Cake formed

Cake was formed in 1991 when John McCrea, a Sacramento, California native who had moved to Los Angeles with a band only to see it “quickly crumble around him”, returned to Sacramento. He began looking for a new band to play with, having “grown tired of Sacramento’s coffeehouse circuit”, and quickly attracted trumpet player Vince DiFiore , guitarist Greg Brown , bassist Shon Meckfessel, and drummer Frank French . All were active in the music scene at the time; DiFiore notes that “[McCrea] came back and stole us from other bands”. The band soon came up with the name “Cake”; rather than referring to the food , the name is meant to be “like when something insidiously becomes a part of your life…[we] mean it more as something that cakes onto your shoe and is just sort of there until you get rid of it”. They have also stated that they “liked the phonetic punch of the word.” Meckfessel soon left to attend college and was replaced by Gabe Nelson . After touring and becoming part of the club scene in San Francisco, the band independently recorded and released Motorcade of Generosity in 1994, selling copies from their van as a method of paying touring expenses.