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Extreme vol.1 no. 10 May 1996
Up front and naked... by Steve Berketo
Just as the grunge assault took music charts by storm, a little no name band from the suburbs of Toronto took a handful of pop hooks and fluffy lyrics and made songs that left hearts with warm spots. The kind that makes a girl force her guy to say “ I Love You!” In doing so, Barenaked Ladies went on to become the first Canadian band to go gold with an independent release. When material was re-recorded and releases wide as Gordon with a major label by their side, 800,000 units were moved in their home country and they became a household name almost overnight. When you stay on top of the charts for 8 straight weeks the only way to go is straight down. Their sophomore effort, Maybe You Should Drive, took a different direction that the band does not regret but admits did not capture the energy of what they were all about. Born On A Pirate Ship bids farewell to novelty and navigates the band towards a new horizon of serious musician accreditation. Guitarist Ed Robertson disagrees. “Well, I don’t think it’s a case of looking for anything or trying to drop a novelty tag,”
Robertson defends. “The songs we’ve written are still the songs we’ve written and I looked at this album as adding to a body of work that already exists. We still play all of those other songs live and they’re still apart of what we do and who we are. We’re just growing and changing and adding to that body of work.”
There an old rock journalism rule that says “the artist is always right even if the writer can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that he/she is wrong”. Fine then, we’ll call it natural progression. Everyone happy? “It forced the four of us to stretch into new areas because we still wanted to have an interesting sound and a different sound in a straight ahead rock set-up. So, Jim and I played some keyboards and tied in more singing and we all got more involved in vocal arranging. I think it made for a really adventurous record.”
We have math formulas that will tell us the distance between, around, and inside anything we can imagine. But why is it that no one has ever invented an accurate gauge to measure success of a band? Sometimes it’s sized up by the opinion of the average fan, who, let’s face it, spends $14.99 on a cd and has to take a mortgage out for a ticket when a band has the decency to stop in town. Rarely is it reflected in record sales when it’s important to maintain or outsell the numbers of the previous release. When THE BARENAKED LADIES unveiled Maybe You Should Drive, everyone expected more “Enid”, “If I Had $1,000,000”, and “Be My Yoko Ono”. The sad truth was it just wasn’t there.
“I think after the success of Gordon we felt a lot of pressure while we were making Maybe You Should Drive. We never decided to make a serious record and we tried not to let the pressure we were feeling influence the project, but it invariably does. The album did quite well. It sold three times platinum in Canada but was treated as a failure because Gordon did so well. Meanwhile Maybe You Should Drive was one of the best selling albums of the year.”
Knowing a good thing when they had it, the band went back to Gordon producer Michael Philip Wojewoda when it came time to records Born On A Pirate Ship. And for good reason. Ben “Maybe You Should Drive” Mink was use to working with solo artists like K.D. Lang and perhaps did not fully understand what the building blocks of BNL were. Robertson remembers, “I think we got a little off track. It’s an interesting album and there’s a lot of great songs on it but I think it misses the energy of the band and our uniqueness. I think our new album forced a re-examination of the band. We were stripped down to a four piece with Andy’s departure. It made us go “ok… what’s good about what we do, and let’s do that.”
Oh yeah! We almost forgot the part that one Lady in all his Nakedness is no more. Heavy giggling wound down in the spring of of ’95 and it wasw time to lay down tracks for a thrid project. Members were under mondo stress and were also dealing with serious management problems. Cracks were appearing in the pavement and something had to give. Andy Creeggan was leaving and a period of self examination would soon begin for Steve, Jim, Tyler and Ed. “Andy never wanted to be in a touring band. He’s an incredible musician but just wasn’t into doing what we were doing”.
All was not lost, in fact, all was found. A band, like a relationship, has high points and low points. When experiencing that later, negative energy can only build so much before there it throws you back to the centre of the emotional spectrum and allows stable progression. Gordon was undoubtedly the high and the events following Maybe You Should Drive were the low. When it was all over, BNL took a good look around and moved full steam ahead.
“It was scary,” recalls Robertson. “I didn’t know if I could do this band without Andy. He was a big part of it for me. It was horrible to think of going on without one of the members of the band. When it came down to making the record as a four piece, it was the best time we ever had. The tour right after with Kevin Hearn playing with us was a really positive thing. It was one of those things you dread happening and when it does it’s the best thing for you.”
Track 6, “I Live With It Every Day”, was written by vocalist Steven Page and Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy. Their friendship began while Page was still in highschool firing off fan letters every so often. An opportunity to enroll in a course at Cambridge University opened up and Page ended up staying with Duffy while he was working on the LILAD TIME album. When it was time to indulge in R&R, Duffy packed his bags for Toronto and the two wrote songs together.
Most surprisingly about the new album is that it’s not afraid to rock. “It’s because we were listening to AC/DC records and we wanted them to salute us”. Robertson laughs. “I Just think it’s an element of the band that we decided to explore with this record. People definitely perceive it as a guitarist driven record, but also I think its’ a very melody driven record.” |
