Tonight, JB, The Dawg, and I stopped by the Fox Theatre in downtown Deadwood Shitty, home of the Scott Peterson trial, to see one of my favorite bands, Cake. Up until last week when JB got the tickets, I wasn't even aware that there was a concert-capable venue in the RC, but we concluded that the Fox is trying to get on the concert circuit and that its availability as a rock venue is a relatively new development. As such, the Fox is a wonderfully classic 1920s era old-time theater, complete with baroque rococco scrollwork, neo-classical architecture, and a Golden-Age-of-Hollywood foyer. Even so, it's a little ragged around the edges. Upgrade number one should be the sound system. The sound wasn't bad, not like seeing a show in the Oakland Coliseum, but it was a little muddy. At around 400 seats though, I'll see a band in this venue any time, especially a band as talented as Cake.

Mistle toejam	Foyer madness	The Pressure chief tour has begun

But, on every stage a little rain must fall. Enter Live105, the radio station promoting tonight's "Mistletoe Jam", and Stroke 9, a painfully generic band that exemplifies the soul-less Live105/X Games/contemporary-teen-movie sound. Looking like some flunkies from Road Rules trying lamely to complete their challenge for the day, the Live105 MCs did their best to whip the crowd into the obligatory rock frenzy. First, they brought out the conceptually tasteless and offensive "Ghetto Claus", a guy in a Santa suit and a pimp hat. You could tell Live105 thought it was totally cool and funny in a Snoop Dog kind of way, but not even this crowd would go for it. After several attempts to get the crowd roaring by merely saying the words "Ghetto Claus", they put us out of our misery and shuffled GC back offstage. Finally, after a few more half-hearted appeals like, "If you yell real loud, you can have some Cake" (I didn't see that line coming), they had the crowd as primed as they were going to get, and turned the stage over to Slack 9.

Buuuut, rather than take that energy and rawwk with it, Luke Esterkyn, the lead singer of Schwag 9 strolled onto the stage, plugged in his guitar, and started slowly picking a love ballad. After a few bars, the bassist strolled onstage, plugged in his bass, and started slowly plunking along. And so it went for the next few minutes until their wet blanket had been effectively thrown over the entire house.

On came the rest of the band, dressed like the high-school nerds they undoubtedly were (but when you're "cool," it's even cooler to dress like a nerd. Ah, the irony.). Lead guitarist John McDermott in particular was ready to rock with his tennis shoes and polo shirt. A polo shirt? If you're a guitarist in a "rock" band, how can you possibly hope to have any cred when you're doing shows in a polo shirt. You better be pretty damn good. He wasn't. Like the rest of the band, there was too much fake emoting and not enough rocking. McDermott never played above the eighth fret the whole time! You can't get a legitimate rock sound going at the bottom of the fret board. You can't get a Sweet Leaf sound on the eighth fret. You've got to be way up there by the tuning pegs, in the RAWK zone.

Spank 9 blows. They have a tinny, two-dimensional sound that is heavy on the treble and driven by lyrics that might be considered pretentious if they weren't so obviously written to conform to the Dawson's Creek paradigm rather than to convey some deep and pensive psyche to the same mindless, wriggling, screaming media gluttons seen by Tom Wolfe at the 1965 Beatles concert in the Cow Palace.

The potential was there, but the songwriting was horrible and the presentation was even worse. During the second song, Esterkyn abruptly segued into an almost unidentifiable rendition of the "doo doo-doo doo-doo-doo doo" chorus of "Take a Walk on the Wild Side." Twice during this ill-fated diversion they pleaded with the audience to sing along, but the teenage crowd was oblivious and Wild Side withered away to dust like Democratic chances of saving the ANWAR from the Cheney cartel. Later, the Stroke offs went into a ridiculously bad lounge version of their one quasi hit,"Little Black Backpack." It couldn't end soon enough. Fu Manchu would have blown these guys' doors off. Bring on the Boogie Van.

