Photo courtesy of Cake
CAKE and co-founder Vince DiFiore (left) will be performing at the Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage on August 11.
CAKE and co-founder Vince DiFiore (left) will be performing at the Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage on August 11.
An interview
By Matt Shields
Special to the Turnagain Times
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Photo courtesy of Cake CAKE and co-founder Vince DiFiore (left) will be performing at the Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage on August 11. |
Vince DiFiore, who, along with founder John McCrea, has been with CAKE since before their first album in 1991. DiFiore plays keyboards and adds vocals, but it is his trumpet playing that has helped bring the unique sound the band is famous for.
The group is coming to Anchorage to play at the Moose’s Tooth Aug. 11. DiFiore recently spoke with me by phone from his hometown of Sacramento, California. I asked him if adding the trumpet had been a well-thought out plan, or was it simply a case of it being the instrument in his closet at the time?
Vince DiFiore: It was a combination of things…John [McCrea] wanted some horns in the band and I was playing with a saxophone player I knew one night in a free jazz-improvisational thing, and John came out to see us. I’m not sure if he was coming to see me specifically, or he was just out that night cause it was something to do in Sacramento on a Thursday night, but he talked with me after the show and invited me to a rehearsal. I think the thing with the trumpet for John…well two reasons. He wanted a foil for the electric guitar. He didn’t want a band where the electric guitar had a lot of solos because he wanted to get away from rock cliché and convention, so he thought giving the trumpet some solos would even that out. Then you have the guitar play a more melodic role within the verses and choruses, with an emphasis on interesting rhythms and melodies. The other reason for the trumpet, versus the saxophone, is it’s sort of a sadder sound in some songs. The saxophone can sound too celebratory, like the Saturday Night Live “Whoop it up” sound.
Matt Shields: Without sounding celebratory there is a sense of upbeat-ness in a CAKE song. Even if the song is about something melancholy, or sad, it’s still accessible without feeling that it’s time to hit the booze cabinet and drown our sorrows.
VD: That’s a good observation. That’s something that John once said a long time ago, when we were just starting to hit the scene nationwide. That an interesting part of our appeal was there was this sort of fanfare of “Here we come! …With all our problems.” It’s a good juxtaposition of high spirits, but big problems.
MS: Staying with the subject of the band’s music, does the sound that has come to be recognized as CAKE make it difficult to branch into other directions because of a fear that “We can’t do that, because that’s not a Cake song”?
VD: I was talking to a local musician the other day and he was saying how amazing it was that we have five albums without really changing our style very much. The one thing we’ve done is on the later albums we’ve brought in more synthesizer and keyboard sounds, where as we had maybe just some organ and piano on the earlier albums. But it’s stayed pretty much the same and I think it works well for us because the emphasis is always on the song.
MS: Meaning?
VD: We don’t go into the studio and piece things together. It’s usually making an arrangement for a song that’s already there. Occasionally, a section of a song might be created, but it’s usually, from front to back, the same number of bars as if John was coming in and just playing acoustic guitar and singing to us. By us sticking with the process that the song is the most important thing, there are a number of arrangements that can be made for it, and I think we’re not wearing out our welcome as long as the songs are strong.
MS: So far you haven’t. You don’t seem to repeat yourselves.
VD: Maybe there are some songs that are similar because they have a country western feel, and because of the conventions of those chord patterns, but otherwise there is not a lot of repeat feel through our albums.
MS: Is there a particular album, or song, where everything came together in such a way that it gave you personal satisfaction as a musician?
VD: Two songs that stick in my mind. One example of that happening, on the second album [Fashion Nugget], would be Frank Sinatra. A journalist once wrote, “You heard the trumpet, you heard the guitar, and you were wondering if it was going to work out, but then, all the dolphins were swimming together”…Or something like that. I forgot the exact metaphor, but basically it seemed like something that started out lopsided but then came together. Friend Is A Four Letter Word, from that same album, is a song I think works really well. There’s really strong trumpet, really strong guitar, the rhythm section is solid…And then later on I think Opera Singer worked out really well. There are tons of parts in that song. For some people it might seem kind of busy, but as someone in the band, when I’m listening to Opera Singer, there’s a lot of ear candy because the parts just keep on coming. I like that song a lot. That was with a different guitarist, Xan McCurdy, who we’re playing with now.
MS: When did Xan McCurdy join the band?
VD: Ever since Greg Brown left Xan’s been the guitar player. The third album, Prolonging The Magic, was a combination of a lot of guitarists, and then Xan played on Comfort Eagle and Pressure Chief.
MS: Somewhere in there you guys played with a friend of mine, Greg Vincent —
VD: God, everyone knows Greg. An awesome, awesome, pedal steel player. He also plays guitar really well. He played on Walk On By, She’ll Come Back To Me, Mexico…I think a couple others, too. He’s a beautiful player, it seems like he knows every direction on that instrument. He has such a melodic sense.
MS: Besides yourself and John McCrea, is anyone else from the original lineup currently with CAKE?
VD: Gabriel Nelson is a bassist we were originally working with. He played on the four-song demo that preceded our first album Motorcade Of Generosity (and those songs are on Motorcade), as well as the album itself. Then he had a kid, and spent some time raising that child, he started a band of his own. Later on we lost our bass player and Gabe came back. He’s been with us since around ’98.
MS: How about yourself?
VD: The Fall of ’91. The time the first Gulf War was happening.
MS: Interesting way to remember it.
VD: Yeah, back with George Sr., that was about the time. We started touring nationally about ’94 with Motorcade of Generosity after Capricorn Records had picked it up.
MS: B-Sides and Rarities is your sixth album, correct?
VD: That’s right…It’s nice to think of it as our sixth album, I hadn’t really counted it as our sixth. It just sort of appeared and we had this sense of fulfillment that something had happened. Our seventh album coming out will be a live recording from the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield.
MS: I read a posting on the band’s website that CAKE has “severed contacts with the mainstream recording industry”. Does this mean you are producing these albums on your own?
VD: We’ve started the process of recording on our own with this last album. Sort of paring down recording costs and taking things into our own hands. We’re also doing sales and distribution on our own through our website, which is not uncommon these days. The record companies can’t be as generous as they used to be because sales are so low, and we felt if we’re going to be selling fewer records we should sell them on our own. It makes sense economically and we have a greater sense of freedom.
MS: It seems that with the internet a band has the chance to find as much name recognition as say, the Rolling Stones, with their high-powered promotional machine behind them. Are you seeing a lot more bands taking a similar approach by going completely independent?
VD: Definitely. Boy, things have really changed as far as the internet factoring in. For example, at one point we were asking ourselves if we wanted to do a concert DVD, and our feeling was “no”. That was the one thing that we own, tickets to the show, and we don’t want to sort of give away that live concert experience. We want people to come to our shows…But just before I got on the phone with you I was watching our latest concert in Istanbul, Turkey, on YouTube. It was that quick. The show was just a few days ago and now you can see us playing live in a nicely edited piece.
MS: Was that your first time in Istanbul?
VD: That was our third time actually. It is a revelation going there because it’s at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Iraq and Iran are right down the road. It was sort of a thrill to be there because of that. You have a lot of respect for those people for living in the middle of both of those worlds and having to have a global discussion within their community. In the same way that republicans and democrats discuss things in the United States, they are having a discussion between East and West, Muslim and Christian, within their communities. I think there is a level of intelligence inherent in that place because of the questions they have to live with every day.
MS: Did you take the chance to have discussions with people about our country? About their views of America?
VD: In the past I’ve gone through so much of that United States citizen guilt that I’ve left it aside. I’ve had so many discussions with people, and I’m so clear with myself about my viewpoints, that I make sure I treat interactions on a person-to-person basis. I don’t take that baggage with me when I go to Europe. People are people and you can make a human contact anywhere from New Mexico, to Brugge, Belgium. If you have all that guilt, then people aren’t going to want to talk, or it’s going to be hard for you to have a friendly discussion.
MS: I like that observation.
VD: The other thing is, in Western Europe, their hands are just as bloody, really. They don’t have the big military industrial complex that we do, but England was in there with us. Western Europe tends to have some of the same interests that we do. Maybe they’re not generally part of the military machine, but there are neo-conservative type people there, too.
MS: How was the tour of Europe musically?
VD: Great. We did seven shows over there. We went to the Netherlands, England, Belgium, France, and Turkey. It really was a good experience for us, I think, because we went to places where people probably hadn’t heard a majority of our music. We enjoyed the process of winning them over, which is something we hadn’t experienced in a long time because we’ve been used to doing shows where everyone shows up and knows all the music. In Europe it was a festival setting where people thought they’d come check us out. That’s something I personally miss. Having a crowd who isn’t very familiar with us, and they either give you the thumbs up or thumbs down.
MS: CAKE continues this tour by coming north. Have you played Alaska before?
VD: We’ve played in Anchorage. We had a show with Geggy Tah. It was great, but the most we saw of Alaska was flying in and out, seeing the frozen rivers. This time we are going to do some sightseeing via helicopter.
MS: I’ve personally wondered if musicians who have played in Alaska are talking it up. We are a bit off the radar, but we have a savvy audience up here that wants more bands to come play.
VD: Of course…that’s a part of the United States identify, having Alaska up there. I think if Alaska weren’t part of the United States it would feel different to be a U.S. citizen. For people outside of Alaska there’s that space in your psyche that opens up because you know that Alaska is up there, just like you know that the Pacific ocean is there, or our open prairie spaces… Knowing that Alaska is there does something for your well-being. But it is a long flight.
CAKE performs at The Blue Loon in Fairbanks, Aug. 10 and The Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage on Aug. 11.