A Conversation with Cake’s John McCrea – HuffPost 12.9.10
Mike Ragogna: John, how are you?
John McCrea: I’m doing great. I just got home and it’s great to be home from being on the road.
MR: You were on tour for a while?
JM: Not for too long, but we just played a TV show last night, so I’m tired and really glad to be home.
MR: What show did you do?
JM: We did Conan.
MR: Nice.
JM: They were really pretty nice to us, which is unusual for television shows.
MR: You’ve been around for a while. I remember your debut album when I was working at Razor & Tie. I remember everybody making a fuss about it, and you could hear it being played down every hall.
JM: Well, that’s reassuring.
MR: (laughs) Your new album is titled Showroom Of Compassion. Was there a mission with that title?
JM: Our album titles have to do with narrative, but it’s not always really explainable, in a way. I hate to ruin it for some people who think it’s one thing. For me though, it’s mostly about the phonetics of the words, a little about the meaning of the words, and about the way they intersect with the picture on the album cover which is a tiger devouring a human being. So, I thought that somehow worked well with the idea of compassion. I can’t explain it anymore than that.
MR: Maybe that was the Bush years’ version of compassion.
JM: Yeah. You know, it creates a bit of cognitive dissonance, and I enjoy cognitive dissonance.
MR: It’s been since 2004 since your last album Pressure Chief.
JM: We did try out having our own label a couple of years ago with the B-Sides album. It was sticking our foot in the water to see if we could do this on our own, so yes, this is our first studio album in quite a while. We wanted to make sure that we could actually pull it off going independent. We did it years ago with our first album, that was an independent release. We did everything ourselves, at first. It’s a lot of work that maybe musicians shouldn’t have to do, but with the music industry imploding the way it is, we felt like we didn’t want to be tied to a sinking ship.
MR: I hear you brother. I still consider myself sort of in the business but not so much in the business of making money off of music.
JM: That is a smart thing for you because, really, I think it’s going to be a hobby soon.
MR: For a while, it seemed to be a ritual, a rite of passage. You have your first prom, your first car, and your first record deal…
JM: …yeah, and then something bad happens and you go back to real life.
MR: (laughs) Let’s talk about the reality of having your own label. What are the rewarding elements?
JM: Well, I guess the most rewarding element is that you are doing things on your own schedule and you are not at the whim of some sort of exterior corporate schedule or structure. That’s the most infuriating thing for musicians that I have talked to over the years. You put your whole life into this record and you release it, then there is some sort of scheduling conflict or corporate rivalry between this person or that person who both work at your record company, and you happen to be aligned with the wrong side of the power struggle and suddenly, songs that you wrote over a 20 year period are just being flushed down the toilet. It’s nice to be free of that.
MR: It seems like so few artists, especially when they are starting out, know anything or care about the ramifications of a lot of business decisions. They just want that deal.
JM: I think that people romanticize musicians. I think they want us to be somewhat impractical, maybe on drugs or self-destructive. It’s sort of a Van Gogh cutting off his ear kind of value that’s added to a musician who ignores his own safety or comfort and is just crazy about music only, or self-destruction only, or there’s some sort of emotional caricature that we are wanting that music to represent for us. I think there is a little bit of a burden that is placed on musicians that I think is somewhat unnecessary to be clueless and be children about these things. It’s a perfect set-up for unscrupulous business people to take advantage of. It’s been happening for decades and decades and decades.
MR: Yeah, since the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. The term “Car Hood Signing” evokes that.
JM: Yes. But if you talk to a musician who has got any brains, who has been in the business for more than five years, there is steam coming out of his or her ears. At first, you are in the cloud of narcissism and your own thing and your own music. Then, after a certain point, you realize that the whole thing is rigged. We are hoping that we can sort of navigate around that somewhat and not be crushed because we are doing that.
MR: Well, there’s that wide-eyed, naive expectation of daddy or mommy taking care of you.
JM: Yeah, that’s bulls**t.
MR: Exactly. After all my years in the biz, I’m dying to teach a music course that approaches the business side from a holistic angle.
JM: You’re going to have to dispel this really entrenched momentum of the idea of the musician as being somehow separated from reality and pragmatism. People don’t want to hear musicians being concerned about their own welfare. That’s not sexy. They don’t mind if we overdose on drugs but they don’t want us to be smart about business. So, that is a tough one to counteract.
MR: Like you said, you have seen it from the inside, and now, you’re seeing it from the other side of taking back your own career. Most new artists really need to be doing that if they’re going to survive.
JM: Especially right now, especially these days. If the music business was somewhat more stable, you could probably, here and there, see success stories from people with the current structure. But the current structure is in the process of imploding so I think you have to, unfortunately, ’cause I would really like it if musicians, myself included, could just think about music.
MR: Yes, excellent. Hopefully, it will get back to that state. And, you know, you can surround yourself with people who can take some initiative and care about your career, it’s almost like having family involved, you know?
JM: I think you can, but you shouldn’t really trust anyone too much, I hate to say it. You can, and hopefully, navigate that way intuitively to know that yes, these people are my friends. But you would be surprised about how many times you can be surprised.
MR: I’ve been very lucky over the years, and I mostly know more stories of that working than the other, thank God.
