As some of you will recall, I have a friend named John McCrea, who is the front man for the band CAKE. They’re putting out their latest release independently, without the help of a record label. To try to help get the word out, I recorded a conversation with John — and I do stress the word conversation, this isn’t really an interview per se — at the end of June. The original plan was that it would be transcribed and posted to coincide with the CAKE contest I held in mid July. But, gosh, you know, one thing and another, and, well, um.
Anyway, better late than never.
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Tom Tomorrow (in italics) and John McCrea in conversation, late June 2007
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I guess we should start out by pointing out that we’ve actually known each other, how long, five years now? I met you at that Unlimited Sunshine concert in Brooklyn.
That was 2002. So five years. Time flies, huh?
Yeah. That was the weekend I got to dress up in a very foul smelling penguin costume and dance on stage with the Flaming Lips.
I don’t think the Flaming Lips wash those costumes every night.
Oh, I don’t think they ever wash those costumes.
You probably shared that experience with a lot of other people.
I feel that it was an intimate moment that I shared with many people before me and after me.
(laughs) We don’t have to talk too much about that. That was an interesting night–wasn’t it raining?
It rained the first night (of a two-night concert series in Prospect Park). The funny thing is, that thing almost fell through entirely. You and I had been in touch on the phone or by email about doing some t-shirt stuff, but then when you were playing that show in the park, it was raining so hard my wife and I almost didn’t make it over there. But we did, and it was an amazing concert — but then you and I still almost didn’t meet because some security guy didn’t want to let us backstage after.
You would be amazed at how common that is.
But we had the right passes. I’m still pissed off at that guy. (laughs)
The funny thing is, that happens in almost every city in the world. Something about the job description of security guy, there’s an overzealous law enforcement mode they get in.
It’s true of anyone with a small amount of authority. They’re actually filming a scene for the new Indiana Jones movie here this week, and you can’t walk downtown without some officious little 23 year old production assistant telling you, “I’m sorry, you can’t cross the street, you have to walk eight blocks out of your way.” Admittedly I do cut them more slack than I would have in New York, where film shoots are a constant irritation.
New Yorkers are so jaded.
When you’re living in New York, even out in Brooklyn, there’s literally a film crew probably every other week, somewhere in your way, and it’s just an annoyance. New York is a place where, at least in my experience, all you’re trying to do is control the annoyances as much as possible.
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We’ve talked about this before, but just tell me a little about the glamorous, exciting world of the touring rock musician.
Well, there’s a lot of security guys. It’s probably an every day occurance that we get searched all the time at airports, it’s something you have to brace yourself for. Most people just travel once in a while but we’re travelling every single day, so we become sort of numb to it after a certain point. And there are certainly law enforcement types who are totally cool and in it for good reasons, but that said, it only takes one to ruin your entire week.
It’s kind of upsetting when you know there’s no gunpowder anywhere in your bags and for some reason their machine says there’s gunpowder and you’re not going to make your flight if it drags on much longer. That almost prevented us from being able to play a show. Our ability to travel through space is a lot less certain than it used to be. And the ability of our luggage to travel through space. There’s constant problems, constant logjams. We had to play a festival in France, I forget which one, without my guitar or amplifier because French people were, I guess refusing to load the bags.
You have a very specific guitar that you use.
Exactly. I have a replacement for it now but I didn’t at that point. It’s sort of a uniquely crappy sound and it’s hard to find another one to replace it. At any rate we just had to choose all the songs that we play that didn’t include my guitar.
Okay, so talk about life on the road. How many months do you go out on tour, how long are you out, what is your routine like?
I guess I could describe a day, and then I could tell you how many days in a row that lasts. A day is typically when you’re travelling by bus, it’s being on the bus maybe from the time you got on the bus after the show the night before into late afternoon the following day. Usually between eight and twenty hours of driving.
