release Motorcade and the three subsequent studio albums: Fashion Nugget  (1996), Prolonging the Magic  (1998) and Comfort Eagle  (2001).

In a conversation whose length could be measured in part by our need to switch tables to avoid the sun as it passed across the cloudless sky, McCrea discusses the emotional and physiological disconnect between the experience of Cake—the experience of any successful band, for that matter—and the desires of its longtime fans.

“You do everything you can to make an album that’s good,” he says, “and you tour on that album, and sometimes you don’t get back for two years—you go out for 10 days, you come home for two days, go out for three weeks and come home for five days. And then you get back, and all your houseplants are dead, and your sister’s married, and somebody had a kid, and in terms of your connection to your community, you’ve been sort of frozen. You’ve been moving through space but not time in terms of your community, and sure the Web has mitigated that and it feels a lot less like being a lonely spaceman, but you come back after two years of that and you’re just sort of dumped there in a heap, and you’re exhausted—and everyone’s like, ‘Where is your next album? What’s going on?’ ”

What’s been going on with Cake, despite the temporarily stalled discography, is substantial. Among other things, there has been an unexpected reunion with a long-lost member of the group’s original lineup, a move toward autonomy with the band self-releasing its music, and a decision textured by the mix of economic prudence and poetic whimsy that seems inherently Cake-like: a recording studio retrofitted for solar power. Over the course of the Oakland-cafe conversation, McCrea talks about these varied events, all of which in one way or another conspired to delay the release of Cake’s sixth album.

“It’s been a long time,” John McCrea sings from the stage of The Fillmore in San Francisco. It’s a few months prior to that conversation in Oakland. The night is a benefit for a charitable organization, the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, named in honor of the late legendary Bay Area promoter.

“It’s been a long time,” sings McCrea, and there’s a brief yet fomenting pause before he completes the first line: “since I’ve seen your smiling face.”

This is a new song, one that few if any members of the crowd may have ever heard, and yet it falls seamlessly into the band’s set. “It’s been a long time,” he continues, again inserting that extended pause, “since I’ve seen a sunny day.” The song has all the elements of a classic Cake hit: The beat is taut, more space than notes; the guitar part develops slowly, but develop it does; McCrea whips out his vibraslap, a springy gadget that emits a buzz-like sound effect from a Road Runner cartoon; and a modestly employed trumpet, courtesy of founding member Vince DiFiore, lends a trademark blend of bravado and melancholy. If anything feels particularly new about the song—it’s titled “Long Time” and is featured on the upcoming album—that would be the decidedly retro, synthesized vocal that serves as a vamping backdrop to McCrea’s half-sung lyric. And like any great Cake song, “Long Time” is one whose simplicity belies the detail that it contains. Think back to the burbling momentum of “The Distance,” the faux-country rollick that is “Stickshifts and Safetybelts,” or the band’s affectionate reimagining of the Gloria Gaynor standard “I Will Survive.”

The first time McCrea sings “sunny,” there’s a playful melisma—that technique in which the singer holds a vowel but changes the note several times. The melisma is best known as an overused cliché in contemporary R&B—the sort of histrionic syllable-mangling associated with everyone from Whitney Houston to R. Kelly. (Asked about his taste in R&B, McCrea says he favors “the more direct vocal stylings of Al Green” and other early ’70s soul figures.) But as with everything funky about Cake, McCrea has taken the overused melisma and turned it into something fiercely rigorous; he’s made it his own. In most R&B, the melisma is a tool to express intense emotion; in “Long Time,” it’s a tool that allows McCrea to delay letting you know what word he is singing, to keep you off balance, to keep you at a distance. The vowel goes up and down like a razor, seven or eight times—were you to chart it on a piece of paper, it would look like the zigzag on Charlie Brown’s shirt.

