Greg Brown, co-founder and lead guitarist of Californian geek-rock legends Cake, has died at the age of only 56.
Full disclosure: Cake were never really on my radar because that whole ironic slacker / ‘geek rock’ thing in the ’90s (see also: Weezer, Wheatus, Spoon) never really appealed to me.
I’ve also always found it difficult to engage with music that spans so many styles that it treads a thin line between pastiche and homage, lacking a true identity and vision of its own.
Cake’s curious melange incorporates everything from funk, hip-hop and disco to country and folk, jazz, new wave and straight-up guitar rock, delivered in a slightly smirky satirical sung-spoken way by front man John McCrae.
It’s clever, but it seems more like artifice than art.
Nonetheless, they did make a mark, initially with their hit single The Distance, written by original guitarist and founder member Greg Brown, who has sadly died at the age of just 56.
It hovered outside the Top 20 but they never quite repeated its success, dooming them to the status of one-hit wonders (at least with their own songs), albeit with a cult indie following.
Actually they had two hits, the second being this magnificent cover version of I Will Survive. Like all the best covers, it takes the original and respects it, while taking it to entirely new places.
Not least in the way singer John McCrae transforms Gloria Gaynor’s anthem of women’s empowerment into a melancholy male sigh of weary optimism, but also with its fantastic funky bassline, its trumpet fanfares, and not least, Brown’s exquisite guitar breaks and solo.
They were accused of disrespecting the original – and Gaynor disliked their version because of its additional profanity – but always denied that was their intention, saying they played it because they loved the song; and I believe them.
Brown left the band in 1997 after their breakthrough second album, the million-selling Fashion Nugget, and formed a new group called Deathray, later joining Homie – the side project of Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo.