Bakers Pink

Epic Album Release Sheet

The self-titled Epic label debut album by Bakers Pink makes aesthetic sense from the first rippling piano runs of "The Noose, The Flesh, And The Devil." It's a deeply disturbed ballad from a psychotic cabaret.

"It's just your basic lover's triangle-type thing," explains lead singer Michael Anthony Franano, who wrote the song. "I just took it a step further. It's a kind of karma song, really, about how you can't run from yourself and you can't run from the truth. It manifested itself into a story about three individuals-those three individuals are probably all me!"

Over the course of Bakers Pink, the band takes its listeners on a musical and psychological journey of uncanny power and emotional turbulence. While the serpent's kiss of hedonism surfaces on "Euphoria"; ("Taste me/Waste me/Shoot me/Euphoria/Needles/Sting you/But they bring you/Euphoria"), "Lonely Lonely Lonely" finds the flower of love rooted in the shared experience of existential isolation ("God, nothing grows/In these fields/Seems the land's gone rotten/Lady Blue/Tell me what to do/When you've been forgotten"). Michael is particularly fond of the latter tune, the product of a muse's predawn visitation.

"I was asleep one night and suddenly I woke up, I shot out into the living room at literally three o'clock in the morning. No lights on, sitting there naked with my guitar, and these words came out. Normally I sit down and start thinking about how to build a song. But I swear to God, four verses came out, pow!-and we didn't change a word. When we went in and recorded, it was all live, there's not even a rhythm guitar track dubbed on there. We did the whole song in about two hours."

"It's just one of those magical songs and magical moments. Everything about it was exactly the way I think a song should be done."

It's rare that a rock 'n' roll band takes such a giant step forward with its own music that the members feel compelled to rechristen the enterprise. But that's exactly what happened when the Kansas City band called The Front entered the studio to begin work on their second album. The group had weathered the departure of keyboards player Bobby Franano, and their new music-for a new label-was a sharp stylistic departure from their previous output.

"With change comes opportunity, and it was time for a change," says guitarist Mike Greene. "We didn't want a name that was going to categorize the band." About three-quarters of the way through the making of the album, the band opted to change its name to Bakers Pink.

It was a moniker that was literally, and fortuitously, handed to the band. Michael had recorded a demo of some of his new tunes while the group was in New York's electric Ladyland cutting album tracks. He asked the studio's second engineer to put the music onto a cassette; when she gave it to him, he read the words "bakers pink" on the box. Suddenly, the band had an album title and a brand-new name.

(As it happens, "bakers pink" was a shade of color first used in the construction of prison during the 1920's, when it was widely believed that this particular shade would help keep inmates sane and calm. Instead, the color had the opposite effect, and drove many inmates insane!)

"There's literally no two songs alike," says Michael. "There's different instrumentation, and each one is recorded differently. If there's a common thread, it's the idea that there's a conflict in every song. Life is a conflict, there's always a contradiction. I think you have to listen to the album as a whole a couple of times and it starts to make sense."

The story of Bakers Pink begins in Kansas City in the mid-Eighties. Franano remembers that his mother "always had Cream and Hendrix and the Moody Blues and Deep Purple going in the house because she was a little hippie. She married a guy who played drums in a band in Kansas City. "We'd ride around in a Ford Econoline van, we were exposed to the whole scene at a very early age."

In 1984, following a stint in a band called Fallen Angel (which also featured drummer Shane), Michael formed The Front-now known as Bakers Pink. The band's debut album was issued on Columbia in 1989, and "Fire," the first single and video, won active rotation on MTV; a myriad of metal mags gave the album rave reviews.

Mike Greene says he "used to go see The Front before I was in The Front." Shane remembers "begging my parents to buy me a drum set. The got me one drum, so I used pillows and pans and whatever. I started listening to the radio with a headset and taught myself how to play." Randy Jordan had played with a rival band in the area, but was living in a small town in the Ozarks when he was summoned to The Front. At the time, he says, "I hadn't seen or heard from them in like two years! I said as long as I had a place to live, some cigarettes and food...no problem."

Jump to 1992: The new sound of Bakers Pink (now commuting between New York and Kansas City - was born at Electric Ladyland and The Hit Factory with the help of producer Mark Dodson (Suicidal Tendencies, Anthrax).

"Oddly enough, we found ourselves full circle to where we had started off in the loft in K.C. before we ever got signed," says Michael Anthony Franano of Bakers Pink. "The record definitely has the old album-oriented rock thing. There's a sense of poking fun at the grandiosity of life when in actuality we're just one step above an ape. Our needs and desires are pretty basic, when you think about it. I really do think people take themselves entirely too seriously and I do it myself. Life itself is kind of a joke."

Be that as it may, the music of Bakers Pink underscores a rich lode of emotional psychological truth and contradiction. If life is a paradox, then color it Bakers Pink.