Take Them Out to the Ball Game

At first glance, it might seem that there is no common thread throughout the Ommegang Brewery Series lineup of artists. The series features the quirky Cake on June 15, indie-rock wonder boys Death Cab for Cutie on July 21, singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett on July 27, the long-awaited Wilco on July 28 and the ever-popular Darius Rucker on Sept. 22. 

But according to series promoter Dan Smalls, of Dan Smalls Presents, there are a few consistencies among both the people who will attend and the bands that will play: All of the artists speak to audiences who enjoy the 2,500- to 6,000-person, picturesque venue, complemented by the brewery and its Belgian-style ales. For their part, the bands enjoy playing in scenic Cooperstown, not so much for the beer, but rather, for the village’s star attraction, the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The series started as a trickle of shows over the years as the brewery hired different promoters to come in and host events once or twice annually. But starting in 2011, they asked Smalls to help out along with Dan Mastronardi of the Westcott Theater. This year, Smalls has the reins completely to himself for the wide-spectrum series. 

Last year featured acts including the Levon Helm Band with Arlo Guthrie, the Avett Brothers, Steve Earle, the Felice Brothers and more. Plans for this year started with the hope of bringing the mostly mellow rockers, Wilco, to the site. After Ommegang hosted the Baseball Project, a super-group including Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon, in July 2011, Smalls began talks with that group’s manager, Tony Margharita, about bringing Wilco, his other act, to the venue. 

“He just fell in love with the site and that’s sort of how it started,” Smalls explains. “And then when Wilco decided to take a year off from their festival {Solid Sound}, they said, ‘Well, there are a number of unique places around the Northeast {to play}’ and they centered the whole tour around Cooperstown. They’re huge baseball fans, so they’re pretty stoked.” 

Other acts fell into place as Smalls coordinated with promoters throughout the Northeast, carefully deciding which bands were nearby and which were an appropriate fit for the venue. Death Cab for Cutie came naturally. 

“I just kept reading about Death Cab being such huge baseball fans that I decided to send a note to their agent and said, ‘Hey, I know we couldn’t make the State Theatre {in Ithaca in April 2012} happen, but {what about Ommegang?},’” Smalls reports. “And he said, ‘Ya know, we’ve got a few dates this summer and they’re huge baseball fans. Let’s do this as a present to the band.’”

Now, with five acts booked for the summer and a likely sixth to be added in the coming weeks, Smalls and the brewery are ready to gear up for the summer partnership, as Smalls describes it. While he monitors the ticketing end, the brewery provides the venue. Both share in a common mission.

“Their vision is about customer service and the experience being tantamount to the cause,” Smalls says. “They think about that first. They don’t think about making money first. They know that will happen if you take good care of people. The event is more important. You have to focus on from the time they hear about the show to the time they’re blogging about it the day after the show. You have to shepherd them through that whole experience, and there are so many pitfalls today. It’s really hard to keep track of it all. But Ommegang is focused on those things the same way we are.”

The venue also helps make Smalls’ job easier. As he describes it, Ommegang is tailor-made to host events, even though the brewery, built in 1997, wasn’t designed for that purpose. Despite the fact that the remote location serves as a challenge for advertising—Smalls needs to get the word out to six disparate upstate New York markets—he’s found the venue a popular destination for music lovers. It boasts plenty of on-site parking, places for camping, a perfectly sloping hill looking down to the brewery and a view that allows onlookers to gaze without constant sun in their eyes.

“It’s got all the little things that you don’t think about unless you’ve been doing this for a long time,” he gushes. And starting on June 15, the isolated venue will fill with the unmistakable sounds of Cake, a band that first gained attention in the early 1990s. They’re not chocolate- or vanilla-frosted but, rather, distinct with deadpan vocals and dependable horn arrangements. 

When Cake first mixed up the batter in Sacramento, Calif., they were largely a “hostile reactionary gesture” against what was happening in music at the time, according to lead vocalist and songwriter John McCrea. The blossoming alternative-grunge scene in rock seemed “like big excessive American rock in different clothing,” says McCrea via phone from his home in Oakland, Calif.

But what started as a reaction turned into a long-standing band that released its latest album Showroom of Compassion in 2011. It was the first disc on their own label, Upbeat Records, and their sixth studio CD, recorded in their own solar-powered California studio. 

Still, after the many years of sarcastic lyrics and catchy, quirky songs, McCrea and the current lineup of trumpeter Vince DiFiore, guitarist Xan McCurdy, bassist Gabe Nelson and drummer Paulo Baldi, are still hot in the kitchen. He spent some time chatting with The New Times in advance of the June 15 Ommegang date.

