Yummy Bacons to play Pikes Peak

I'm close - only one little degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. The actor-singer isn't on the line just yet. "I'm John with The Bacon Brothers" is looking for him.

"Shannon Foley came to our gig at the Hard Rock in Denver. I think she knew (Kevin) from before," starts brother Michael when I ask about how they got involved with Pike Peak Rocks! a 6.5-mile charity hike to the 14,115-foot summit. The event culminates in a free concert by The Bacon Brothers.

"They were doing a hiking event up Kilimanjaro," he says, talking about Foley, who is executive director of the Love Hope Strength Foundation, "but we couldn't do it. She came up with the Pikes Peak thing. It worked out."

The 100 expected hikers donate at least $1,000 each to benefit the cancer foundation, which organizes events like this all over the world to raise awareness and support cancer centers and survivors of the disease.

In the pause, John with The Bacon Brothers announces Kevin's arrival.

"Hi," Kevin says.

Even at 50, Kevin Bacon sounds much like he did when 1984's "Footloose" made him a mainstream star and began a career in which the inevitable forgettable films (remember "He Said/She Said"?) were largely overshadowed by well-wrought performances, a willingness to step back from the lead, and an ease with both comedy and drama.

But you probably know all that. You probably know who he's married to (Kyra Sedgwick of TNT's "The Closer") and maybe you even saw in last week's Time magazine that he lost his BlackBerry.

And Michael? In the view of most of the world, Kevin Bacon's older brother is pretty much just that.

It was Michael, though, who waded into music first. He started as a kid with the cello and classical music, and then gravitated to banjo, guitar and, finally, rock 'n' roll. After marrying and having a baby, he set aside dreams of rock superstardom and started making a living as a composer. Since then, he's scored 12 feature films and hundreds of hours of prime time television shows. He won an Emmy, in fact, for the score to a 1993 documentary for PBS, "The Kennedys."

"I grew up listening to him playing in bands and writing songs," Kevin says. "He got me my first guitar. ... So that was a huge, huge influence on me."

You get a glimpse of that on the cover of their fifth CD, "New Year's Day," a poppy storyteller released in March. There, a preteen Kevin sits with his brother as Michael strums a mandolin.

"I think when I decided to become an actor I kind of felt that he was already doing that," he goes on. "I decided to take a different path and started taking acting lessons. I would always write music, and we'd get together and write."
Michael laughs. "We wrote songs for all of Kevin's movies. They were all rejected."

The Philadelphia natives formed the band 14 years ago. It was designed to be a one-time gig, and then people heard about them, club owners started calling to book them. Michael says, looking back, that was when it was easy.

"We didn't try to pretend we didn't have a celebrity in the band," says Michael, who is nine years older than Kevin. "But we didn't have a big label. We had two guys and we drove around in my station wagon."

Kevin says that he expected that his presence might actually be problematic.

"It's like Kevin always says, people would think we suck," Michael says, laughing.

Kevin, however, doesn't laugh. "I think there's a lot of scrutiny. You try not to get too bogged down in that kind of judgment," he says. "You don't expect people to like you because you're an actor. You have to start with that. From that point on, you have to do the best to put it out there, and you have to hope that people come around to enjoying the music.

"That's kind of the way it is."

While Michael can enjoy celebrity in teaspoonfuls, The Bacon Brothers thrusts Kevin deeper than movies into the drudgery of celebrity. Meet-and-greets in towns small and large. Happy radio chats. Interviews with people like me.

"To be perfectly honest, it's not the most enjoyable part of the gig," Kevin says. "But we don't take for granted that people pay to see us, and if there wasn't a celebrity in the band, it would be difficult to get to someone like you.

"On the other hand, playing and recording is really the most enjoyable part of it all."

It's still fun, they say. And I suspect that if it weren't, they wouldn't endure the less-happy elements of being a touring band.

And Kevin has also made an upside out of one of the potentially annoying parts of being himself: the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that emerged from college dorms in the 1990s. Parlaying the notion at its core - it's a small world - the Web site (sixdegrees.org) facilitates Everyman's support of millions of charities.

"So we're constantly sort of morphing that," Kevin says of Six Degrees, "coming up with new ideas that do something positive with that. The funny thing is that it doesn't really seem to be fading. People still talk about it and want to ask me about it."

He laughs and makes that Kevin Bacon groan that sounds like both protest and resignation. "It's just this harmless thing. I'm basically used to it."

Pikes Peak Rocks! The Bacon Brothers

When: 1 p.m. Saturday

Where: The summit of Pikes Peak

Tickets: Free from the observation deck

Something else: If you miss the Peak, you can see The Bacon Brothers, with openers The White Buffalo, that night at the Hard Rock Cafe in Denver. Doors open at 9 p.m. Tickets are $50, $100 VIP, with all proceeds going to the Love Hope Strength Foundation. 1-303-623-3191, pikespeakrocks.org.

THE 6.5-MILE HIKE

What: An event to benefit the Love Hope Strength Foundation and raise money for bone marrow donors around the world

When: Begins at 6 a.m. Saturday
Tickets: $50 registration fee with a minimum donation of $1,000; pikespeakrocks.org

Something else: The climb kicks off with a hikers-only acoustic set by singer Cy Curnin of The Fixx, and one - at 12,000 feet - by The White Buffalo.


Six Degrees of Separation - From Zebulon Pike to Kevin Bacon

The announcement that The Bacon Brothers were coming to perform a concert on the summit of Pikes Peak had us thinking about Kevin Bacon's famous Six Degrees game.

Although Bacon would rather be known for his acting and music, he's become inexorably tied to this Web phenomenon in which people count how many connections it takes to connect another celebrity to Bacon. We tried to connect our famous explorer Zebulon Pike, who gave his name to Pikes Peak, to Bacon and found that old Zeb has a Bacon rating of 3. Here's how he connects:

1. Christopher Houldsworth plays a character named Zebulon Pike (not necessarily related to our Zeb, but we're desperate here) in the upcoming film "The Penitent Sweater."

2. Houldsworth was in "Blood Done Sign My Name" (2009) with Ray Kendrick.

3. Kendrick was in "Death Sentence" (2007) with Kevin Bacon.