They say any actor can be connected to Kevin Bacon through six degrees of separation or less. Does that mean any reporter interviewing him and his Emmy-winning composer brother, Michael, is connected to all humanity by under 12 degrees?
It feels like Bacon’s Law should be universal. It even inspired Kevin to start a nonprofit back in 2007 called SixDegrees to connect people to charitable causes involving youth empowerment and sustainable living; a clever way to use the “small world phenom” thrust upon him to positive ends. The topic never came up in our morning Zoom conversation earlier this month, but one dollar from every ticket from their sold-out Richmond show this weekend will be going there.
The Bacon Brothers started playing music professionally 30 years ago. Raised in Philadelphia, their mother was a teacher and activist, while their father Edmund was a famous urban planner who wrote the seminal 1967 illustrated text, “Design of Cities.” On the brothers’ debut album in the mid-‘90s, they described their sound as “Forosco” due to its mixture of folk, rock, soul and country, though their love of the blues seems to run pretty deep, as I discovered. As far as celebrity sibling bands go, they’re undoubtedly in the Forosco hall of fame, meaning audiences actually enjoy their shows.
They may feel obligated to play “Footloose” every now and then for googly-eyed droolers, but their original songwriting and playing on new tunes like “Airport Bar” and “Live with the Lie,” sound polished and lived in from years of playing together. Our brief interview focused on music, so we didn’t get to discuss Kevin’s impressive stage and film career (or his endearing IG account with nearly 5 million followers); but these days, he’s up there with the finest character actors working. This is a guy who pulled off the rarest of things in Hollywood – a believable Southern accent – for his role as prophetic jailbird Willie O’Keefe in the Oliver Stone film, “JFK.” (“Fascism is comin’ back! … You nawt a bad lookin’ man, Mistuh Garrison.”) Or as he told Conan O’Brien he was required to say in a dubbed version for airplane screenings: “You don’t know squat, Mistuh Garrison! ‘Cause you never been loved by a man!”
As previously mentioned, the Bacon Bros get sizzling this weekend at the aptly named Tin Pan. Note: Early on in the interview, Kevin was having technical difficulties, so a couple of his answers were unintelligible, which I tried to describe; later I found out it was his 67th birthday that morning (Happy birthday, late!)
Style Weekly: You guys have been doing this for 30 years, what do you still look forward to going out on tour together?
Michael Bacon: I like the pressure it brings out. I really have to start paying a lot of attention to my voice, my guitar playing, cello playing. It gives me a little bit of a motor to do some practicing, some woodshedding, and having a goal to have that work pay off on the road.
Kevin Bacon: Hey Brent … Yeah, for me, I guess I’d say it’s always the show, you know? There’s a lot of things that are rough about getting out there – getting there for one thing … but [choppy, metallic fragments of distorted garble] tours are pretty much always a blast. We have a great band and the people seem to really enjoy it. That part is really the highlight.
You’re breaking up some, Kevin, but I caught most of that. The new songs from “Ballad of the Brothers” have been out about a year now, are they still evolving in the live setting?
Kevin Bacon: Oh, ok. Yeah, we always look to add new stuff, play old stuff maybe we haven’t played in a while. Shake the setlist up some. I mean, the best of all possible situations, I’ve always said, would be to play a song for 10 years live and then cut it. But that’s not always the way it works. Because you learn so much about what works and what doesn’t work in the song, and you get new ideas. Certainly, vocally [distorted robot clamoring underwater].
Michael Bacon: Kev, you’re breaking up, seriously.
Kevin Bacon: Ok, let me side back in …
Michael Bacon: I’ll jump in here… one of the things we’re doing is there’s a song from our last record, called “Losing the Night,” it’s an autoharp song, which I love playing. So we’re taking out one autoharp song, and putting one in. That’s always fun, because we’re with the band in the studio, then we have to find a way to put it across live. I think we’ll also be doing a song from the [Amazon series] “The Bondsman” that Kevin and I wrote, which is more of a Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt kind of song. And there’s another song featuring our keyboard player with a song I wrote; I met her because I wanted a background singer to sing harmonies, and the song became a duet. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that. Good stuff, challenging.
You guys have a nine-year difference in age, did that have something to do with the melting pot of sounds you bring together?
Kevin Bacon: Can you hear me? Ok good. Yeah, I think so, because you’re talking about an era where things were really changing a lot in music, that was super influential to both of us. I don’t know that there’s been that much change, in a nine to 10-year period, since then. Between say, ’65 and ’75, there was a lot of new stuff going on. Both of us had a wide variety of music we listened to … Michael has always talked about the influence of showtunes and classical music that our parents would listen to, but I don’t remember that much of that stuff. Or if they did, I would just go upstairs and try to avoid it [laughs].
