The Cake – Baby That’s Me
The Cake – World Of Dreams
The Cake – Ooh Poo Pah Doo
The Cake – Rainbow Wood
I’m not sure how I found the music of The Cake. It’s quite possible that it was simply browsing around Amoeba looking something from the 1960s that I hadn’t heard before that I could add to the KCRW library when we moved down to LA and I started working there. At KALX I had been a member of the “Record Acquisition Team” aka The Rat, and bought music to fill gaps in the library. For a period of time I did a somewhat similar thing at KCRW, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I chanced upon the CD collection of the Cake’s music put out by Rev-Ola in 2007. It’s possible also that I was looking around for reissued material to consider for my best of 2007 show, but regardless how I found it, the important thing is that I did and I seriously dug it. For years I’d been hoping to run into the original LPs the band released and so when I saw this on the wall at Atomic, there was no way I was going to let it slip away.
The Cake were a fairly late entry into the “Girl Group” sound, arriving on the scene in 1966. While there is certainly that “classic” Girl Group sound on display, especially on their best track, the absolutely exquisite “Baby That’s Me” with Harold Battiste re-creating Spector’s wall of sound at Gold Star Studios, The Cake were clearly not your average Girl Group. For one thing, they really mixed up their styles. By 1967 you might expect a group like this to include some R&B songs, but “Ooh Poo Pah Doo”‘s straight up New Orleans inspired Funk? Perhaps not, though the inclusion of Mac Rebennack aka Dr. John as a session musician certainly must have helped with that. What is really surprising is when the group all of the sudden includes several decidedly baroque songs on the first side, which is split evenly between classic girl group fare and almost medieval sounding tunes, of which “Rainbow Wood” is my favorite.
The Cake released another record together before parting ways, a couple members Jeanette Jacobs and Eleanor Barooshian, sang back-up in Dr. John’s groups and later on Ginger Baker’s Air Force. It’s a shame that the group didn’t catch on. They seemed to be strangely behind and ahead of their time simultaneously, and I’m sure no one knew exactly what to do with a group with all of these eclectic sounds. I’m thankful for the work of reissue labels like Rev-Ola and thankful that I ran into the music of The Cake so that I could share it here with you.
Cheers,
Michael