Keeping the audience at a distance is a McCrea hallmark. At the Fillmore show, he talks politics between songs—decrying the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stumping for environmental causes—and tells the audience he knows they’d rather he just get on with the music. I’m in the audience, and when his comments turn to the military, a woman next to me turns to her date and complains that her brother is over there fighting; she says loudly that McCrea “should just shut up and sing.” And when the next song starts, she immediately turns toward the stage and starts mouthing the lyrics, a smile blossoming on her face.

“That’s been fun, actually, watching John evolve,” says DiFiore when we meet up months later in Sacramento’s East Portal Park. “Seeing him do open mic at Drago’s [at 24th and K, now The Golden Bear] to seeing him interact with the crowd now, it’s come a long way. At some point he decided to run around a little bit. That was around the Prolonging the Magic  album; all of a sudden he was running side to side on the stage, getting the audience going. I really appreciated that. He bumped up the whole act, doing that.”

It’s been a long time since all the members of Cake lived in Sacramento, but the city remains the band’s center of gravity. It’s where Cake came of age and continues to record, and where two members still live. McCrea moved to the area with his family from Berkeley around the age of 9; Cake formed in 1991, after McCrea returned to Sacramento following a stint in Los Angeles, where he supported himself as an AV guy at UCLA (“Best job I ever had,” he says). Cake wasn’t his first band—before it came units like the Dalai Lamas, as well as John McCrea and the Roughhousers. When he returned to his hometown from L.A., he was often talked about locally for the deeply socio-political content in his songs. Longtime Sacramento concert promoter Jerry Perry summarizes how Cake built on McCrea’s earlier work: “Cake,” says Perry, “is a whole other magical thing. John, and the musicians he was working with, took those rock songs, those slightly countrified dance songs, all those elements—they’re indie rock, or call it what you want, but they’re danceable. They make me think of the Talking Heads: danceable, but smart.”

McCrea and DiFiore both miss that period of time, the early to mid-1990s. “Those were the days,” McCrea says. “Rent was $300, and it was such a good hive of the arts. Now the rent is like three or four times what it was, and you have to have a job to live there.”

Living in Sacramento still, as does bassist Gabriel (Gabe) Nelson, DiFiore can stoke those bicycle-days memories with greater ease: “I love riding my bike to a gig,” he says, “with my trumpet strapped to my back.” (It was on one such ride that the band was named. “We were riding bikes in midtown,” DiFiore says of himself and McCrea, “and thinking of names. I threw a few out, and he threw out ‘Cake,’ and I thought it was a great name, and it stuck. It really worked around town. We had the word ‘Cake’ on posters with a lot of different images that didn’t have anything to do with it.”)

McCrea says the Sacramento summer heat and his allergies conspire to keep him in Oakland, where he settled around 2003, after many years of the rootlessness inherent in touring. “It’s hard for me to be functional in the summer. If my life was a lot groovier, I’d just take off all my clothes and go down to the river every day, but I have a job, believe it or not.”

That job is Cake, but it wasn’t always a fulltime one. DiFiore, who has a master’s in psychology from Sacramento State, worked in social services, among other things manning a preschool infant room, before taking the leap to focus on the band. (DiFiore and Nelson both keep busy playing music locally, DiFiore in jazz-improv settings at Luna’s Café, at 16th and N, with musicians like Tony Passarell and Ross Hammond, with whom Nelson has also played and recorded, and in a cover band called Animal House that features KRXQ radio’s Pat Martin.) This was when Cake was still coming into its own, playing with great frequency, working out the arrangements to songs in public at places like Old Ironsides, Java City, The Cattle Club and Café Montreal. Perry, who was also at the recent Blue Lamp show in October, speaks nostalgically of “a time when we could see Cake play once or twice a month in Sacramento.”

Old Ironsides in particular was an amazing place to watch Cake become Cake. (For the record, I lived in Sacramento and Davis from 1989, as an editor at Tower Records’ music magazine, Pulse!, through 1996.) On any given night, you knew you’d run into people, and there’d be good bands playing. When Cake played at Old Ironsides, at first it was just another band, and then slowly it became more and more of this thing, this entity, and then the place was just packed, and everyone was singing along, and Cake would introduce a cover or a new song, and you’d watch that song change over time, note by note, verse by verse.

