http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/04/arts/music/04POPL.html In a time when music festivals, radio-station concerts and package tours all seem to depend on the same small subset of bands to fill their seats, the lineup of the Unlimited Sunshine Tour seems like a joke at first glance.
There is Cheap Trick, the late-70's power-rock band known for its impeccable melodies and atrocious fashion sense. Then there's Charlie Louvin, the country, gospel and bluegrass singer whose best-known songs warned against the dangers of alcohol, Satan and atomic power. And the headliner is Cake, the laconic 90's slow-groove rock band whose members hadn't even been born when Mr. Louvin was singing about atomic power. Finally, the Detroit Cobras, a garage-rock cover band, and the Hackensaw Boys, a punk-tinged Americana-roots band.
Individually these are all strong acts, but together they are a concert promoter's nightmare. The audiences for most of these acts hardly overlap. It seems doubtful, for example, that a Cheap Trick fan would want to listen to Mr. Louvin singing, "I like the Christian life."
Yet fans at the tour's first stop were remarkably open-minded, at least according to Mr. Louvin, who spoke by telephone from backstage after the tour's kickoff show on Tuesday at the Tabernacle in Atlanta.
This tour, Mr. Louvin said, has been one of the few times he has been nervous about performing. "I didn't know how it would be," he said, because most audience members were unfamiliar with his music and his legacy. "But it was absolutely great. The audience reaction was at least 120 percent."
Backstage with Mr. Louvin was John McCrea, the singer, songwriter and guitarist in Cake who organized the tour. (It is scheduled to stop at the Roseland Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday night.)
"I always used to make mix tapes when I was a teenager, and this feels similar," Mr. McCrea said of putting together the acts for the tour. His first Sunshine Unlimited roadshow last year was equally diverse, with a high-quality lineup that included the Flaming Lips, De La Soul and Kinky.
"I don't feel like this particular bill is gratuitously eclectic," Mr. McCrea said of this year's assortment. "There's a through line." All the acts, he continued, share a "geometry of classic-style songwriting."
This is particularly true of the senior act on the tour, Mr. Louvin, who says he is "as old as Methuselah now." (He is actually a spry 76.) And it is also true of the two youngest bands on the bill, the Detroit Cobras, who perform versions of songs by pioneering blues and R&B singers, and the Hackensaw Boys, who find inspiration in the old-time string music of the same era.
For a person with such diverse taste, Mr. McCrea's own music is surprisingly focused. Cake works within strict musical parameters. Its arrangements are minimal, its rhythms spacious, its melodies exacting, its singing low and wry. One sometimes wonders if Mr. McCrea ever wants to break free of his sound and just belt out a song like Gloria Gaynor, whose "I Will Survive" became a hit in a new incarnation when Cake performed a downbeat, near-monotone version of it.
"It's not appropriate for me or who I am musically," Mr. McCrea said of the prospect of cutting loose. "Our band is about restraint and economy and downsizing."
Like his music, Mr. McCrea speaks slowly and clearly, measuring each word before he says it.
Unlike other popular rock bands, which tend to have a busy, portentous sound, Cake's aesthetic was not to reach for the stars but to reach "as far as I can jump," Mr. McCrea said.
In keeping with such modest ambitions, Cake has not released an album in two years. "It doesn't seem like a good environment to release an album in," Mr. McCrea said. "I've sort of been stalling and dragging my feet."
Nonetheless, he has been writing songs, one of which, "Wheels," he plans to perform on some tour dates. He said that he hoped to have a new album out in the spring.
The case is made to Mr. McCrea that releasing albums consistently, as the Beatles did, can be integral to growing and evolving as an artist. He disagreed.
"My perspective is that there's for some reason a paradigm in which we think of artists' having to evolve over a period of time," he said. "Where are they all evolving to? And what are they going to do when they get there? And is that evolution more important than taking each song and making it what it wants to be in terms of production value and arrangements?"
No wonder, then, that the hero of Cake's song "The Distance" is a driver who is still making his way around a racetrack — "pacing and plotting the course" — even though every other driver has long since crossed the finish line, the stands have emptied and day has turned to night.
Musically, this seems to be Cake's goal: to have the longevity of the driver in "The Distance" or of Mr. Louvin, whose first rock-'n'-roll-related bill featured a young Elvis Presley as an opening act.
Music historians have said that the Louvin Brothers — the seminal country act featuring the close-harmony singing of Mr. Louvin and his younger brother, Ira — broke up around 1963 because their music was pushed aside by rock 'n' roll. It is fitting to see Mr. Louvin, whose music helped inspire the country-rock boom of the early 70's, capturing the hearts of a modern rock audience once more 40 years later.
But Mr. Louvin had a different explanation for the breakup.
"It wasn't because of rock 'n' roll; it was because of liquor," he said, referring to his brother, who died in a car crash in 1964. "I didn't know how to handle a drunk. My brother was a professional drunk."
Mr. Louvin said that he decided to leave the band "before we went down the tubes together."
Mr. Louvin said he was looking forward to the tour's final stop on Sept. 21 in Hollywood, where he has never performed.
After the tour, Mr. McCrea said he wanted to continue pursuing his longtime dream of starting a television show, "Freedom of Speech." In perfect Hollywood-pitch fashion he described the show as " `Politically Incorrect' meets `The Gong Show' meets `American Idol.' "
