McCrea, too, sounds like he's about to break. The leader of Sacramento's Cake is an us-against-the-world sort, and, like a street-corner prophet, eager to declare the unfiltered truth, whatever the topic. For starters, he despises the fashion and regiment of alternative rock. Also, he resents the joke-band tag that resulted from the band's first radio hit, the savage, culture-mauling "Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle." He might never perform that song again. As for touring, he says it's more like being a truck driver than anything else. Then, after thinking about how much he dislikes the traveling roadshow life, he ponders aloud about the future of the band. "It's unnatural to travel around so much with four other males in a small space," he says, smoking a cig and peering out from underneath an omnipresent, eggshell-colored fisherman's cap. "If you did the same thing to rats within a proportionately small space, I'm sure that they would be biting at each other." Sometimes, as was the case during a discussion on genre, his train of thought twists and turns like a television with a runaway remote. What started with the statement that the musical categorizations can be "wasteful and divisive" quickly mutates into the linking of what he calls the rigiddancing style of white people to the arrival of Columbus and the decimation of the rain forest.

			"I Will Survive"
			"The Distance"
			"Frank Sinatra"

Like the band's 1994 debut, Motorcade Of Generosity, but with considerably better production and execution, Fashion Nugget finds McCrea and band -- including guitarist Greg Brown, trumpeter/percussionist Vincent di Fiore, bassist Victor Damiani and drummer Todd Roper-- stirring up a surly, pulsating, beatnik-y swill that is as colorful as McCrea is in conversation. Think Jonathan Richman fronting a Mid-American Camper Van Beethoven with a lust for '60's soul and '70's funk. Then, as if a monkey wrench was needed, add trumpet to the mix. Nugget toes the line between such opposites as lounge, hippy-hoppy funk, freaked-out country and even disco ("I Will Survive" is given a serious and surprisingly affecting reading here). Maybe not since the Beastie Boys has a band mutated genres and carved out its own little sound so organically.

The grandson of a Communist, McCrea sing-speaks a barrage of images and scenes that are sometimes playful, sometimes somber, and frequently condemning. He attacks shallowness and materialism ("Italian Leather Sofa") betrayal ("Friend Is A Four Letter Word"), and the rat race in general via the story of a race car driver who refuses to stop circling the track long after the race is over ("The Distance"). Then he comes at you with a rockabilly romp that charmingly admits that "stickshifts and safety belts, bucket seats have all got to go, when we're driving in the car, it makes my baby seem so far."