Michael and Kevin Bacon moonlight as musical duo Bacon Brothers 7 tonight. Musical Instrument Museum, 4725 E. Mayo Blvd., Phoenix. $63.50-$128.50. 480-478-6000, mim.org.
Arizona photographer hopes to capture every Frank Lloyd Wright building 480-210-1776
Kevin Bacon says he “definitely” had some reservations when he and Michael, his brother, decided to start playing music together professionally as the Bacon Brothers after what was meant to be a one-off gig in Philadelphia, where they’d grown up, in 1995.
“Totally,” he says. “Because I knew that nobody likes actors in rock and roll Sixty-five down, only a few hundred to go.❚ Even though he knows he might not ever complete it, Arizona photographer Andrew Pielage is on a quest to capture the soul of architect Frank Lloyd Wright — and all 400 (or so) of the buildings he left behind, from grand public cathedrals to humble concrete-block homes. ❚ Yes, he’s usually getting paid to shoot. But anyone who doubts the sincerity of his Wright fixation should know he even got married at the David and Gladys bands.”
Then, with a laugh, he adds, “don’t like actors in rock and roll bands.”
IIt’s not as though he planned to embark on a second career.
And frankly, Kevin adds, if he had thought about what he was getting into, he wouldn’t have done it.
“I wouldn’t have ever wanted to trade on the actor thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to be like, ‘Oh, you like my movies? Now, you’ve gotta listen to my music.’”
Family creativity runs deep
The thing is, the brothers had always played music together.
As Michael, an Emmy-winning composer for film and television, recalls, “We were brought up in a very skinny townhouse in downtown Philadelphia. And our father was trained as an architect so he took this old house and made it into kind of really a gorgeous midcentury architect design. And it had this enormous hi-fi system with speakers built into the kitchen. It was almost like
a loft. The kitchen was on one end, totally open. And then in the living room, which was probably 35 feet away, there was a stereo, and all the little knobs stuck out of this beautiful wooden midcentury box. So the whole house was a gigantic speaker. For a young child, that was really formative.”
The other thing about their household, Michael says, is that the kids were all encouraged to explore their creativity.
“There was a costume box,” he says. “You didn’t go out to the store and buy a Batman costume. You went up and there was a box full of all this old stuff my mother collected over the years, and you did your costume out of there. If you wanted art lessons, you went to art school. And the same for music. Same for acting when Kevin was interested in that. Dance, everything.”
He figures he and Kevin were collaborating on music together by the time his brother was old enough to go to preschool.
As Michael, who’s nine years older than Kevin, recalls, “My sister taught me how to play guitar. I taught Kevin how to play guitar. My sister and I had a jug band in high school. I also went to Philadelphia Orchestra. Our parents were very interested in ballet, opera and the orchestra.”
Both brothers recall having written their first song by the age of 12.
“And then we started writing songs together,” Kevin says, “partly because I didn’t play an instrument except a little bit of drums and percussion. So I would sing Michael the melodies and the lyrics that were in my head and he would kind of form them into an actual song.”
A lot of the writing they were doing, Kevin says, was in the hope of placing something in the movies he was making or for other people to record. So he and Michael would demo the songs.
And as Kevin recalls, “An old friend of mine from Philly heard the demo and came up with this idea of playing as the Bacon Brothers and doing a gig in Philadelphia. So we put together a little band of just two acoustic guitars, some percussion and bass, and we went down and played one show. And it just kept rolling from there. It wasn’t as though we said, ‘OK, let’s put a band together. We both need other careers.;”
It was a logical step, Michael says.
“It wasn’t really like dropping off a cliff. It was more like, ‘Well, now let’s actually do this in public.’ When Kevin made that decision that he was willing to try it, because he’d never done it before, that’s really what started the band. And I guess we found out that we actually were pretty good, people liked what we were doing. And here it is 25 years later.”
An organically grown group
They’ve grown the band organically while releasing nine albums showcasing their blend of rock, Americana, folk and Philly soul, most recently last year’s selftitled affair.
“We played small places,” Michael says. “We didn’t ask for a lot of production. We didn’t start out with a label. Nobody was really interested in us as a project for their label. That all came just from playing, just taking the songs that we’d written and trying to share them with people.”
By the time the Bacon Brothers started, Michael had launched a successful career as a composer, having set aside his pursuit of his musical dreams in an effort to support his family after the birth of his son.
“I had a booking agent,” he says. “She booked me into colleges, high schools, elementary school, playschools. The next thing I would be doing would be prenatal jobs. It was really a very tough time.” Kevin laughs and adds, “Playing Lamaze classes.” Michael laughs and continues.
“Yeah, exactly. That’s where I was headed. And one day, I couldn’t get the insurance bill paid and we got canceled. My wife looked at me. Look is not exactly the right term. But she said, ‘You’re not providing.’ I went, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to provide? I thought I was a sensitive singer-songwriter.’”
Given his classical background, Michael looked at scoring as a logical career choice.
“So we rented an apartment right above Kevin’s in New York,” he says. “And we kind of gave New York a shot as far as scoring. Luckily, after about a year of trying, I got one job.”
Every opportunity he’s had score a film or TV show since then, he says, can be traced back to the first job.
It wasn’t long before composing had become a fulltime occupation.
Making time to play
After playing that show with his brother, Michael says, “All of a sudden, here’s this opportunity to rekindle that dream that I had to give up for reality’s sake.”
He considers himself “an incredibly lucky person,” Michael says. “There are very few of my contemporaries still writing songs and performing and that sort of thing. And I teach. I’m a full-time associate professor at the City University of New York, teaching music, history of film music, film scoring. And we have the band that has obviously become much bigger than either of us ever thought it would and just somehow seems to be getting better.”
They’re a song-driven band, Michael says. And right now, they are going through “a huge songwriting bloom, which as he says, is “a very good place to be for a musician.”
They just released a video for one of Kevin’s new songs, “Play,” and there are six more freshly written song he’s hoping they can work into the set soon.
As to whether it’s safe to expect another album, Michael says, “I’m not sure I understand exactly the way the record business is working these days. I think we’d like to get a follow-up single sometime pretty soon. But how those things roll out is a little bit beyond my understanding at the moment. If CDs are still being sold at gigs, once we have 10 songs in the can, we’ll probably release a CD.”
For now, there’s “Play,” a contagious pop song with a slinky funk-guitar groove that finds Kevin setting the tone with “People tell me love’s a thing to work at / You gotta work, work, work to keep that thing alive . I hear what you’re selling I don’t buy that / I keep my work between the 9 and 5.”
The song was inspired, he says, by reporters asking about his relationship with actress Kyra Sedgwick, his wife of 30 years.
“I kind of wrote it as a response to doing a lot of press,” Kevin says. “People always say to me, ‘Wow, you know, you’ve been in this relationship for such a long time. How do you keep a Hollywood relationship going? It must be a lot of work, it must be a lot of work, it must be a lot of work.’ So my response to that is, ‘It’s really not about work, it’s about play.’”
Kevin was working on his Showtime series “City on a Hill” when he came up with “Play.”
“It just kind of jumped out,” he says. “And it was one of those times when I kind of felt like, ‘Let’s run to New Jersey, book the room and cut this one,’ because it felt like it was ready to go. And then we would have something for the tour, a way to sort of frame it and have something new out there.”
You may think that with both brothers having successful careers to run outside the Bacon Brothers, coming up with time to work on new material would be a challenge.
Kevin doesn’t see it that way.
“That’s the type of thing that if you have a second, you can do it,” he says. “Everyone’s got, you know, an hour to pick up a guitar on a weekend or whenever – in an airport, in a dressing room. That’s not the issue. Touring is challenging because, you know, my schedules is … it’s full. So fitting it in is definitely a lot, but we seem to get it done.”