And then the next morning you’d go to Greta’s Cafe in midtown (at 19th and Capitol, it’s now a Chipotle), and you’d look up from your menu to find that McCrea was your waiter.

“I was a terrible waiter,” he says. “I got terrible when it got busy. I’m not a really great multitasker. When you’re on your way to get somebody’s bill and one person asks you for more cream and another person asks for a refill of coffee and another person asks you to take back a sandwich [because] it’s cold—that’s like four things or so. I can’t do it. That was awful.”

His own protestations to the contrary, McCrea was a courteous waiter, and he multitasks fine, then and now. These days, the multitasking involves, among other things, coordinating the band’s own record label, Upbeat (also the name of their studio), along with the other members of Cake. Asked why they’ve decided to self-release Showroom of Compassion  after parting ways with the label Columbia Records, McCrea remarks that this is a reprise for them; Motorcade, the band’s debut, was self-released before being licensed by the now defunct label Capricorn Records. “Without insulting anyone,” he explains, “I could say that Cake’s culture, a very home-craft-project-gone-too-far, with the sort of fancy-suit culture of an East Coast record label—a lot of people vying for position and power—those two cultures didn’t go very well together for us.”

The band has always gone its own way. Four times it has organized the Unlimited Sunshine Tour, a genre-smashing entourage that one year combined the hip-hop of De La Soul and the indie rock of Modest Mouse, and another the meticulous pop of Cheap Trick and the old-time country of Charlie Louvin. (Another Unlimited Sunshine Tour is reportedly in the works for 2011.)

On a particularly productive day back before Cake was a full-time job, McCrea might have some new hand-silk-screened Cake T-shirts to sell, like the one that proclaimed “I am an opera singer” years before the song “Opera Singer” appeared on Comfort Eagle. (“My favorite said, ‘Honey, don’t forget your death,’ ” recalls DiFiore, who jokes that the line, with its comic emphasis on persistent dread, prepared him for the constant low-level anxiety of parenthood.) McCrea continues to design the band’s graphics, which generally have an instructional-handbook visual quality and have adorned products ranging from the commonplace like shirts and key chains to the decidedly quirky like doormats and first aid kits. The first Showroom-era T-shirt features a hand inside a monkey puppet.

If Sacramento clubs helped give life to Cake, the relationship was in some cases mutual. Concert promoter Perry explains how influential McCrea was from early on in the city’s music scene. “I’m a profound fan of Cake,” he says. “When I was running a dance club [The Vortex] in the 1980s, I really wanted to book bands. I was so taken with what John was doing with the Roughhousers, that it dragged me into doing shows, just to be able to book them. I can honestly say that if not for John McCrea there would not have been a Cattle Club.” Perry is referring to the local rock incubator that he ran from 1989 through 1995 and which was a key stop on the West Coast touring circuit, a place where local bands alternated slots with the likes of Nirvana, No Doubt, John Doe and The Jesus Lizard. The building, a cavernous standalone structure on an otherwise barren stretch of Folsom Boulevard not far from Sacramento State, is now a sports bar, which was devastated by an early-morning arson attack a week prior to Cake’s October Blue Lamp show.

While DiFiore and Nelson have been with Cake more or less since the beginning (Nelson left for a brief time), there have been other personnel changes. The band has Spinal Tap’s hiring record in regard to drummers. And if you listen closely to “Bound Away,” off Cake’s new album, you’ll hear something that was until recently unimaginable. That heavy guitar part, the loosely strung rumble that’s mixed in with a mariachi-style horn section, is original band guitarist Greg Brown sitting in. (Brown left Cake with some mutual acrimony back around 1998, to focus on his own band Deathray, a pop-rock outfit that has since dissolved. Contacted via e-mail, he politely declined to comment.) Brown was replaced by Xan McCurdy, who has played with Cake ever since.