And you have a little sleeping bunk, a sort of spaceship bunk–
–that generally doesn’t extend much higher than your face. It’s a little bit claustrophobic. I tend to get a little bit carsick so I wake up after a night sleeping in one of these coffin-shaped bunks sick to my stomach. Which sort of lasts throughout the rest of the day. It goes on for weeks and weeks like that. I tend to get sick, just generally, because I’m not really getting much out of my food and I’m just getting nauseous the whole time. Weeks and weeks in a row.
But all the drugs and easy sex makes up for it, right?
I think that’s what it may have been like in the seventies, I think it was really exciting in the seventies but now it’s more like a travelling salesman who happens to sell music. I’m sure there’s a lot of that for other bands. (laughs) But increasingly I’m not sure that it’s that way for even the sexiest of bands these days. It’s a leaner business. In terms of how long we have to stay out on tour, that’s just being turned up and up and up by the fact that our recorded music is now, for all intents and purposes, worthless to the people that listen to music. Generally people under thirty tend to think you’re a chump if you pay for music. The value has been transferred over to the shiny and valuable iPod player and away from the music itself. It’s increasingly necessary for us to play more and more shows in order to pay our bills and accountants and managers, et cetera. Despite a lot of hype about Myspace, t’s getting harder, not easier, for bands to make ends meet, and I know that that’s not a popular statement, but it’s the truth. I’d like to see some sort of solution to it.
You had a great line you said to me once, that “information wants to be free but rent wants to be paid.”
Yeah, in a way I’m right on board with people that say “music wants to be free.” That’s great, let’s have music be free, but let’s also have sandwiches be free. And jobs that other people do. It’s inconsistent to single out musicians. And I don’t know how you’re gonna solve the problem, but it’s a problem, because there’s human beings that are doing labor, and if there’s no other way for them, other than to be a corporate shill or endlessly touring carneys of rock, it’s a problem. Good people maybe aren’t gonna want to do it. I don’t know. And I don’t think Wal Mart nation, people that are willing to buy slave labor in order to save ten cents on a pair of shoes, I don’t think they’re suddenly going to have compassion for musicians. Musicians they believe are too busy taking drugs and throwing TV sets out of hotel room windows to notice.
I promise you there are people composing emails as they read this about how their jobs are much more difficult than yours. I get that whenever I allow that I might be having a difficult period in my own career.
I don’t think you can actually know how difficult someone’s job is until you do it. And it would be outrageous for, say, an architect to tell a plumber how much more complicated his job was, and that being a good rationale for taking his work for free, you know what I mean?
Also, one of the difficulties–neither one of us got into professions that have any sort of, you know, retirement plan or guaranteed longterm career options. We’re both in these really fickle industries. I wonder from year to year if I’m going to make a living.
And there’s no empathy, because you get to draw for a living.
And in all fairness, I like my life a lot better as it is, than a lot of ways it could have turned out.
Right but you’re a cartoonist, not a lawyer, or a garbageman, or a schoolteacher, so is it right just because you’re in the right occupation for you that you should have to pay some sort of penalty for that? Is that rationale for theft?
It’s a little bit different for me because it’s a slightly different economic model–
But the sense of entitlement is there because you have this seemingly exciting or glamorous job–
Glamorous, yes, glamorous is precisely the word. If you could only see me alone in my studio day after day, just drenched in glamour–
But people think that because you get to communicate, that it’s somehow not work.
In my case, I tend to like my job when I’ve gotten the cartoon written for the week, but every week when I’m approaching it and I don’t have anything in mind, I would rather be doing almost anything else for a living. There’s a speech Hemmingway gave, where he said that a writer’s life at best is a lonely one, that a writer must face eternity, or the lack of it, every day. And he had it about right. Of course, he ended up killing himself.
I think when an artist kills himself or herself, people just sort of nod knowingly, “oh, of course.”
Kurt Cobain didn’t get a lot of sympathy that I recall, outside of the fan base.
There’s the drug and alcohol thing too, with Hemmingway and Cobain both there was the added problem of addiction.
Well this is a cheery conversation so far.
It’s awesome.
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Okay, so why’d you go independent, what’s going on with that?
