36 Songs, 36 Days (2012 Edition), Day Seventeen: If I Had A Million Dollars (Live) by Barenaked Ladies

This is like one of those photos in a horror movie the
charaters take just before everything goes to shit, right?

Hey, look...for the third time it's Scarborough, Ontario's own Barenaked Ladies.

This is a live version of one of the singles from the Ladies' first album, Gordon. It's not the most famous live version, though--that would be from their first live album in 1996, Rock Spectacle--but from Talk To The Hand Live!, a DVD/CD set that served as the last adult album to feature band founder Steve Page. Page did appear on their children's album Snacktime! before a horrific twentieth year resulted in Page's departure and the reformulation of the band as a quartet headed by the band's other founder, Ed Robertson. And, as such, it's an odd, bittersweet little artifact.

In the past, I've written about how Barenaked Ladies have been saddled with this rep as a band so fluffy in its pop-songiness that they pretty much float away on their own lack of musical weight....and I really think this thing is the main reason that rep got started. I mean, listen to it for a second. The lazy melody, the acoustic guitar, the harmonica, the archly twee lyrics all indicate 'hey, look, we're inoffensive! Fun for the whole family! Buy our album! Buy merchandise we tacitly endorse! You know, Like Kraft Dinners!' It's totally devoid of any of the glimmers of melancholy that, to me, makes this band work. And for us New Yorkers, it's got an extra-sour taste to it, as it became the theme song of a particularly risible series of ads for the New York State Lottery some years ago--in a world where The Arcade Fire, Feist and Death Cab For Cutie are being used to coerce you into buying high-end merchandise, there's something really skeevy about using BnL to coerce the really poor into throwing away non-disposable income into the boondoggle of scratch ticket riches.

Looking back at this performance now knowing what was about to happen to the band makes me feel kind of weird. After Page left, the Robertson-led line-up produced one album of original material, All In Good Time, which was actually a pretty good collection of mature pop songs; a second greatest hits compilation, Hits From Yesterday and The Day Before, which duplicated most of the tracks from their last greatest hits album save for two tracks from Everything To Everyone, one track from Barenaked Ladies are Me, one track from All In Good Time and the theme song to that blot on all geek culture, The Big Bang Theory; and Stop Me If You've Heard This Before, a collection of rarities and unreleased tracks. While there are some rumblings of the band providing the score for an upcoming musical based on National Lampoon's Animal House, I am beginning to wonder if they are about to slide into the same oblivion we've seen other bands with this kind of history slide into. My fear is that they will become alt-pop's version of Everclear, producing cover albums and re-recordings of their greatest hits while protesting that yes, they were major players in alternative music of the 90's, just you wait until the history books prove them right.

Of course, maybe there's something else that needs to be admitted--that sometimes a band is the fusion of two or more people, and is not just defined as a corporate/cultural entity. Maybe, by listening to the off-the-cuff banter between the lines of this performance (involving a weird plan to sell corporate sponsorship of a YouTube video of one of the band members gacking up spoiled milk), we get the indication that BnL was the fusion of Steven Page and Ed Robertson together. Splitting Page off may give us a band that capable of some really good pop--I will stand by All In Good Time as an excellent album that pays off on some of those glimmers of melancholy I saw in such singles as 'Call And Answer' and 'Pinch Me' and even as early as 'Brian Wilson'--but not a band as capable of being as fun as Barenaked Ladies was at the height of its power.

Here's a video, taken from 'The Bathroom Sessions' series of YouTube clips with Page and Robertson...

30 Songs, 30 Days (2009 Edition), Day Eighteen: Grade Nine by Barenaked Ladies

And here we have the first Barenaked Ladies song I ever liked...and the one that prevented me from getting into them until later.

I have established my love of things ska in a previous entry in this series. When I first heard this song on one of the rare attempts to create an new alternative rock station here in New York out of the ashes of WLIR/DRE, I went nuts.* After all, here was a brand new ska band who had the same sense of fun the classic 'revival bands' of the 80's had...

And then I heard the other tracks on Gordon, the Barenaked Ladies' initial album...and I got thoroughly confused. A trip up to the aforementioned radio station's super-tiny studio to see an acoustic performance by them further confused me. I mean, yeah, I liked "Brian Wilson," the second single from the album, but it...it wasn't like this one.

Later on, when I discovered the true joy of the Ladies the way most Americans did with Stunt, I was able to re-acquaint myself with this song. In retrospect, it's actually a textbook example of what we now know as 'geek rock.' It's all there--the references to being an outcast, outright geek references and a winsome fondness for high school. It's almost required that a geek rock combo to do a paen to their high school days, isn't it?

No video for this song officially--Much Music apparently created one that Warners was NOT happy with...so here's a live version.

*--I don't know why, for a city as musically diverse as New York, we are throughly incapable of supporting an alternative rock station. I can't speak for anyone else, but I am tired of having to choose between three different top 40 stations, four different urban contemporary and two reggaton stations. At least WRXP, one of two 'classic rock' stations, is more than willing to acknowledge that alternative rock is a viable genre, and will play such modern acts as MGMT, Death Cab for Cutie, Kings of Leon and my new favorite band, The Hold Steady.

30 Songs, 30 Days (2009 Edition), Day Twelve: Light Up My Room by Barenaked Ladies

One of the great misconception about this band of Canadians is that all they're good for is writing silly, witty pop songs. While the bulk of Barenaked Ladies' work is, well, fluffy--sort of like Squeeze on mood elevators (and that's meant in the best of all possible ways)--there's also a somewhat middling body of work which is darker and more melancholy in tone. Hell, these guys wrote "Pinch Me," which to me is one of the best representations of the tonally grey feeling people who suffer from chronic depression get, and "Call and Answer," a painfully sweet song about trying desperately to let go of a destructive lover...and failing yet again. They have this talent for cushioning the seriousness of their lyrics in a blanket of words that sounds on the surface to be their usual whimsey...but when you look at them closer, you realize the seriousness of the tales held within.

This isn't as dark as those songs--there are little glimmers of hope, like sparks that rise from a campfire--but I always thought this song had its own twilight taste. A song about making do when your resources are dwindling and your life partner is maybe eyeing the door, it benefits from the vocals of Ed Robertson, who sounds weary but won't let that weariness overtake him. It's prolly not the favorite track of a lot of people from Stunt--we are talking the album that produced both "One Week," "It's All Been Done" and the aforementioned "Call And Answer," after all--but it is a track that holds up after repeated listens.

Here's a video of Robertson doing a solo acoustic version of the song: