CAKE is joining us at TVD all this week which just so happens to be the release week for the band’s Limited Edition (5,000 only) six disc 7″ vinyl box set of Showroom of Compassion, CAKE’s January 2011 self-produced release. (Your chance to win one of two copies of the box set is right here.)
Vince DiFiore: My first 45rpm record was “Monster Mash.” It sounded retro to me, but I didn’t know at the time that it was practically an exact replica of the girl group song, “The Mashed Potato.”
After hearing it on the radio Halloween night, without a doubt I had to have that record. The store where I finally found it was the fourth that I tried, and it was quite a car trip from home. I had to ask my parents frequently to earn the drive down there.
Maybe that is part of the allure of vinyl. It reminds you of when you just absolutely had to have a certain song. Today, it’s so easy to instantly obtain music.
Gabriel Nelson: Mr. Freeze was my eighth grade science teacher. This was back in the early eighties, when ideas and mores from the seventies were still lingering around the American culture. People were sort of “looser” back then. Topics that are normally taboo, were opened up for frank discussion. It makes sense then, that if a discussion on drugs was going happen anywhere on campus other than the school courtyard, it would happen in Mr. Freeze’s science class.
I guess one of the kids asked Mr. Freeze about LSD. Mr. Freeze said he had never taken it, but a friend of his had and had reported that while under the influence of the drug, he put a record on the turnstile and watched it go around and around.
Soon his altered mind began to envision a small little person on the surface of the record, right in front of the stylus. The miniature stranger was finding it necessary to run for fear of colliding with the sharp needle that loomed behind. Alas, there was no way the little human could sustain the effort, and he eventually was conveyered right into the needle. Upon making contact, he was split down the middle.
CAKE – Sick Of You
The result was that now there were two little people running away from the needle. Each runner would eventually fatigue and be split down the middle. At the climax of this hallucination, the record was covered in tiny, fearful runners.
I don’t know why, but I have always thought of this story when playing a record. It just amuses me.