We were conflicted about signing with Columbia Records to begin with, I had a sense that it was a much different culture than ours. Also the large music business thing seems unsustainable under current conditions.
When did you sign with them?
We signed with them after being on an independent label that got bought by a much larger label.
How long ago was that?
In 2000, I think. We released two albums with them. But it was always sort of weird, it was almost like touring in Spain or something, the communication was always difficult with that corporate culture. We were sort of a do it yourself culture and tended to do everything ourselves and we had to relinquish a lot of the job over to these people that were working on fifteen other bands at the same time, probably all of whom we couldn’t listen to. Asking those people to understand us and understand what we were about well enough to offer us up to the marketplace, as it were, probably in retrospect seems rather impossible.
Which CDs did they put out?
Pressure Chief and Comfort Eagle.
And those are both great albums, were they successful in a traditional sense?
Sure, but I’ll give you an anecdote. There was a song called “Short Skirt Long Jacket.” We needed to make a video because everyone thought that’s the single, probably. So CAKE, the band, started thinking how can we avoid doing a typical rock video where you either have a bunch of guys with guitars in an urban decay setting or even worse, guys with guitars with a bunch of fucking animation jumping all over the place.
Not that there’s anything wrong with animation in general. Cartoons being one of humanity’s highest achievements.
(laughs) It gets stupid when it’s sort of foisted upon rock. Anyway I thought of going around with a microphone and some headphones and letting people talk over the song and say what they thought about the song and that ended up being a lot of fun, and a lot of work, trying to edit the visual, the auditory of the music, and the auditory of the people talking over the music, trying to make it flow was very labor intensive, so I just spent a lot of time with the editor, late into the night, and we finally finished and got something we thought was really good, and the record company watched and said, “oh, we really liked it, this will be great … to use for TV ads.”
And so, that’s probably fairly self-explanatory, but I was just crestfallen. I asked somebody at the label who sort of understood it to please try to explain to the suits why this is good, and why this is not a TV ad. It ended up being explained by the right person to the right person but it was a week of waiting around for them to decide, and finally they decided, yeah, we have to think outside the box. But this incredible investment of work on my part was just going to be casually flushed down the toilet. It ended up being a situation where the music video channel ended up thinking it was an innovative video and playing it a lot. We had thought about going independent before signing with them and just didn’t have the confidence in our system, that our system would allow us to continue to live. We’d seen examples of people more successful than ourselves biting the dust, trying to go independent, and that scared us. But anyway, gradually it dawned on us that this was a sinking ship and probably we should try to do things ourselves again, like we’d done in the beginning. Our first album, we’d released on our own label, and did pretty okay. So we are preparing to go ahead and start doing all these things ourselves again.
What are the mechanics of that? Do you have some sort of distribution mechanism in place? How do you actually do this?
By the seat of our pants, I think. We’re still trying to figure out what the distribution channels are going to be, at the very last minute. It’s going to be released conventionally on August 14, but we’re starting to sell it to people from our website right now. It’s actually doing quite well. War Pigs was second most added song on college radio the other week. So I think people are responding quite well to the music. And I think if we’re able to actually follow through with the distribution we should do okay.
But it’s all your own organization. You don’t have anybody–
Yeah, we don’t exactly have a bunch of infrastructure. We might end up packaging these CDs up ourselves with a six pack of beer. Or a twelve pack, probably, because it’s going to take a long time. And that’s what we’re doing, and it’s kind of what we’ve tried to do all along. We didn’t do a merchandising deal with another company to sell our shirts for us, we actually make and sell our own shirts and do most of those things ourselves, and we always have–
Well, you actually sew them yourselves, right? On your own sewing machine in the back room? When you’re not on tour, you spend most of your time making shirts out of raw fabric–?
Yeah, pretty much, and that’s why the whole thing is getting a little too much for me. Having to write songs, and record then, and then also sewing all the shirts–
Being a seamstress–is that the right word? That seems sort of–
Seems sort of sexist.
Seamster?
What is the non sex-determinant way of–
Uh, t-shirt-sewing-person.
Yeah. You know, I used to make t-shirts–well, I screen printed them, but that’s how I used to make a living, I guess when the band was first starting out and there wasn’t very much money for food, I just made t-shirts and sold them for ten dollars each, and had a good time coming up with weird non sequitur slogans.
You told me a story once, you found some sort of flyer –?
Oh, yeah–did I give you one of those shirts, I hope?
No, I don’t have one. I wear an extra large.
I think I’ve got a few left. It was a vocalist seeking band notice, it was up at the Guitar Center on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. The guy, it was like a rant. It was very specific, and at the end of it, it was like, “If you think this ad is bogus or you think I suck, FUCK YOU!” So it’s like, you haven’t even met the guy yet and you’re already having personality problems.
So how long did you spend in LA?
Maybe two and a half years thinking that I just wanted to write songs. Which I ended up not being able to do, I didn’t want to have some hack cover my songs, I actually had more attachment to them. I also think they were a little too peculiar for anyone to cover, so I don’t think anyone would have wanted to.
Has your stuff been covered by anybody?
Here and there. Nobody so famous, but there’s a country artist in Austin, and an Israeli band that did a version of “I Bombed Korea,” but they changed the lyrics to “I Bombed Gaza.” I think that he was expressing similar emotions to the character in my song. I think probably this guy had maybe, you know, bombed Gaza. It’s a strange thing to ask your 18 year olds to do, and in Israel it’s all of them, they all have to become soldiers. I think he was expressing mixed feelings about it.
Do you feel that once you let the music out in the world it takes on a life of its own? And I ask this because, I’m thinking specifically of the Rush Limbaugh theme riff, which is from an old Pretenders song that is sort of a rant against megamalls and so forth, so it’s actually this very environmental/left song, but it has this catchy bassline that Rush Limbaugh has appropriated–
It’s a great bassline and I can understand why a bouncy guy like Rush Limbaugh would want a bouncy bassline like that.
I was going to do some sort of cartoon about this — I have no idea what, I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night. But I had something in mind that I was writing about this, and I called up Chrissie Hynde’s record company or management or whatever, and asked if she had ever released any sort of statement, how she felt about her music being appropriated, and some PR person said I’ll get back to you on this. The phone rings about a half an hour later, and it’s Chrissie Hynde, and we talked about this for about an hour, and I tried my best to convince her that she should pull the music, deny the sonofabitch the rights, and her contention was basically that once she’s written it, once it’s out in the world, it takes on a life of its own and it’s nothing to do with her anymore.
I think she might be right legally–
But we weren’t talking legally–
All kinds of people use–if she is, or was, on a label, there’s an agreement between the labels and broadcasters that they can pretty much use stuff–
But tell me that Chrissie Hynde couldn’t go public and just declare war on Rush Limbaugh.
She could, but I don’t know if she has the power to actually pull it.
Yeah but she could make it very painful for him to use that theme song. She could go out in public and say, I am a left wing — I think she’s a big PETA supporter — she could say, Rush Limbaugh is such a moron, every time he plays that theme song it undercuts his message because the point of that song is diametrically opposed to every word that comes out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth. If she went out and played the media, got that message out there, Rush Limbaugh would just be embarassed every time he played his theme song.
Yeah, and I could be wrong about the legal stuff, if he’s using it as a theme song she probably does have the power to pull it.
All I know is, if Rush Limbaugh somehow decided that one of my cartoon characters would look great on a t-shirt or something, I wouldn’t be so sanguine about that.
Yeah, I get it. It might have more to do with pragmatic decisions than anything philosophical. But you have to understand that it is true that once you put your music out there, people are going to do evil shit with it.
“Love You Madly.” That’s a very cynical song, but didn’t it get used in a commercial for a very upbeat romantic comedy?