Q: You always keep it fresh, but consistently “Cake.” How do you stay so unusual? Do you pay extra-close attention to what’s going on in music or none at all?

A: I don’t think we’re conscious of style as much as we’re conscious of. . . we build the whole thing on the song and try to do what’s appropriate for each song and that varies a lot. With a lot of genres, country music or punk rock or electronica, there are a lot stricter rules about what the bass should do or how the drums should behave. And because we don’t have any rules other than we should try to figure out what each song wants, we end up doing something different, but we’re not trying to do something different, we’re really just trying to adhere to the DNA of a given song. A lot of times people describe it as, “Oh, they’re eclectic” or something, but that’s not the goal for us. It’s really just about trying to figure out what each song wants to be. 

Q: How do songs come about? 

A: I write most of the songs and I bring them, in their rather, sort of crude form, to the band and we work quite a bit on arranging. And a lot of times we’ll come up with multiple arrangements for one song and eventually arrive at something that we think is best. But it’s a lot of work. That process is very democratic, not completely because I think the songwriter should have the final say, but we usually come to a conclusion that everyone in the band is happy with. 

Q: As primary songwriter, how do you go about songwriting or what inspires you?

A: That could be such a long answer. I think that often less is more and I believe that in almost all aspects of life. I think that in our society, without even realizing it, we learn an attitude, a relationship to the earth and to other people that is somehow acquisitional, somewhat about acquiring things in order to define who we are. And I think a lot of times, it would be more effective to get rid of things to define who we are. That would actually bring more clarity to the situation. I find that to be true in music. A lot of times, it’s about what you don’t include that makes something profound. 

Q: Can you give me an example in your songwriting?

A: I will give you the example that my songs are not five minutes long. I tend to say what I want to say and then get out and I believe in that. Another example would be just in terms of our arrangements and our production values. There’s not layer after layer after layer of sound crowded, packed together, obfuscating; there’s a deadening or a blunting that happens to sound when it’s packed together with lots and lots of other sounds. And I think for the most part, with some notable exceptions, we avoid that. 

Q: Tell me about your reaction to grunge and alternative when Cake started up. 

A: We felt like that was just big, excessive American rock in different clothing. OK, it was marginally subversive because it touted post-punk rock influences or even proto-punk influences, but ultimately, it was a wide-load expression of what we thought was sort of American entitlement. Does this seem like I’m speaking English?

Q: Yes, I’m following you.

A: OK, there’s this sense of expansiveness that we thought was, in a way, not realistic, not human. That turning the amplifier up to 11 would actually improve life. And so, we thought, let’s turn the amplifier down to 6 and that will actually be subversive within the content of an excessive culture and society. That will actually be different. So we were actually very quiet and people would come to our shows and be very befuddled and a lot of times I didn’t let them mike our guitar amps or our drums.

Q: So you were really quiet. Wow!

A: We were playing smaller venues. I mean, even when we’re playing the larger venues, we’re pretty quiet for what we do. But I think it makes sense because the human ear can’t actually process and make intelligent sense of that much volume. When you’re at a concert and it’s shaking all the cells in your body, but the human ear is actually not able to access lyrical content, it’s exciting because the monkey is being vibrated. But for me, that’s not that exciting to just be vibrated. In a sense it’s a negation of the structure of the human ear, and it would also follow that it’s a negation of human nature itself because you’re just insisting that the human ear just sort of deal with it. For me, a lot of bands write really interesting, subversive, political lyrics, especially punk rock bands, but if those lyrics are so important, maybe they should turn the amp down a couple notches. I question how important that is for them. What’s it really about? Hormonal thrill? Or actually communicating?

Q: Growing up, did you do the school band thing?

A: I stayed out of school bands. When I took piano lessons I would practice very little. And once I stopped taking piano lessons I ended up playing for hours and hours a day just sort of making up my own pieces. And that was what I found most interesting—just making things up.

Q: How was it when you first started touring?

A: After we released our first album {Motorcade of Generosity, Zomba in 1994} we started having to drive this van across the United States, and it would blow up. So that was, you know, traumatic. 

Q: Was the decision to make your own record label because of this new album?

A: Well, we realized that the music business and labels were in precipitous decline and that aligning ourselves with business entities that were panicking and struggling was probably not a wise investment. We were scrambling to figure out how we wanted to release it and there were a lot of labels that were interested in releasing the album. We extricated ourselves and thought, “Ya know, we don’t want to be on this sinking ship,” and we are on a sinking ship because there’s 25 percent fewer musicians than there were 10 years ago. Musicians are really struggling right now, but we thought that we’re just making it worse for ourselves to be part of this big, wasteful infrastructure. 

Q: How has having your own label changed the band? Feel more free?