Now for the good stuff. Cake rolled onstage with a strut of confidence that provided immediate contrast to minor-league Stroker Ace. As Suck 9 had been, Cake was also dressed casually, with half of the band looking like they just climbed down from their rigs for some diesel and some chow at a Bakersfield truck stop, and the other half dressed up in stuff like wide-collared cowboy shirts with mother-of-pearl snap buttons looking ready for their 1975 fourth-grade school pictures at Carmichael elementary. The difference though was that Cake had enough stagecraft and sound to reinforce their previously established performance persona. Spunk 9 doesn't know what the hell it's trying to do.

Cake's sound is a unique one -- quirky rock made fun and funky with a super-tight rhythm section, thoughtful lyrics, and an iconoclastic thirst for the off-mainstream. Tonight, Vincent di Fiore on keyboards, tambourine, and especially trumpet added the usual cool extra layer of sound that further distinguishes Cake from the also-rans. Frontman John McCrea was nonchalant to the very verge of self-importance, but his voice, his stage presence, and his signature percussion rattle were all in full effect. On lead guitar, Xan McCurty provided deep, rich, grunge-tinted, country-flavored riffs (played deep in the single digits off the fret board where the real rock happens) while squirming around like a marionette that had to take a piss. Tonight I really heard in songs like "No Phone", "Stickshifts and Safetybelts", and "Haze of Love", that the source of their unique sound -- the funk, the rough edges -- comes from their country-western Sacto cowtown roots. All hail Merle Haggard.

It was also soon evident that the skin-deep Live105 crowd was overmatched by music and commentary that was just too cerebral for them. The crowd wasn't even listening to McCrea's interludes, they were just blindly cheering, caught up in the MTV Spring Break mob mentality. "Fuck yeah, let's rock, wooo-hoooooo." This was the same kind of crowd as the one we saw heckling Kurt Cobain at the Oakland Coliseum on New Year's Eve 1993 for not rocking hard enough while he was trying to play an acoustic version of "Heart-shaped Box" (some chucklehead ended up throwning a shirt that landed on the neck of Cobain's guitar, causing him to stop, take the shirt off the guitar, and re-start the song). McCrea called the front row on their shallowness at one point. As he was announcing that the next song was from their first album, some pre-teen in the front row started cheering bloody murder and McCrea stopped in mid-sentence to chastise, "what are you cheering for, you don't even know what it's called."

The crowd had its chances. During "Nugget", McCrea tried to lead different demographic segments of the crowd (male and female) in a sing-a-along of the chorus "Shut the fuck." Seemed perfect for the Spring Break crowd, but he was clearly dissatisfied with the effort and derided them for being "not angry enough." After another sing-a-long for "No Phone", McCrea once again chided the crowd to be "angrier." No such luck. In typically weak fashion, when the Live105 crowd was given a chance to authenticate the rebellious rage that they seem to respond to in the marketing world, they came up woefully impotent. Find your angst Generation Next, it's there if you really want it. Like the bumper sticker says, "If you're not completely outraged, you haven't been paying attention."

Not that McCrea didn't do his best to antagonize them into true viscerality. About an hour into the show, after a huddle onstage with the band, McCrea announced that they were out of songs. The crowd laughed nervously. McCrea repeated his claim and told the crowd that "you should totally boo us right now," which they heartily did. McCrea responded sarcastically to this artificial derision with some political commentary, but it went right over the crowd's head because they were so focused on acting the way they've been conditioned to act for a concert that they never really heard anything he said all night.

During "Safetybelts", a woman from the crowd helped herself up onto the stage and casually walked over to McCrea. She stood by him for about 10 seconds before a roadie politely escorted her offstage. I was happy to see security, for once, handle things with a situation-appropriate response rather than going right to security condition Altamont regardless of the infraction. After the song was over, McCrea thanked the young woman for her supervision, but opined that "we're pretty tight, so thanks anyway."

They were definitely tight. Though they acted like this was a practice gig, which it basically was as the first show (and their only American one) on a two-month European tour, all five musicians worked seamlessly together -- a tough thing to fake when playing their layered, complex songs. They didn't do much improvising or jamming, but the sound was meaty, the rhythm was buttery, and each instrument had its own distinct voice. They played most of my favorites, including "Frank Sinatra", "Never There", and "Daria", and closed down the night with a two-song encore capped off by a pretty flaccid "The Distance".

All in all, Cake is a truly unique band that I'll see anytime, anywhere, but tonight felt more like an $18 show than a $30 show.