|
800,000 Bareanked Ladies Fans Can’t Be Wrong
By Mike Cimicata
YEAH, YEAH, YEAH
Nov/Dec. 1996
They’re multi-platinum stars in their native Canada. Their U.S. audience has steadily broadened thanks to persistent touring and word of mouth. Their ’96 studio release, Born On A Pirate Ship, furthers their rewriting of the pop rulebook. Now they’re re- leasing their first live record, Rock Spectacle (pronounced Roc- Spectak). Clearly, Barenaked Ladies have better things to worry about than flying cheese.
Still, worry they must. At least, until concertgoers manage to restrain themselves from hurling boxes of macaroni and cheese at the band after Iead singer Steven Page sings the line ”We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner” in their love song ”If I Had $1000000.”
”When it started it was really fun.” says Page, reacting to the mac-and-cheese-throwing phenomenon as we sit in the band’s dressing room backstage at The Electric Factory in Philadelphia, before a show on the band’s fall tour. ’I couldn’t understand how the word spread that you were supposed to do that. And I thought that was pretty amazing and magical, ’cause that was kind of before the internet explosion of the last couple years. Now it’s kind of easy to find out about that stuff.”
The band’s sense of wonder about the unique form of adulation they’ve received has lessened as they’ve grown tired of being the victims of airborne pasta and powdered dairy product. ”People started opening the cheese, which was the worst part,” Page explains, his face wearing the frustration of a man who has worn far too much cheese on his sleeve. ”People opening cheese powder and whipping it. So the whole audience walks out sweaty and covered with cheese, we’re covered in cheese, and our equipment gets wrecked. It’s not worth it.”
Drummer Tyler Stewart, seated on the opposite sofa, notes the additional concern of the band’s personal safety. ”Getting hit by sharp boxes, when you’re blinded by lights, really sucks,” he says plainly. The effects of the Kraft Dinner toss have increased in proportion to the size of the venues the band now plays. ”As your popularity grows,” says Steven, ”you can’t weed out the goons in the crowd. And there’s always goons.” These goons know no limits, apparently: ”I got hit in the nuts with a jar of applesauce once,” Steven reveals. Uh, thanks for sharing, Steven.
Through thick and through thin, through cheese sauce and applesauce, Barenaked Ladies have carved out a dedicated fan base since the band’s inception in the late ’80s, when Page and fellow singer/songwriter/guitarist Ed Robertson, both in their teens, began writing and performing together in the Toronto area. After recruiting Stewart and brothers Jim and Andy Creeggan on upright bass and piano, the quintet’s self-released 1991 EP, The Yellow Tape, sold well enough to achieve gold status in Canada – a first for an indie release – and attracted the attention of Warner Music Canada, who inked them to a deal.
The full-length debut, Gordon, (Sire/Reprise) sold 800,000 copies and roamed the upper reaches of the Canadian album charts alongside The Bodyguard soundtrack and Eric Clapton’s Unplugged upon release in 1992. Emphasizing acoustic-based pop, Gordon seriously examines mental illness and relationships while spoofing such institutions as high school and box sets. It is bursting with pure pop like the first-love reminiscence ”Enid.” Its guts-on-the-floor ballads like ”Blame It On Me” and ”What A Good Boy” are world class, as are its rocking study of paranoia ”Brian Wilson” and the Arlo Guthriesque ”If I Had $1000000.” Gordon encompasses so much that the multiple musical persona1ities, wackier songs like’ ”Be My Yoko Ono.” and penchant for blatant musical and lyrical nods to The Beatles, New Kids On The Block, and many in between threatened to earn the group an undeserved novelty act label.
The album certainly proves that humor does belong in music. But attentive listening to Gordon reveals it to be much mare – a multi-faceted pop masterpiece, in fact; a study of the range of human emotion written almost entirely by Page and Robertson that somehow, in the course of its 15 harmony-laden songs, manages not to collapse under the weight of its many ideas. Trying to do everything is usually a sign of certain doom in almost any artistic endeavor. Somehow, on Gordon, it works.
Gaining popularity slowly over the four years since its inauspicious U.S. release, Gordon has now sold about a quarter of a million copies stateside. It’s an impressive number considering radio and video airplay never materialized, but as Steven told Timothy White recently in Billboard, he thinks Gordon may be just about the most bootlegged album in history. ”We go and play university campuses, and it seems like all the university kids know all the words to these Gordon songs,” he says in support of his theory. ”And I guess we sold maybe 250,000 copies of that. But for the amount of people who know those words, I’m sure there must be like 800,000 [copies] floating around the campuses and bars and so on in the United States.” |
