Cake lead singer John McCrea (center) is fed up with the music business, and unsure of his band’s future after they end their tour at the Civic Friday.
Alternative rockers Cake will play their last show ever next week in Santa Cruz.
Okay, maybe. To be more accurate, lead singer John McCrea simply doesn’t know when or if he’ll ever play again after this tour wraps up at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium Friday Oct. 25. If retirement is looking better than ever, it’s because McCrea hates flying, being away from his home in Sacramento, selling T-shirts and living in transit.
“I think about it all the time. I don’t like to travel very much,” McCrea tells Santa Cruz Weekly. “It’s a huge honor to be able to play music, but I’ve been traveling for most of the past 20 years, so after a while, I feel like a pirate or a traveling salesman.”
McCrea doesn’t know when—or if—he’ll record another album, either. Exhausted from touring, McCrea sounds deflated. McCrea’s future financial security weighs heavily on his mind—almost as much as the state of music as a whole, and he isn’t interested in discussing much else.
McCrea started a band with his friends, including trumpet player Vince DiFiore, in 1991. They named the group Cake, not after the foodstuff, but instead after gummy things that stick to people’s shoes and then won’t come off. They established themselves five years later with their second album Fashion Nugget, which included “The Distance,” one of their biggest all-time hits. Known for tunes like “Never There” and “Sheep Go to Heaven,” Cake has a sound somewhere between Camper Van Beethoven and the Beastie Boys, and intriguing trademarks—fun lyrics, McCrea’s baritone voice and his vibraslap, the percussive piece of wood and metal that rattles more like a kid’s toy than a musical instrument.
Cake became a symbol for the freefalling music industry in 2011 when their album Showroom for Compassion debuted at number one on the Billboard charts with 44,000 copies in its first week—roughly the same number of seats as a major league baseball game. It was the lowest sales figure for a number-one album in 20 years. McCrea calls it a “salutary experience,” because it was the same sales debut as their previous album, seven years earlier in a rosier economic climate.
“That’s perfect for Cake. We’re not supposed to be number one,” McCrea says. “It’s not part of our culture.”
It’s perfect too because McCrea has become an increasingly cynical spokesperson for frustrated artists getting screwed—whether by tech corporations pocketing big profits, or by their own record labels. He wants musicians to form a union to protect themselves. “Music is being monetized by a new set of corporations,” McCrea says with a sigh. “I hate the music industry as much as anybody, and I enjoy watching people who cheated along the way suffer.”
From the rubble of tanking record companies, McCrea says tech industry moguls and bloggers have crafted a convenient myth that musicians never “made any money from recording anyway”—only off T-shirts and ticket sales. And meanwhile, if someone does a Google search for “Free Cake,” they’ll be directed to ways to listen McCrea’s music illegally (or perhaps to some gluten-free baking recipes). And of course Google makes advertising money off each search. “There’s been a huge transference of wealth from people who make stuff to people who distribute stuff,” McCrea says.
Two years ago, McCrea stood behind the enemy’s gates when Cake played a show at Google headquarters. Everywhere the band looked they saw free restaurants, free cappuccinos, people bringing their dogs into work, a Hollywood makeup crew to make employees look like zombies and people who told them it was like this every week. “I never felt so much like I was visiting Ancient Rome at the height of their glory and power,” McCrea says.
“I would be fine with free music as long as no one was getting paid,” he adds, “but as soon as there’s a Levi's ad and my band is getting paid nothing, it’s fundamentally different.”
Cake plays the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on Fri, Oct. 25.