A: More invested. Everybody feels more invested in it and less passive. We have to make a lot more decisions, we have to put on our business hats and decide how we want to invest our resources and that’s fine, I think that’s good, it’s very adult. In a perfect world maybe we could trust others to handle the business side of our projects, but not right now. It’s gruesome what’s happening. 

Q: Tell me more about what’s gruesome. 

A: There’s been a massive transference of value away from people like you and me that create what is called, somewhat demeaningly, “content.” And there are companies that are making billions of dollars from that content and they want it to remain free so that they can go on making billions of dollars from ad revenue. On your articles, on our music, so we’re at a pretty critical juncture right now as a culture. We have to decide what our value system is. Cake is able to survive; we have to tour a lot more than I think maybe I’m happy with in terms of having a family. I’ve got two kids and I don’t like being away from home that much. But increasingly, making an album has just become advertising. On the Internet everything is all about advertising and I think that’s a bit crass. And it’s not the Internet that I was hoping for. I thought that it would be empowering for musicians, but in fact it’s just a new group of gatekeepers that are becoming incredibly wealthy. 

Q: How can this change? Are you optimistic?

A: I’m optimistic although I tend to be pessimistic. I think that artists and writers and musicians and culture workers, I could say, have a window of opportunity wherein they could aggregate their power if they were so inclined. And I think they should be inclined. I’m talking to authors and independent filmmakers who are just starting to freak out about the decimation in value of what they do and the way it happened with music is that people said, “Oh, you can just go on tour and sell T-shirts and it’ll be OK for you.” But are we now asking authors to sell T-shirts and go on tour? Are we asking independent filmmakers to sell T-shirts? It’s an interesting cognitive disconnect that I think the public at large, and perhaps some of these companies in Silicon Valley, are engaging in. 

Q: It’s scary.

A: Yeah, it is scary. As a journalist I would be even more scared than as a songwriter.

Q: It’s an interesting industry. I think there is opportunity, we just need to be more creative.

A: Right, right. We’re {musicians and journalists} going to have to spend—like what Cake is doing—a lot of energy doing jobs that maybe weren’t traditionally in the job description of a musician and journalist perhaps. That’s just gonna be the reality. What I’m gonna miss though is the money that allowed an investigative journalist to research a story for two years and dig deep and uncover a Watergate or some sort of corporate scandal. I think that that’s probably a lot more serious than a lot of musicians who are out of work. That’s actually fundamentally important to our society.

Q: Everything’s too immediate and no one has the money to pay for something like that. 

A: Right. And bloggers are not going to fill that gap. So that’s sad. Having an experienced city hall reporter who knows what they’re writing about is actually something that we should be willing to pay for. 

Q: People forget the value of that now.

A: Yes, they do. It’s an interesting conundrum. 

Q: How do you like your solar-powered studio? 

A: Here in California there’s a lot of sun. It seems like a wasted opportunity not to convert our studio. We had just gotten back from Germany; every time we’re there it’s cloudy and rainy. We were sort of ashamed to be informed that Germany is the No. 1 producer of solar energy in the world. So we came home from Germany and decided that we had to do something. And now as the value of recorded music descends into the toilet, we get about $25 from our public utility in Sacramento a month, which we can all buy sandwiches with that.

Q: You’re also activists in social and environmental issues. Tell me about why you choose to get involved.

A: For me, I think there’s not enough emphasis or importance placed on the value of having working ecosystems and being part of working ecosystems. When we destroy ecosystems, we eventually destroy ourselves. It’s about the survival of the planet. You can’t destroy everything and expect to survive. 

Q: For people coming to the show, can they expect new and old Cake? 

A: Yeah, we don’t use a setlist, so that’s sort of in order to stay alive inside and not feel like a machine and to sort of stay in the moment, so we really don’t know what we’re going to play. But the odds are really good that we’re going to play some songs from all of our albums. 

Q: This is out of nowhere, but what was your best Halloween costume?

A: That is out of nowhere. You know, I am so seldom able to dress up for Halloween. I can’t even remember. I don’t even know. I’m so sorry.

Q: I asked because a friend and I decided to be girls with short skirts and long jackets and base the costumes off the lyrics of your song {“Short Skirt/Long Jacket”}.

A: That’s awesome! There’s nothing wrong with doing that. I have never dressed up that way and it’s probably a good thing. 

Q: Do you have anything else to add?

A: No, you actually asked really good questions. I didn’t have to talk about anything that I hate to talk about, so I appreciate that.     

Cake will bring their tunes to the Ommegang Brewery, 656 County Highway 33, Cooperstown, on Friday, June 15, 8 p.m. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Advance tickets are $42.50, available at dansmallspresents.com, which also has tickets for other shows in the series.