In the scrap heap of pop music should have beens lays "Baby, That's Me" by The Cake, the revered anti-success story of the combination of baroque psychedelic girl group pop. The usual story of mismanagement, wrong men, label politics, and more than a little drugs, apply to Eleanor Barooshian, Jeanette Jacobs, and Barbara Morillo but few stories result in a record as beautiful as their version of this Jackie DeShannon/Jack Nitzsche composition.

As recorded by Leslie Gore, "Baby, That's Me" is petulant at best. The Cake, however, deliver a performance that borders on disturbing in it's distance; as though the girls are delivering a psychotic Mystery Science Theater commentary on their own lives. Harold Battiste adds his special swamp voodoo to the arrangement, muddying the waters even more, and Cher pops in for uncredited background vocals.

Like so many good things, the general public missed the point and the record flopped. Fortunately for me, it showed up on a "gray area" Japanese import at the end of the eighties, giving me the opportunity to meet one of my most favorite records and now, the good folk at Rev-Ola have re-issued the entire, brief, Cake catalogue and even threw in the original mono single mix of "Baby, That's Me" so that those strings can be heard in all their morbid glory.