And your hometown Philly, lotta good bands from there … reminds me, there’s a guy here in Richmond, Armistead Wellford, who played bass for that band Love Tractor from Athens, Georgia; they came up with R.E.M. and The B-52s, Pylon. I wonder if he will be at your show; because his son, Hayes, starred with you in that good genre flick, “Cop Car.”
Kevin Bacon: Oh right, right! Yeah, one of the little boys. I think they have come to see us before.
The only other Richmond connection I could think of: You have a Pat Benatar cover on the new record, “We Belong,” and you may not know she started out here, playing in bluesy bands at a local Holiday Inn. I think she was a bank teller.
Michael Bacon: Oh yeah, we worked that one up, that’s also on that docket.
How did you decide to include that Benatar cover on the album?
Kevin Bacon: I always loved that song, you know? Quite a few years ago, I was thinking about a cover I had done a demo of, and making it a little more of a rock song, little less poppy. When we were doing the last record, I kind of dug it out, played it for Mike, and we decided to work it up.
Any other big projects coming up that you’re excited about?
Kevin Bacon: We’re kind of just starting to put together, or Michael is taking the lead on it, to put together a live album. You know, we did one years ago. We’ve always felt like our live show, it’s really the thing. It’s hard to fake a good live show.
Does that mean you’re recording songs on this tour?
Michael Bacon: Well, not so much .. it’d be a nightmare, I’d have to go back and pick through all of the ones I’ve been mixing now, with the [new] ones. It’s a long process, because you have video and audio, and our record company, Forty Below, is going to mix it. I’m excited to have a different set of ears on it …
We only have a few minutes before your next interview, so I threw some quick hit questions in … What is the one concert that each of you has seen that was truly memorable or life changing?
Michael Bacon: Well [when I was young] I had gotten fixated on Mississippi John Hurt. When you really try to play his stuff, man it is friggin’ hard! I can play the notes, but what he did with his vocals and his amazing thumb. He had the most independent thumb and first, second and third fingers, of anybody. I remember going to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and lemme see, I was born in ’48, so this would’ve been, I guess, around 1960-ish? And he would just kinda walk around with his guitar strapped on his back, with a big smile on his face and talk to people. He was a total idol to me. Going back to that time, too, there was a guy named Eric Anderson who wrote a song called “Thirsty Boots.” One of my other idols, which was Phil Ochs, sang it during the night concert, as a duet in harmony, and that was really unforgettable.
Wow … what about you, Kevin?
Kevin Bacon: Yeah, you know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I saw Janis Joplin when I was like 6 years old. My friend’s dad owned a club she was playing at in Philly. And I actually went backstage and got her autograph on a pink piece of paper. It said, “Hello Kevin, Love Janis.” And I lost it. It’s one of two autographs I’ve ever gotten. I lost the other one, too. The second one was on a paper plate, B.B. King. So I’m two for two [laughs].
Do you two have any pre-show rituals before you go on stage?
Michael Bacon: Well, Kevin and I are very dedicated vocal students. When we really started touring, my voice was in bad shape … so we did a lot of searching for a great vocal teacher, who we found online, Justin Stoney. Most of the guys who sing in the band, do this ritualistic warm-up. It’s really strange sounding. I remember we were doing “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” and we were in an office warming up and they complained and said, “What are you doing? We can’t work with the sound in the background.” [Laughs]
You guys learned songwriting the old-fashioned way. What do you think about people using AI now to generate music or art? I mean, I could go in Chat GPT right now and type: Write me a club remix song for the HBO show, “White Lotus,” as composed by Michael Bacon [who has done a lot of soundtrack work for PBS], using a looped sample of Kevin Bacon getting spanked in “Animal House” saying “Thank you sir, may I have another?” And it might be club hit in 2 seconds.
Michael Bacon: As a college professor, AI is really a problem. I’m a music teacher but I also have to teach some courses that are writing intensive. I don’t know if you’re aware of [producer] Rick Beato, but he has a really good piece on this where … There’s that band, I can’t think of their name, but he went in and used AI to separate out the vocals and guitars and basically saw the artifacts that came from whatever the original source was. But that [piece] was the best explanation of the dangers and the horrors and the amazing uses that it can be.
I’ll check it out.
Kevin Bacon: Is that on YouTube?
Michael: Yeah, it’s great.
The Bacon Brothers perform at The Tin Pan on Saturday, Aug. 2 at 8 p.m. Update: This show is sold out.