Yeah and I think we let that happen. The other thing is, in a way musicians are no longer poet/philosopher/kings in our culture. They’re now closer to carnival workers. It’s not the same sort of highly esteemed place. We’re sort of used and discarded in a way that’s unprecedented in the last forty years. It’s not lost on us. So you have people like Bob Dylan and Sting and whoever else doing these really horrible commercials.
Well the moment that anyone thought that rock music was something that could never be in commercials is long past. No one is shocked by that anymore … You guys were the closing music for the Sopranos once.
Right and there was no perversion of the song in that usage, and that’s the way I guide it, I ask myself is this a bait and switch to our audience? Did we sell them the song meaning one thing and then change it on them completely?
I think the only objection I have, is when a new set of meanings and association–music is all about meaning and association, it’s all very emotional, it’s a very instinctual thing, and what I really resent is when I have a new set of meaning and associations are superimposed over something meaningful to me. This goes back, for me, to Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue–
United Airlines.
I loved that piece before United Airlines ever picked it up, I used to listen to that and found it transformative. And then it just became this fucking commercial for United Airlines, something that was played on their tinny speaker system every time you were stuck on the runway, and it just destroyed the piece for me, and I hated that, and I resent it to this day.
The song Anticipation, by Carly Simon–
Right. I never knew that one free of ketchup asociations–
I think that messed with a lot of people. That song may have meant a lot to someone. Yeah I’m right with you on Gershwin. Look I turned down, god, I think close to a million dollars, back when people actually paid musicians good money to use a song in an ad campaign, for Chevrolet, they wanted to use Stick Shifts and Safety Belts. It wouldn’t have changed the meaning of the song that much, but it would make everybody think, oh that’s the song about Chevrolet. And it was really a song about sex, and mating rituals, and I surely — that would have been great to get paid that money, I almost wish that they hadn’t offered it to me — but I had to refuse it, I felt like it was definitely bait and switch to the audience that i had originally sold the song to. It would have done that same thing, probably made the song unlistenable, especially if it were used in multiple ads. And the song is not about a Chevy Malibu. Again, I don’t think this is a ethical issue. An ethical issue would be putting your mother out on the streets or something.
The other way they’ll get you–we’ve had numerous instances where we refused a company, say, in Spain, the usage of our song for a cell phone commercial, for instance, and then they just went out and aped the voice and use the same arrangement.
Wasn’t there a lawsuit about that–?
Tom Waits did that. But I don’t think we have the resources to hire an international lawyer and pursue that. It’s happened in Argentina for a Heinekin commercial, in South Korea they used “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps…”
Which is one of my son’s favorite songs.
I hope he doesn’t go to South Korea and get disillusioned.
He’s four years old … you actually loom somewhat large in his imagination. One of the things I do with him is make these little clay figures, there’s this sort of foamy soft clay you can buy, and we have a little foamy soft clay John McCrea with a beard and a cap. And green skin, I think.
Nice.
He remembers that time you came to visit — of course he had pinkeye or something — I think non-parents get a really weird view of what it’s like to have a kid because you sort of parachute in and see this one moment and think that’s what it’s always like. Anyway he had pinkeye, which is highly contagious, and you were on tour–
And I was terrified, yeah.
His big favorite on the new album is Mahna Mahna. My god, we go somewhere in the car and we have to play Mahna Mahna twenty times.
That was written by a jazz musician in the sixties–Piero Umiliani. It was originally written for a sauna scene in an Italian softcore pornography movie.
And made famous by the Muppets.
Yes, the Muppets sang it. And they did a great version of it!
Hey I’ve got an idea, let’s talk about the album.
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It’s a strange album, in that it’s really comprised of some odds and ends and unfinished pieces that we worked on and made complete in the last year or so. And a very exciting feature is that it’s a scratch-n-sniff album, and the artwork on the first 5,000 or so is red, and it smells like fresh cut roses, and the second batch is brown, and it smells like leather, and the third is yellow, and it smells like banana. I think we also have newly mowed grass, in green, of course.
It’s the first album that I’m aware of that comes in Smell-o-Vision.
It’s one of those things that’s very exciting when you’re a kid.