JM: Oh good.
MR: John, let’s get back to Showroom Of Compassion. At what point did you decide it was time for a new project?
JM: Well, actually, I dragged my feet on this album because it just felt wrong…part of it was I really didn’t believe in the music business, I didn’t believe in a lot of things that maybe I had taken for granted. I mean, I don’t think I ever believed in the music business, but there was just something uncertain and unstable and I didn’t want to release my children into this scenario that I thought existed. Part of it was I really wanted to go back to releasing albums independently. But I also was aware of what happens to bands that try to do that. Sometimes, they just disappear in a really mysterious way. So, I guess I have had a lot of cynicism about the way the business is structured, and thought that we may get squashed like a bug. I think I just dragged my feet. About two to three years ago, when we started recording in earnest, I thought, you know what? Even though I thought the music business was crapping out, we would give it a try anyway and see what happens.
MR: Let’s talk solar power since you’ve been into it for a while.
JM: Two or three years ago, before we started working on the album, one of the things we wanted to get done, and part of the reason why it took us so long to make this album, was we wanted to reconfigure our studio and make it 100% solar and be able to say on our album, “This has been recorded, rehearsed and produced with 100% solar energy.” Living in California, it seemed like the least we could do.
MR: Yes. KRUU is the only solar-powered station in the Midwest, and some people still don’t understand how we can stay on the air on a cloudy day. (laughs)
JM: I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but Germany is the number one producer of solar electricity, and if you’ve been there, you know that it’s not a very sunny climate. It occurred to us that if Germany could be #1 in the world, then a lot of places in the United States could be #1. I think it is a matter of being #1. We have to move very quickly as a nation in order to remain prosperous and happy.
MR: You know, it’s so hard, because we are not only entrenched in the old ways, but I think we are a conservative country overall despite moments of progressive clarity. It’s so hard for us to let go of old systems when there’s so much fear.
JM: And we are a big country. There is a lot of momentum, and people are relying on the status quo to put food on their table and I understand that. Having said that, sometimes the national interest has to usurp special interests.
MR: I think you are so right. And as far as those who bit the bullet in the beginning and put a lot of money into the initial investment? For the most part, you don’t hear a lot of horror stories from those people.
JM: It’s really easy. We never think about it other than the fact of feeling that this is a lot cleaner and feeling better about ourselves. The other thing is there are other organizations now like 1bog.org that do leverage-buying which reduces the cost significantly. They will aggregate a whole bunch of people that want to go solar, and rather than buying just one solar rig, they will buy a thousand and get the deal you would get buying thousands of rigs. There is also Solar City that will allow you to get solar on your roof without the big investment and you just pay monthly. There are less and less excuses to not go solar.
MR: And probably more pressure from the oil industry to make sure that we don’t go that direction.
JM: Yeah, but how great would it be to go in that direction. How excellent not to be potentially funding terrorism with our energy purchases.
MR: Ah, yes. The tentacles of that industry are so scary, so cloak and dagger, that no one even knows how to begin that conversation.
JM: Yes, that’s right, it is a very powerful industry. And you are right, you have to be careful you could disappear.
MR: Although these days, they would have to disappear a lot more people.
JM: (laughs) I hope you’re right.
MR: Hey John, let’s again get back to the record. The title Showroom of Compassion is my favorite since Jason Mraz’s We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things.
JM: That is a great album title.
MR: I wanted to ask you about a really interesting song the album called Federal Funding.
JM: That is a song I wrote a long time ago before everyone started getting into an uproar, before hating all government and regulation. It’s an ambiguous song to me. There are a lot of great things about government. It kept us out of a Great Depression for 70 years. The laws that were written following the Great Depression were really effective. I don’t want the song to be misinterpreted as some general “dis” on government. There is a lot of gradation.
MR: Right, it’s not exactly a Tea Party anthem.
JM: It’s not. I worry that it may become that, so I’m just preemptively saying it’s a touchy subject for me and everyone. There is a lot that has been demonized over the last 20 years, there has been a lot to sort of undermine the entire idea of regulation or government or rules. I think rules are great. There is corruption in government. Democrats made a really lame attempt at getting rid of earmarks a couple of years ago, and obviously, they weren’t trying very hard. There are things that could become less corrupt. I think, overall, we do need government to protect the weak from the strong.
MR: Excellent, beautifully said. Do you have any advice for new artists?
JM: Well, I’m not sure where things are headed with the music business. I do think it’s exciting that you can take your own career into your own hands. I think the most important thing to focus on is write a good collection of songs and record them into an album or however you want to do it, but just get yourself a bunch of really good songs and figure out how to record and produce them. I really think that’s more important than waiting for somebody else to come lift you up and make you into a star.
MR: Thank you again. You are a really smart guy.
JM: I have been thinking about this for a while but I appreciate your compliment. Thank you.
Tracks:
1. Federal Funding
2. Long Time
3. Got To Move
4. What’s Now Is Now
5. Mustache Man (Wasted)
6. Teenage Pregnancy
7. Sick Of You
8. Easy To Crash
9. Bound Away
10. The Winter
11. Italian Guy
Transcribed by Erika Richards