As simple and declarative as that previous sentence is, there’s no overstating how complicated a scenario it was to replace Brown, whose concentrated soloing, rural intonations and vibrant rhythmic backings were an essential component of the Cake sound, and remain so even in his absence. Showroom of Compassion, more than a decade after his exit, continues to draw on the hook vocabulary of Brown-era favorites—the bristling lead guitar line of the new song “Mustache Man (Wasted),” for example, recalls that of “Ain’t No Good” off Motorcade.

“About five years before Greg Brown left the band,” says McCrea, “Cake did a show with The Loved Ones, and that was Xan’s old band. It was at UC Berkeley, and I remember watching their set, thinking to myself—I didn’t think Greg would ever leave the band, but thinking to myself, ‘This is probably the only other guitar player who could play with Cake.’ There’s something about the heaviness of his attack. It was very lucky that at exactly the moment Greg
was leaving, Xan was leaving another band.” Nor was McCurdy a stranger to Sacramento; he tells the story of an annual plaque at Old Ironsides, which hailed the venue’s most popular act of that year, and notes with some pride that at one point The Loved Ones was on that plaque. As for the break with Brown, McCrea says, simply, “I don’t like talking about it much, because it was a big downer at the time. Greg and I are talking again, and playing again. I might help him with some of his stuff.”

When asked if the rigor of Cake’s arrangements might have been one of the reasons a guitarist as fluid as Brown decided to leave the band, McCrea says, “I’ve never talked with him about it, but that probably was a factor.”

The reunion with Brown is a meaningful milestone for Cake, but you can’t go home again—especially when not everyone’s home is within driving distance.

“Living in different cities? I don’t like it,” says DiFiore. “I would rather everyone lived in Sacramento, but people are individuals. It’s hard to expect everybody to stay here. Two of the people in the band have never lived in Sacramento,” by which he means McCurdy, who lives in Portland, and the band’s current drummer, Paulo Baldi, who lives in San Francisco.

But while they may not all live in Sacramento, they do record here, and their investment in their longtime studio—located not far from Tower Theatre—increased in recent years as they transformed it into one that runs entirely on solar power. During the recording of Showroom of Compassion, the band proudly reported on its Web site that it used “100% solar energy.”

“It was something we’d thought about for probably 10 years,” says McCrea of going solar, “but we’d never touched down long enough to actually do the research on getting solar power. The solar power thing has been the easiest thing you could imagine.” The band has performed benefits for solar power-related causes, including the defeated Proposition H (the San Francisco Clean Energy Act) in 2008. Pressed on the complexity of the solar implementation, McCrea allows that the structural effort wasn’t exactly plug-and-play: “It did delay recording a little.”

The band produced a YouTube video to document the solar-panel installation process. Its song “Arco Arena” (an instrumental off Comfort Eagle) plays in the background. The Sacramento venue from which the song takes its name is itself named for the gas giant Atlantic Richfield Company, which is owned by BP, whose oil flooded the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. McCrea says Arco turned down a request long ago to put the architectural drawing of the arena on the cover of the single. “They didn’t think our values were the same as theirs,” he recalls of the communication. (A rare version of “Arco Arena” with lyrics goes: “Move your feet to the spirit of the ball … The parking lot sparkles hot / Around the busy sports complex.”) Apparently Jay-Z does share the band’s values, or at least its taste in instrumentation—he licensed a hefty sample of “Arco Arena” for the song “Guns & Roses,” featuring Lenny Kravitz, released on his 2002 album, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse.

It’s been a long time since record retail was at its height of power, back in those halcyon days when the machinery behind hit singles served as a full-bore economic engine for just the sort of aspirational extravagance that Cake mocked in its early single “Rock ’n’ Roll Lifestyle,” and today refutes with its solar activism and self-releasing venture.

