BankPlus Amphitheatre at Snowden Grove

CAKE will always be with us. I’ve gleaned this insight after more than 30 years of listening to the band, ever since my days in Dixon, California, when they were merely regional favorites, not international headliners. One indication of their longevity is the simple fact that the interview I conducted with lead singer/songwriter John McCrea for a Graceland Soundstage concert scheduled for five years ago still holds just as true today as it did then. After our chat, a little thing called Covid happened, and the show never took place. Yet here we are: CAKE will finally make their Mid-South appearance by kicking off this year’s season of concerts at the BankPlus Amphitheater at Snowden Grove on Friday, April 18th.

Shockingly, things have only gone from bad to worse since 2020, pandemics aside, but that’s kept the band’s outspoken political activism more relevant than ever. The landing page of their website sports the Turkish proverb, “When a clown enters a palace, he does not become a king, the palace becomes a circus,” and their Facebook page is dotted with exhortations to “never forget who Trump really is.” But they also take their activism in a more positive direction.

In honor of Earth Day and Arbor Day, the band will join forces with BankPlus Amphitheater, Mammoth Live, and Barbian Entertainment to plant a magnolia tree, Mississippi’s official state tree, on the venue grounds. The symbolic planting highlights CAKE’s decades-long commitment to environmental sustainability, including global reforestation efforts, clean energy innovation, and eco-conscious touring practices. The band also operates out of a 100 percent solar-powered recording studio in Sacramento, California, a facility that regularly generates more electricity than it uses. Now, in addition to the on-site planting, one lucky fan attending Friday night’s show will receive their very own magnolia tree to take home and plant.

Through all such efforts, a reliable constant has been the band’s musical aesthetic, yet it can’t be boiled down to any single genre. It’s more accurately characterized by its smallness and sparseness, as McCrea explained when I mentioned seeing the band at a festival of alt-rock superstars in the late ’90s. By then, the band had blown up, with their second album, Fashion Nugget, going platinum in 1997, but they weren’t always comfortable with other groups they were lumped in with at the time.

“It was a very strange experience for me,” said McCrea. “Everything was, like, big dumb rock, even ‘alternative’ was just about this big, sort of bulbous, wide-load sound, right? And we knew people were not gonna get it. I remember one critic called us ‘dinky beats,’ and that was meant to insult us. But for me, it was like, ‘Yes!’ I mean, obviously they didn’t get it, but it was good because I realized, ‘Okay, good. It’s sounding small.’”

Yet while the band’s sound was often sparse, it was expansive stylistically, with Vince DiFiore’s trumpet echoing everything from mariachi to jazz, McCrea’s dry delivery and richly allusive lyrics drawing on all walks of life, and a taste for scrappy, dirty instrumental sounds. It was — and remains — decidedly anti-trendy, right down to the fishing cap McCrea often sports and the beat-up acoustic guitar he plays through “a Fender Sidekick amplifier, the kind that they give away for free when you buy a Telecaster.”

It’s always been a sound that’s resolutely D.I.Y. and unpretentious. Yet McCrea has typically been reluctant to confine the band to any aesthetic, even a sparse one. “I don’t want to make ‘less is more’ sound like the main goal,” he said, “but I think ‘less is more’ in the service of providing musical narrative, I could say that’s our prime directive. It should be a means to an end.”

At the heart of the CAKE experience lie the songs, of course, and the unpredictable turns of phrase which can appear in them. Listing some of his greatest influences, McCrea noted some of the usual suspects: “I love Hank Williams Sr. for his economy, his ability to tell a story with very few words. I love Cole Porter for his cleverness and how he’s clever without being completely annoying. And then I guess Bob Dylan is similarly clever, you know, and mostly not annoying. I like Leonard Cohen a lot for his lyrics and vocal melody. I mean, all of these people write great melodies.”

Turning to his contemporaries, McCrea zeroed in on Stephen Malkmus of Pavement as a favorite. “I would definitely list him as one of my top songwriters, especially of the ’90s.” But he went on to emphasize that, while CAKE are unabashedly political in their practices and in their extra-musical communications, he avoids the vagaries of topical struggles in his craft as a tunesmith.

“I don’t enjoy songs that are sort of beating you over the head in any way,” McCrea said. “I do think it’s an emergency right now, like the humans are having a confusing time and we need to focus. And I don’t see why every part of our presence should be about music. I think I’d like to let the music be about music, and let our social media be about whatever the hell we want. But some part of me resists talking about music too much on our page. Somebody wanted to interview me for a book titled something like Rock Stars’ Inspirations, or something like that, and it sounded like a really fascinating book with lots of interesting artists, but I just didn’t want to do it because of the title. You know, ‘rock stars’ — there’s just so much baggage with that, and I’m against it. I’m ideologically opposed to that, you know? I don’t really want to be a celebrity. I don’t want to be talking about what I’m doing as necessarily more important than what anybody else is doing today.”

You know the story. The Devil went down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that ace fiddle player, Johnny. As a cultural touchstone, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which just celebrated 40 years of fiddle-playing in the American collective unconscious, has attained incredible heights; I knew the song before it even occurred to me to wonder who wrote or recorded it. That musician, of course, is Charlie Daniels, and he and his band will perform at BankPlus Amphitheater at Snowden Grove, Friday, June 28th. In advance of the concert, I spoke with Daniels over the phone about his session work with Bob Dylan, diversifying his writing, and the staying power of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Charlie Daniels

Memphis Flyer: A radio DJ friend of mine told me you got your start as a session musician. Is that true?

Charlie Daniels: Yeah, when I first came to Nashville, I used to do quite a few sessions. I never really fit the style of a what a Nashville player would be. I came off the road after 13 straight years of playing bang-slam rock in clubs, but there were certain sessions I sat in on — Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Marty Robbins. But the day-to-day thing, I was not really a “session player.” So sometimes that part of my career gets a bit overblown, I think because of the magnitude of some of the things I did play on. I did three Bob Dylan albums. That was part of my career, definitely.

Which Dylan albums did you play on?

[I played on] Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning.

That’s a great spread. Nashville Skyline is one of my favorite records.

You know what? I was only supposed to play on one session. I was fairly new to town, and Bob Johnston was the guy who brought me down there, who was producing the record. I said, “I would love to play on one of Bob Dylan’s sessions.” A lot of people think [Nashville Skyline] was the first album that Bob did in town. It was at least the third one he’d done here, and they’d put together the nucleus of a studio band for him. They always used ’em when he came to town. This time, the guitar player they had used was already booked on what would be the very first session. So Bob Johnston said come on down and play the first session, and the other guy will come on after you.

So I went down and played the session, and I was packing my guitars up and getting ready to leave. Bob Dylan asked Bob Johnston, “Where’s he going?” Bob Johnston said he’s leaving, we’ve got another guitar player coming in. … And Bob Dylan said nine words that would change my life: “I don’t want another guitar player. I want him.” That was the beginning of something very wonderful for me, because Bob was always kind enough to put the names of the musicians who played on his records on the back of the album. … It cut a lot of corners for me.

You put out a couple of books recently?

I didn’t know I could write, to be honest. But a friend of mine who worked with us at the time said, “You write story songs. Why don’t you write stories?” I was on the road one time, and I went in the motel room and took some paper and I sat down and started writing. I have a song called “Uneasy Rider,” and I wrote the story of it. And I found out, well, this is fun. So I started doing that.

It sounds like you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve. Does it keep it interesting and fun for you to change it up that way?

I was born in 1936, and it was way, way before television, so it was radio for me. And at that time, there weren’t many radio stations, so they had to follow the mandate of the FCC and they had to do something for everybody. They had to serve the whole community, which meant playing a lot of different kinds of music. So I got everything. It was such a variety. I went through the big band era, the Frank Sinatra-type era with the crooners. I was exposed to so many kinds of music when I was a kid, I developed a wide taste in music and I developed a wide taste in a lot of things. So I like spreading out a little. … I might write anything. I just finished a novel, my first one.

I bet that keeps you from getting bored.

Well, yeah. … You see people who never ever push the envelope or do anything outside of convention, and there’s so much life out there.

The Charlie Daniels Band

You have an incredibly long career. Do you think you’re able to stay relevant by shaking things up the way you do?

Well, I think so. Of course, I sound like I’m some sort of rebel, and I’m really not. It just happens naturally. I mean, I do stick to my guns. I have lines I’m not willing to cross and things I’m not willing to do. It’s cost me a time or two, as far as money is concerned. It ain’t cost me as far as how I feel about what I do. … I have never cut a hit record with any people other than my band. I’ve had record company people. I tried it one time. I let them talk me into it, and I had a studio band. They players were great, but this is a lifetime to me and it’s only one session to them, one song. I want guys with me who the music means more to than just one paycheck.

If you get people who have been playing together a long time, you get almost a telepathy, a short-hand communication.

I’ve got people who’ve been with me for 40 years. My personal roadie has a hearing impairment, and he’s a very good lip-reader. I can look at him and move my lips, and he knows what I’m talking about. Those are things you develop over the years. It’s not something that happens overnight.

While we’re talking about things that have been around for a while, you had some big anniversaries in May. What is it, 40 years for “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”?

To be honest with you, I have something maturing at one point or another all the time. I never thought too much about “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and all of a sudden, it was like 40 [years]. Especially for my generation, the age of 40 is supposed to be the line of demarcation for something. It’s where we go from being a young person into middle age. The age of 18, when you’re a kid means a lot. Of course, we all know what 21 is, and the next one is usually around 40. It just hit me a little more than all the previous ones had. But what hits you so much is the viability of the song today.

It’s truly amazing to have a tune like that that stays. And of course we do it every show.

The Charlie Daniels Band performs with Travis Tritt, The Cadillac Three at BankPlus Amphitheatre at Snowden Grove, Friday, June 28th, 7:30 p.m.