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Artist: GEORGE BILEK & THE BARGAIN BASEMENT BAND
Originally Recorded/Released: 1997 (Bargain Basement Productions un-numbered cassette single)
Reissued on CD: 2002 (B.B.P. #203)
Personnel: George Bilek; Erin Connelly; Danny Hesse; Chris Matthews; Charces Lane; Tom Kidd; Shannon Kelly
Produced by: Chris Matthews & Erin Connelly
CD Liner Notes:
The Imprecise Story of “Yellow Cake”
(as best as I could comprehend it...) by Chris Matthews
Well Erin rings me up one day back in ‘97 and sez: “I wanna hire you to produce a song with me. It’s really weird but you gotta trust me!” She proceeds to explain how this latest songcrafting class she’s taking has quite a wild variety of students, including one 72-year-old Czech-o-slovakian man named George Bilek. Now, whereas most of the others present the sort of demos you’d probably expect from aspiring L.A. writers, Mr. Bilek bowls ‘em over with a stunning original kind of Slavic-folk-reggae-rap piece -- and Erin immediately knows she has just got to help him fully realize his vision. Somehow she gets him to let us do all this goofy stuff to the song, and when the class plays their final products on the last day of school, George’s is truly the most gorgeous of them all, and everyone applauds a lot.
‘Tis only then that Erin dares to ask what the heavily-symbolic image of the “yellow cake” truly stands for. George reveals that he had written the entire thing while sitting in a soul-food BBQ house somewhere in L.A., rap music blaring over a jukebox and him thinking, “Hey if they can get rich doing THAT, so can I!” The notion of American prosperity was suggested to him most clearly by the patrons enjoying slices from a giant pan holding one abundant yellow cake.
“Cornbread!?” cries Erin. “It’s about CORNBREAD!?”
“No, not bread -- CAKE! Yellow cake!”
Sock it to me, sock it to me yellow cake
Sock it to me, sock it to me yellow cake...
(Liner notes by Chris Matthews, 2002)
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