Revenue for that sector of the music industry—for recorded music—has been cut in half over the course of the first decade of the new millennium. The era of rock star Olympians has pretty much passed; today’s musicians even at the highest echelons seem more like savvy entrepreneurs at best (and needy buskers at worst), making as many public appearances as possible to keep afloat their Q Scores.

And it is into this foreboding marketplace that Cake will be launching Showroom of Compassion: a market in which the cross-promotion has become the new crossover hit. That’s a fact of which Cake is not unaware—the “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” iPod Nano commercial popped up on TV just as marketing efforts for the new record were getting underway. (Not all promotions involve compensation. When Drew Barrymore appeared on The Daily Show  to draw attention to her recent movie, Going the Distance, an air-drumming Jon Stewart mentioned the Cake song whose chorus employs that phrase, and the two of them took a moment to express their admiration for the band. Another late-night host, Conan O’Brien covered, as he put it, Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive” on his blockbuster between-networks comedy tour this past spring, including at a show in Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium. During a show in San Francisco, O’Brien introduced the song as follows: “There’s one band that I’ve always loved called Cake. … I’ve always loved Cake’s version of this song, but then three and a half months ago this song took on a whole new meaning for me because my life was changing so much.”

In the decade since Cake released Comfort Eagle, popular culture has shifted to the Internet and to video games, among other activities. Rock ’n’ roll itself has long since gone from most-favored-genre status in the United States, to being yet another genre among many on the Billboard charts. So it’s fitting that the new Cake album opens with “Federal Funding,” a molasses-paced, yet hypnotically tuneful dirge about the state of the arts, which is to say: grant-writing, nepotism and institutional culture. The song goes: “You’ll receive the federal funding, you can have a hefty grant. Strategize the presentation, make them see that you’re the man.”

McCrea, in other words, has no illusions about the economics of his enterprise. “Art seems to be a luxurious foaming on top of the industrial revolution,” he says between sips of coffee, the Oakland sun nearing its zenith.

If the new album can be said to have a theme, that theme is time slipping away. “Long Time” makes the subject self-evident, but all 11 songs on Showroom of Compassion  are concerned with a distant past and a foreshortened future. “What’s Now Is Now” undermines its seize-the-moment title with a retro disco beat that emphasizes how faddish musical styles can be. Ditto “Italian Guy,” which follows up mention of the title character’s snazzy “polyester pin-striped suit” with the fact that he has gray hair. “The Winter” speaks of “places where we used to be,” while “Got to Move” criticizes someone else’s need to “prove that there is something new in everything you do.” (That last line may be a defensive maneuver in regard to what is truly stunning about Showroom of Compassion, which is just how consistent its sound is with that of earlier Cake albums; this is no stylistic shift, aside from the overt Beatles-esque touches, nor a finger-to-the-wind adjustment. This is, indisputably, another Cake album, plain and simple.) As for “Sick of You,” Showroom’s lead single, whose video was shot in front of an old south Sacramento auto dealership, it brims with a depth of relationship discontent (“I’m so sick of you, so sick of me, I don’t want to be with you, I want to fly away”) that suggests a significant backlog of shared experience; “every piece of land, every city that you planned,” sings McCrea, “will crumble into tiny grains of sand.”

Says McCrea of the album’s production process, with little that could be mistaken for wistfulness, “The project we’ve been working on for a year and a half is of fleeting monetary value.” That is, after all those collective solar-powered hours in the studio, the actuarial tables for bands these days dictate that they place more emphasis on licensing, touring and merchandise than they do on so-called recorded product. Certainly, musicians are still figuring out how to balance those sources of revenue; as McCrea has made clear, touring brings its own expense—environmental, emotional, existential.

But with the new album’s release date finally set, he’s got a backup plan: “Being in Sacramento, where luckily we have a publicly owned utility, it’s great, because we get these little checks in the mail.” (The studio is remunerated for every cent of energy it delivers back into the grid.) “As the value of recorded music descends into the toilet,” says McCrea, “we get these $25 and $35 checks. We’re gonna keep our head above water.”