Cake

Recoil: I was reading some interviews where Cake members refer to making music as just being 'your job,' such as how a shoe salesman sells shoes as his job. John seems to have an especially cold outlook on music as a business. Do you really feel like you're just manufacturing music as a job or is that just a mindset you keep in order to help keep the band sane and not worrying if everybody's going to like your albums or not?
Vince Di Fiore: That ['job' comment] may have just been an effort at humility, instead of just feeling like a rock star. It may have sounded dispassionate, but it was probably just an ego check.

R: What size of venues is this tour going to?
VDF: About four thousand. We're playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and the Greek Theatre in Berkley, which we've never played before. And we're playing Red Rock in Denver and places like Prospect Park in Brooklyn, places we've never played before that are a little bit bigger [than our normal tours]. The tour has quite a bill, really. I was watching the Flaming Lips do their sound check yesterday - they've really got their own thing going, they've been doing their own shows for years now. And then De La Soul is coming along and they've got their own thing. It's really an action-packed bill, so we've moved up to bigger venues because each act is drawing their own crowd.

R: What other bands are on the bill?
VDF: Modest Mouse and Kinky, from Mexico. And then also a band called The Hackensaw Boys - they play mountain music. They're from Charlottesville, Virginia, and they are going to play in-between bands, right on the same stage, they'll come out to the front while the stage crew changes over equipment.

R: What were the circumstances surrounding the guitarist and rhythm section's departure from the band?
VDF: They've kind of had their own band since high school and I think it was hard for them to be in a band were there was another band leader with really strong ideas, so they needed to do their own thing. At first, the bass player left, then Greg Brown, our guitarist, left - they cited not musical differences but personality differences. They started a band called Death Ray and they play locally in Sacramento a lot. They had some problems with their record deal and they're still trying to work it out. It was really a matter of them not wanting to be in someone else's band, they wanted to do their own thing.

R: How did you go about replacing them?
VDF: We got Xan McCurty, who was in a band called The Loved Ones and also a band called the Kenetics - two good bands from the bay area. We had played shows with those bands, so we knew him and knew what style of guitar he played. We actually had several guitarists come to the tryout and when Xan came he was really prepared - he knew all of the parts from the Cake songs and his personality was a match. And then Gabe Nelson, the bass player, was actually in the band [Cake] before Victor Damiani. He played on four tracks on the Motorcade of Generosity demos. We'd just known him forever.

R: In Rolling Stone John said that the next album might sound a little different than previous Cake albums. Do you agree with that and if so could you describe what might be different about it?
VDF: We're doing a lot more songs from the inside out, now. Songs used to come in to the band with chords and melody and words, and then we'd work on arrangements around the song. And now it seems like we have a lot more rhythmically based things and riff-based ideas coming from the band, and these ideas will get matched with some lyrics that John has that maybe he's already written and will fit the music that we're making or he'll be inspired by the instrumental that we've come up with and he'll write lyrics for that. And we're also maturing as players. Every album, we get better and perhaps a little bit more aggressive in our style.

R: Cake's self-directed "Short skirt/Long Jacket" video has been nominated for an MTV music award - does that seem absurd or natural seeing as how the concept was born out of trying to get out of having to make a video (or at least that's what John has said)?
VDF: It was sort of an anti-video. When we made that video we were recognizing that a video was an advertisement for a song, so we made it like one of these paid advertisements that you see on television - like for BluBlocker Sunglasses or something like that. We were just asking people on the street what they think about the product (the CD). And also we didn't want to pay a bunch for a video. We've made a string of real low-budget videos. A lot of young bands really get taken with their video budget and then it takes forever to make money past the advance. So we've always been pretty economical about our videos. Also, the reality-TV concept was getting big at the time, and we realized that an everyday person off the street is really interesting, so we wanted to capitalize on that. And also put ourselves out there; instead of grandizing our music, just let people say whatever they wanted to about it. And it ended up being really funny. We're not going to be at the award show or anything. We're not going to win - The White Stripes is going to win - and we've got a show that night in Cleveland.

R: Cake's web site features extensive documentation on global iceberg activity. Is there a good or even bad reason for that?
VDF: That's something that John is really obsessed with. He's sure that there's some sort of a Red Tide phenomenon happening. It's something that happens with the plankton in the ocean, when there happens to be too much plankton, all of a sudden the surf turns red because the plankton has died and you're seeing all of the exoskeletons being washed ashore. So maybe there's something going on with human beings right now - there are so many of us, maybe there's some sort of internal mechanism that's going to automatically start wiping us all out. Maybe one of those things is global warming - maybe we're going to end up frying ourselves to death. That's part of the ironic title of the tour, too - the Unlimited Sunshine tour. Ha ha ha.

R: The current poll on your web site is pretty funny; it asks, 'Does God surf the Internet?' What do you think, does He?
VDF: Unless He hasn't bought a computer yet. Maybe He's a Luddite, maybe He's anti-technology. Or maybe He doesn't like going out to computer stores. But if He has a computer, I'm sure He's surfing the net.

September 2002