When you have a party game named after you and all the famous actors you’ve worked with—Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon—there’s obviously no getting away from the fact that you’re a successful movie star.
This isn’t lost on actor Kevin Bacon, which is why even though he’s mega-serious about his musical career, he doesn’t hide from his “Hollywood” life when on stage as one half of the Bacon Brothers.
“I didn’t want people to pretend I’m not who I am. It helps because if you go to a show to see your favorite singer, you know 90 percent of the songs, and that’s the fun of going,” Kevin says. “To absorb a new set list of music you don’t know can be challenging to an audience.”
It was 20 years ago that the star of such acclaimed films such as “Footloose,” “A Few Good Men” and “Apollo 13” joined forces with his brother Michael, an Emmy-Award winning film and television composer, to live out their boyhood dream of playing together in a band.
“The fact that we have more space in between us age wise means it’s not that battling brothers thing that you see in a lot of bands with siblings,” Kevin says. “We have a lot of respect for each other. Certainly there are things that we will disagree on musically, but we’re always willing to at least try what the other wants to try out.”
Michael adds that there’s a certain trust that comes along with having your brother on stage next to you.
“We’ve been going for 20 years and brotherhood cuts through a lot,” he says. “We grew up in the same house and have the same values and I think a lot of brother bands that might cause problems, but for us, it’s a real asset.”
The Bacon Brothers will play the Birchmere July 16-18, with three engaging shows that combines hard-charging tunes with mellow, country-folk ballads, and a little Philly soul.
Because both brothers’ schedules are extremely busy—Kevin with new films and the recently wrapped “The Following” TV show, and Michael with his scoring work and recent entry into teaching—finding time to go on tour can sometimes be a challenge. But they both do what they can to make sure there’s time at least a little each year.
“Music is everything to me,” Michael says. “It’s the only thing I have been good at and I’m very lucky not to have fallen in a rut. I do a lot of different things in the music realm, and they are all very satisfying.”
Kevin concurs: “Music is so important in my life—playing I, hearing it, being around it. It’s the soundtrack of our lives, really.”
When on tour together, there’s no big entourage or private plane or large fleet of tour busses, the Bacon Brothers travel with their band in a van or a couple of cars, and just operate as any band would during the summer months.
“The best part of a tour is always the show,” Kevin says. “The other parts can be fun once in a while, but there’s a lot of waiting around, the food isn’t too great and you spend a lot of time looking at the off-ramp of the interstate out a window of a Hotel 6. The music keeps us going.”
Except for one new song that Michael has written this year, there isn’t much new music that will be played at the concerts, but that doesn’t mean that the Bacon Brothers will be playing the same old songs from last time.
“We get bored with playing the same show, so it’s often about what can we do to switch up the set,” Kevin says. “I haven’t written anything in a while and he has one new song, so we don’t have a lot of new to pull from. We have at this point a pretty large catalogue of 6-7 CDs and we start looking at some older tunes, reworking them and maybe changing the key or the way it’s put across.”
They also have their own take on Alanis Morissette’s “You Learn” that they expect audiences will enjoy. And there’s always the chance that Kevin may bring out “Footloose.” It’s a song the band performed a lot in the early days and he admits he’ll sing it once in a while if the moment is right.