There was always the one you’d scratch that would have some foul smell.
There’s a secret smell somewhere in the packaging too, that I figure I might as well spill the beans about.
Because no one’s going to read this, it’s just gonna be on my website…
Exactly. (laughter.) If you rip open the plastic and sniff around, there’s actually a pretty ugly smell somewhere.
And that sounds very compelling. Reason alone to buy the CD, because there’s a bad smell in there somewhere!
And it’s a smell that’s sort of at the root of a lot of our problems in America. I mean, it’s at the root of —
You’ve packaged the smell of George W. Bush?
No, it’s even more basic than that. It’s —
Dick Cheney?
No–gasoline. There’s a gasoline smell hidden on some of them.
So it would be a collector’s item, except once you release the little smell molecules, aren’t they gone?
I think it lasts awhile.
“The little smell molecules.” That’s my science background kicking in.
Anyway– the album is actually an album. That’s the thing that I was afraid of, it would just be some songs thrown together. It actually ends up being a fairly organic, cohesive unit, listening experience. And I think it’s just dumb luck. We certainly worked on putting the songs in the right order and making the segues sound good, but it ended up, although there’s a lot of disparate —
It works surprisingly well as something to listen to, through, given this almost absurd range of styles —
And that’s the hope. And we’ve always been about making albums, and that’s why we’re so wrong for the current musical landscape. People want these disembodied songs extracted from albums.
The songs on this album could be extracted and disembodied, were a listener of a mind to do so.
Yeah, don’t worry.
So, “Ruby.” My dad always listened to country radio so I knew that song immediately, from my childhood, but I had no idea what it was about until I listened to your version as an adult.
It’s the saddest song in the world.
And inherently anti-war, in that it’s about the human cost of war.
Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town is the most poignant anti-war song, even moreso than War Pigs. In this war, there’s guys coming back without the bottom half of their body.
A lot more in this war, they’re coming back with injuries that in previous eras would have simply killed them on the battlefield.
And most people just look at the number of deaths, and that’s exactly what the politicians are worried about, but it is significant when 30,000 people have been maimed, or are missing limbs. That’s a heavy price for whatever we’re paying for.
You and I were at one of the earliest anti-war marches in New York, as I recall.
That’s right — that was a big one, and it was underreported. Hundreds of thousands of people. I think New York should have had more of a say as to whether to fight that war.
It did seem like all the people who were most excited about the war, and most excited about this new America we live in as a result of terrorism, were all these people who were profoundly affected by it because they saw it on TV. Terrorism is a TV show for them.
It’s an exciting TV show. I’ve felt on numerous occasions that people were titillated by the whole thing.
It always seemed to be my experience that the people who actually witnessed 9/11 firsthand were often the least likely to fall into that.
Yeah, because they smelled it.
You look at the satellite photos of that day, that smoke cloud from the towers just covers Brooklyn. We lived with that smell — it seems like months. You got up in the morning to walk the dog — there was just that smell. Anyone who was there knows what I’m talking about.
It’s hard to get titillated by that smell. But I guess forty percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was partially responsible for that.
It’s hard to know what to make of that. I’ve always felt that reading polls is like reading entrails. Because on the one hand forty percent of Americans may believe that Saddam Hussein was, you know, personally controlling the planes by remote control, but on the other hand, 80 percent of the public now opposes the war — you have to look at all these things and get a general sense, and the general sense right now is that the public has grown tired of the war. Now, I can’t help but think, it’s too bad ya weren’t paying more attention to the cartoons — (laughs)
All they need to do is read the cartoons.
You could have figured this one out several years ago.
I have to say, you do a really great job of distilling news down to its basic elements for people. And it is true that not everyone has time to monitor all of the news sources 24/7, and you probably don’t either, but you do a better job than most. You have a unique skill of cutting away a lot of the fluff.
I’m kind of a translator. I translate bullshit into English.
(laughs) I wish more people had been reading your cartoon in 2001.
Well so do I, for any number of reasons.
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For more information about CAKE, visit their website.