CAKE’s John McCrea talks anger, radiation, and end of days touring ahead of Grinders gigs in KC

CAKE. // Courtesy band

Since 1991, Sacramento’s CAKE has being making a genre of rock music all their own. Formed as a sort of reaction to how loud and stupid 90s rock radio sounded to lead singer John McCrea, the band has carved out an incredible niche. Between hit songs like “Going the Distance” and “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”, they’ve equally established their bona fides as a group that can rip out beautifully broken ballads, profanity-laden pain, and some of the most specific them cover songs of any modern outfit.

Their live shows are equally singular in their very blurry lane. Known for not using set lists, the band reads the crowd and matches energy—reacting in the moment to where the night takes them. While CAKE used to be a touring powerhouse, they’ve performed only a few dozen shows since 2019. Politics, COVID, and a broken industry have made their live experience increasingly rare.

That is perhaps why support we lost our minds when they announced that, on a very short stint of live shows in 2024, they’d be hitting Kansas City.

CAKE plays Grinders KC on May 14, 2024. Ahead of that show as part of a short run of live CAKE concerts, we spoke to McCrea about deforestation, touring in the ever-shifting landscape of music, the power of unions, and a new live album coming in June from a band that operates out of their own solar-powered studio.

[Update: A second show at Grinders has been added for May 15, 2024, due to the first show selling out. Tickets for the 15th are on sale thi Friday on Etix.com.]

The Pitch: John, how are things where you are today?

John McCrea: It’s raining here. I’m thankful for for the precipitation. It’s, we’ve had some drought. So here, so bring it on, I guess.

Well, I know that you’re a big reforestation guy. So I imagine that that’s yeah, big big part of Cornerstone there.

I think everybody should be reforestation people. It’s, super like, in our interest to care about drought killing a lot of trees and just they’re all kind of drying up—thousands of trees along the along the highways up here. Just crazy.

I guess that’s a great place to start because we’re talking today because you guys have announced a string of some upcoming shows. There’s a new album but you’re you’re you’re heading out into a world that, in 2024, has so many questions about how we survive. Politically. Economically. Environmentally. Where do you start with approaching all of those things at once.

It’s probably the most important question, when things are getting pretty real lately. We’ve sorta run through our ability to ignore these things. Our distractions from our stark reality aren’t working anymore. At the same time as this is uncomfortable, it’s an amazing opportunity. We happen to be alive right now. So we can collectively step up. It’s an opportunity to step up and be the kind of people we hoped we could become—the type of person we admire—because it’s not every generation that gets this kind of clusterfuck.

No, this is this has been what real 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 punch.

So you have to try to regulate your emotions as best you can, then do what you have to do to have a sense of agency and nobody gets like the kind of agency from playing a video game. There’s rarely an emotionally satisfying sense, you know, sense of agency available right now. So you just have to be satisfied with incremental progress. Sometimes small, seemingly insignificant, but something that I think you have to do for your own mental health these days.

What do you do with your anger?

I don’t always do the best thing with my anger. Often I’ve turned to so I’m writing as a means of sort of expressing that. But I don’t think anger is really the answer. Anger usually brings more anger. I am frustrated with what seems like just really self-indulgent stupidity. Intentional stupidity, as it seems to me. I can’t fathom the level of stupidity. There’s such disinformation right now. It’s easy to fall into that, because it reinforces your emotional biases—the kind of thing you want to believe anyway, and it feels good to believe that. Shit like how The Deep State is behind January 6. I think you have to breathe through this, so you do the little things you can do. If everything goes how you think it will, that’s a better feeling. When it goes to Hell, that makes it a lot more complicated to live within.

Yeah, that. asking you what you do with anger feels like an important step in in. You started a band in reaction to how big loud and stupid things were in the 90s. Today I get to listen to a lot of music that is the opposite of big, loud and stupid, but the world itself has only increasingly become bigger. And louder and stupid or in response. So what what does that mean for CAKE’s music? Do you get quieter and weirder in response to that? What what what is what is the state of an even bigger, stupid world? How does that channel into songwriting for you?

It is interesting that we were sort of a reactionary gesture against something initially. I don’t think we are that right now. We still have discontent content, you know, in our music, but it’s not. It’s not fundamental to what we’re doing. There is a muscular quality to the stupidity at this moment ,and that is super dangerous, and beyond the capacity of music to fix. I am under no illusion that anything I do here makes that much difference. I have political ideas that seep through, but mostly I feel like my job is simply to provide a soundtrack to all this mess.

Do you feel like what you write is non-political or is it political to see the world, and to want the best for all, and to react to things that seem detrimental to all of us? Why would we not be on the same page?

My first thing that I ever recorded was a protest song about a nuclear power plant in Sacramento, California. It was constantly leaking radioactivity into the water and air and it was skirting some of the regulations by turning the radiation into a different form. I wrote a song about that, but does that make you a political songwriter? No, not really. But if there’s a dragon in your backyard and you try to kill it before it burns everything… that’s not political. Our situation right now is that everything falls into that place, where “political” is a useless moniker.

Full vinyl box set from CAKE. // Courtesy band

By my count you’ve played just over 20 shows since 2019. So you’ve been really picky about what shows you play. How do you choose what cities you’re going to hit with your very limited runs? What’s leading your decisions there?

I’m not in this to get rich. I don’t think anyone gets happier off money, so we play as many shows as we feel we should play, while maintaining a connection with people that listen to and support us. Also with the pandemic, we didn’t feel like it was a great idea to play indoor shows. During that period, I had friends that perished, and for touring musicians you could wind up in situations where one person had it, but didn’t want to say anything to anyone else, because they didn’t want to tank the tour. As musicians, if we fall there’s no one to catch us, so we try to do anything we can to not bail on a show or tour. But we’re living on a bus together. When tours get cancelled, it’s the artists left holding the bag. COVID did a good job exposing our weaknesses in our business model.

We’ve had COVID for a few years now, and it’s a disease that can tear through a band and its crew, like you mentioned. That comes alongside the increasingly predatory nature of streaming services, and a wild Civil War between bands and venues over the cut of merch. I guess the question is: If I’m a young musician, should I even try to go on tour these days? Is being a rockstar a viable career path?

I don’t think it looks super optimistic. Without artist collectives and an aggregation of our power, there’s nothing that will get better. Streaming is not gonna get better. Haggling over live merch? Not going to improve if we’re tackling it band by band. It’s unreasonable that we have no form of artists union. But we’re so overdue on that, we should have tackled it 50 years ago. Now we live with the zero-sum game of it, and hope you can do well—perhaps be the lucky one. But now, you can get a billion streams—be the lucky one—and still get a check for a few thousand dollars a year or whatever. That’s something to look at. But streaming platforms aren’t going to be nice to us because we’re creative or something. We have to aggregate our power into economic power.

You have a new live album coming up this year, in June I believe?

We have a live album that was recorded a while back in Folsom, California. You know where the where that big prison is? It’s a good recording and we’re still sort of tweaking it and it should be released. Not recorded in the prison, but nearby.

CAKE plays Grinders KC on May 14, 2024.