There once was a teenage girl in Jackson, Missouri, population 11,000, who listened to Top 40 radio and drove an hour and a half to take her younger brother to his first concert. It was Horde Fest in St. Louis, and the two made the three-hour round-trip because they had heard three of headliner Blues Traveler's songs on the radio. They also had heard Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?," Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy," Fastball's "The Way," and Alana Davis' cover of Ani DiFranco's "32 Flavors," though they had no idea "32 Flavors" was a cover nor what an Ani DiFranco even was. They also had never heard of the Barenaked Ladies.
They stood and bobbed their heads like the cool kids they were when the bands played their radio-hit singles, but for most of the day, they sat on the grass and were completely bored.
When the Barenaked Ladies came on stage, they laughed at the stupid name. The band was from Canada and talked funny, and they laughed at that, too. But then they started listening to the songs. There was one about a window-washer, one about a murderous farmer, and one about Brian Wilson, a guy they remembered Uncle Jesse talking about on Full House. One of the geeky singers had an impressive, operatic voice, and the other geeky singer improvised a rap about the local ice cream hot spot.
The girl and her brother noticed that people around them had stood and were dancing and singing along to every song. At the end of their set, the Barenaked Ladies sang about what they would do if they had $1 million. It was really, really funny. They got to a part about not having to eat Kraft Dinner, Canada's version of Macaroni & Cheese, and all the people who were standing threw macaroni at them. When the song ended, the band went into a rap-medley-dance routine that covered Beck's "Loser," Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" and "Memories" from Cats. It was the most totally awesome thing the girl and her brother had ever seen or heard in their lives.
The girl and her brother went straight to the Jackson mall, where she bought Barenaked Ladies' 1996 live album, Rock Spectacle, and her brother bought the new album the band had been hawking, Stunt. It included a song that had made everyone at the concert laugh, called "One Week," which referenced LeAnn Rimes and The X-Files. The girl was a huge X-Files fan but she didn't like Stunt as much as Rock Spectacle. It had more serious, relationshippy stuff on it and just didn't seem quite as fun.
Several years later, she had geeky BNL singers Steven Page and Ed Robertson on the phone for a few minutes each, and had no idea what to say to them.
*****
"You and I have something in common."
"Oh yeah, what's that," says Robertson.
"We've both smoked pot with Willie Nelson." And he laughs and says, "Yeah, that was fun." Now, I was technically backstage, and I technically did smoke pot, and Willie Nelson technically was around backstage somwhere at the time, but it's not like he was passing me the joint or anything. Just one of those things that you embellish upon when talking to a Barenaked Lady, I suppose.
The band formed near Toronto in 1988. Ten years later, they had morphed from Canadian college-pop secret to big-time U.S. headliner. "I think we felt successful and good about what we were doing long before we'd made it," Robertson says. "We were doing a photo shoot for Rolling Stone in New York, we were playing Madison Square Garden, and "One Week" had just got to No. 1, all in the same day. It was like, 'OK, that's a good day.'"
They became Canada's best-selling group and America's least-controversial, most-Average Joe musicians. They sold out huge arenas; were parodied by Weird Al; were the subject of a documentary, Barenaked in America, directed by fellow Canuck Jason Priestly, as well as a Behind the Music episode; won scantillions of music and video awards; got married; had kids; and sold out more huge arenas.
Drummer Tyler Stewart appeared on a charity episode of Hollywood Squares; bassist Jim Creeggan worked on side projects with his brother Andy, who had left the band early on to finish college; and keyboardist Kevin Hearn won a battle with leukemia and put out some solo material. They played benefit shows for the Bridge School, Farm Aid, Music Without Borders, and the city of Toronto when its tourism industry was hurt by SARS. They also played in New York City's Bryant Park for Intel and on Alcatraz Island for T-Mobile.
And they saw their fan base gradually change. "At first, they were probably the same age as us, college age, shortly thereafter college, and then as we had some commercial success, the audience themselves got a lot younger, and then some of the older people moved on because we'd become more mainstream in our appeal," says Page. "Then, after you stop being the hottest thing of the second, some of the younger people move on, and what you're left with is kind of the core of your fan base, which really ranges every night. I'll look in the audience and see everything from full families to people in their 50s and 60s to young teens. It's pretty amazing."
*****
There once was a girl who lived in a big city, listened to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and bands from Omaha, and didn't think she really liked Barenaked Ladies all that much anymore.
Over the years, she had bought the three full-length discs and one EP they had released prior to Rock Spectacle and had caught their performances on Beverly Hills, 90210; Saturday Night Live; Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place; Charmed; and The West Wing. She had also seen them appear on sound tracks to Coneheads, Friends, D3: The Mighty Ducks, EDtv, King of the Hill, Thomas and the Magic Railroad, VH1 original movie At Any Cost, Digimon: The Movie, Malcolm in the Middle, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Sweet November and Felicity: Senior Year. They'd also contributed to the Martha Stewart Baby: Sleepytime album and more That's What I Totally Call Hard Jock Live Hits Now compilations than there are noodles in a box of Kraft Dinner.
She had sung, danced and thrown macaroni at all of their concerts she had been to, which was a helluva lot, but had never really come to love Stunt or 2000's Maroon. They had just felt more serious and relationshippy and didn't seem quite as fun as their earlier albums.
BNL had released a greatest-hits collection in 2001, a DVD of videos in 2002, and a sixth studio album in late 2003, Everything to Everyone. Its hit single, "Another Postcard (Chimpanzees)," dealt with the timeless theme of receiving mail bedecked with primates who send their love from Amsterdam and dress up in women's underwear, and the girl hadn't liked it at all.
The album also showcased a noticeable political streak spearheaded by Page, who had long worked with groups including the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund and Canada's left-leaning New Democratic Party. "Over the last few years, I realized there were a lot of people who had no idea where I stood on issues. It's hard to be honest with them emotionally in my songs when I'm not honest with them about how I feel about the world around us, as well," he says. "Even our light, poppy stuff has always been world-weary and about the general culture at large, whether it's pop culture or social culture, and I think politics has crept its way in there so strongly in the last few years that I think we would be very out of step if we didn't use that in our music.
"You can't be an activist by believing in something; you have to be an activist by actually doing something, as much as that's stating the obvious. I think a lot of us believe that as long as you believe something that's fairly strong and you are fairly well-constructed in your beliefs, then that's just as good. It's not. Because if you don't voice them and you don't articulate them and use them, then there's no point to them."
The release of Everything to Everyone was accompanied by a stripped-down theater run called the Peep Show tour. Each performance featured every song from the new disc; acoustic sets; audience Q
"There are always challenges. There are always moments where you think, 'What next?' Every time you make a record, it's incredibly difficult because you're putting yourself on the line every time in front of your band and in front of your audience, as well," Page says, and it makes the girl think. She had attended the Peep Show nearest to her and had been furious that they hadn't played the song about what they would do if they had $1 million. They hadn't played their hit "Pinch Me" off Maroon, either. But they had put themselves on the line.
She had hung in there, through their geek-cool, Top 40-cool, cancer-cool, and anti-cool phases, and all along, her favorite song had always been "The Old Apartment," with its closing lyrics of: "Only memories, fading memories / Blending into a dull tableaux / I want them back / I want them back." But perhaps it was sometimes good to let the past fade. After putting the phone down, she hit herself in the face a few times for reasons she couldn't quite explain and loaded Everything to Everyone in her CD player. In addition to chimpanzees, songs about failure, commerce, drugs, suicide, superficiality, fighting, love and the nature of fame were emitted from the speakers. You could have knocked the girl over with a handful of macaroni. The music wasn't exactly fun, but it was the most totally awesome thing she had ever heard in her life.