Pudding too hard
This month’s rediscovered delicacy: an acid girl group plays baroque R&B.
“I was in shock… I just felt this betrayal.” BARBARA MORILLO
The Cake The Cake DECCA, 1967
MAMAS & THE PAPAS singer Michelle Phillips wasn’t expecting any pushback when she refused to let a young female vocal trio called The Cake backstage at Monterey Pop in June 1967. But as founding member and songwriter Barbara Morillo recalls today, their friend Eric Burdon was not pleased: “He said, ‘You’re going to give passes to The Cake – or we’re pulling The Animals and Jimi Hendrix off the show!’”
The Cake gained entry, talked to their pal Hendrix and marvelled at the “unbelievable spread of food”. Bronx-raised Morillo didn’t see much music that day, however, distracted as she was by the festival’s forest setting and communal tripping. “In the Bronx,” she says, “there wasn’t even a tree on my block. It was just pavement… and assholes.”
The androgynously-styled teenage a cappella trio from New York had formed the previous summer after Morillo and fellow voice Jeanette Jacobs met after a party in Manhattan. They soon moved into the latter’s dad Buster’s Queens apartment and started recording their songs on a reel-to-reel. Eleanor Barooshian, who can be seen singing with Tiny Tim on 1968 movie You Are What You Eat, completed the line-up after the group bonded on LSD. Drawing inspiration from the British invasion, The Cake arranged baroque harmonies in a choral structure, influenced, in part, by Morillo’s background in a Lutheran school choir, and, they recalled, sang to anyone who would listen.
Five months before Monterey, The Cake had attended a Buffalo Springfield gig at their local haunt, Ondine, and were spotted by the band’s management, Charles Greene and Brian Stone. “We sang our material and they said, ‘We’re going to put you in the studio tomorrow to do a demo,’” recalls Morillo. They arrived with recordings of their songs: instead, the group were asked to sing R&B covers over pre-recorded instrumentals. After two months, they signed to Decca and moved to a small apartment on Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood.
After experiencing Monterey in their first week, they went into Gold Star Studios with recording heavyweights including Harold Battiste, Dr. John and members of the Wrecking Crew. “Our managers said, ‘These are the songs you’ll be doing today,’ and there were no originals,” remembers Morillo. “I was in shock. [They] said, ‘You can do that after you become famous’. I just felt this betrayal.”
Upon hearing the reverberatory intro to Jack
Nitzsche and Jackie DeShannon’s Baby That’s Me, a song previously recorded by Lesley Gore and The Fashions, it seemed The Cake’s debut would be conventional girl group fare. Morillo also had reservations, saying, “We’re from New York. We never say, ‘Oh, gee.’” Despite her concerns, the familiar Wall Of Sound production added an intensity previous versions lacked, complemented by The Cake’s haunting vocal arrangement.
Notions of well-crafted pop normality were abruptly disrupted, however, when a horn and woodwind glissando introduced The Cake’s now-management-sanctioned original material. A rags-toriches reverie, Medieval Love had a stripped, regimented string arrangement by Battiste, lending Morillo and Jacobs’ reflections on courtly love and golden prizes a strange unreality. Borne on piercing harmonies, the dramatic Fire
Fly suggests The Shangri-Las’ Remember (Walking In The Sand) had it appeared on Rubber Soul, while folk-horror conjuration Rainbow Wood amps up the lysergic mood to eerie/ethereal effect.
Able to write strong material and reinventing girl group norms for their increasingly psychedelic moment, The Cake’s spirited R&B covers of Ray Charles a nd Ben E. King also promised broad appeal. Decca invested in a considerable promotional push: one billboard in ’67 read, ‘You Are Looking At The Group That Will Be To Music 1968 What The Beatles Were To Music 1964’. Yet, banned from the Miss America Pageant and TV’s The Joey Bishop Show for their supposedly libertine ways and general refusal to cooperate, The Cake’s big breakthrough did not happen. Amid deteriorating relations with management, a disillusioned Morillo confided in Hendrix, who they’d met before he was famous outside Greenwich Village’s Café Wha?. “I remember crying to Jimi that I didn’t like what was happening,” she says. “He said, ‘Well, I’m going to bring you to England and we’re going to do what you want to do.’”
The trip never materialised, and after returning to New York during the recording of 1968’s scrappy follow-up album, A Slice Of
Cake, Morillo met Hendrix again. “He was getting into heroin,” she says. “He said, ‘This will make everything all right.’ I was disturbed. I knew he was going to die.”
Morillo left soon after, and the group disbanded. “[Jeanette and Eleanor] moved to England with Dr. John and he called
[for me to go too],” she says. “I said no, because ever ybody was getting into heroin.” Barooshian and Jacobs, who would marry Traffic’s Chris Wood, also sang with Ginger Baker’s Airforce: they were, respectively, immortalised in song in Kevin Ayers’ Eleanor’s Cake (Which Ate Her) and Wings’ Medicine Jar. In 1980, Morillo joined The Golden Dragon, led by jazz fusion guitarist Ryo Kawasaki, and toured Japan. In 2006, she and Barooshian briefly re-formed The Cake for a Hendrix tribute show in New York. “Jeanette died at 32,” says Morillo, “and Eleanor died a couple of years ago.
I had to survive.”