For Mothers Day, my brilliant 7 year old son and I went to see Cake.
It was a gamble. Luckily they didn't play "Nugget."
When my boy was just 3, I used to listen to a lot of Cake in the car. We had just moved back to Washington state from Santa Cruz. The teacher in his room at preschool was also originally from Santa Cruz. This is probably why she could barely stop cracking up long enough to describe to me how, on his second day there, he had put a terracotta flower pot on his head, turned to her, and said, "Miss Molly, look! I'm a pot-head!"
Anyway, the next story Miss Molly told me was that he was singing "Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell," to himself on the playground. She commended me for my taste in music but suggested I should impress upon him the importance of not singing that particular song at school. I switched to a heavier rotation of They Might Be Giants in the car after that.
Lately, though, Cake has been back in the mix.
John McCrea was on top of his game tonight. This is not the first time I've seen Cake, nor will it be the last, but they're really on point on this tour. They opened with "Arco Arena," and then went into "Comfort Eagle." I found myself thinking of Hagee and Parsley. I found myself thinking that if there were one celebrity whose opinion I might take seriously on the subject of politics, it was John McCrea's.
As the applause died down I heard the unmistakable guitar riff of Black Sabbath. The crowd, momentarily confused, broke out into a kind of fawning half-applause, half-gasp. The band proceeded with a faithful rendition of "War Pigs," not the stylized Cake cover one is accustomed to if one has heard their version of "I Will Survive."
Politicians hide themselves away.
They only started the war.
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor, yeah.
Time will tell on their power minds,
making war just for fun.
Treating people just like pawns in chess,
wait till their judgement day comes, yeah.
McCrea informed us after the song that that was his Mothers Day gift to all of us moms in the audience. And then he said he thought we deserved another Mothers Day song, a nice little ditty by Kenny Rogers, and after a couple of false twangy starts off-kilter with the guitarist, he kneecapped us with "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town."
You've painted up your lips
And rolled and curled your tinted hair
Ruby are you contemplating going out somewhere
The shadow on the wall tells me the sun is going down
Oh Ruby, don't take your love to town
It wasn't me that started that old crazy Asian war
But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore
And yes, it's true that I'm not the man I used to be
Oh, Ruby... I still need some company
It's hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralysed
And the wants and the needs of a woman your age, Ruby I realize,
But it won't be long I've heard them say until I not around
Oh Ruby, don't take your love to town
She's leaving now 'cause I just heard the slamming of the door
The way I know I've heard it slam some 100 times before
And if I could move I'd get my gun and put her in the ground
Oh Ruby, don't take your love to town
Oh Ruby.. For god's sake turn the fuck...
(Well, at least it wasn't a ten-minute long singalong of "Nugget" like the last time I saw them.)
The show rolled on; the boy and I sang along with gusto and glee to "Sheep Go to Heaven," "Never There," and "Short Skirt, Long Jacket."
But through all of this, the undercurrent: a quiz in mid-show to determine which mom in the audience would get to take home the potted apple tree McCrea had standing on the stage with him, in which one of the questions was, "How long did the Civil War last?" (The boy knew the answer to this one, but didn't get McCrea's attention. He nodded solemnly when McCrea intoned, "Wouldn't that be nice, to have a war that was over in four years?")
And I couldn't help but look at the old soul in a young body next to me, the wellspring of my own creativity and political passion, and think that in 11 years he'll be old enough to register for Selective Service. Two terms and change. How much time will it take to undo what began on September 11, 2001, when he was too young to know why I sat in bed all day with tears streaming down my face, unable to rip my eyes away from the slow motion interminable loop of planes crashing into towers?
This is his world. I'm just trying to clean it up for him before he has to go out into it alone. So there's my Mothers Day wish, courtesy of Black Sabbath channeled through the wise old curmudgeon John McCrea.
No more War Pigs have the power.