30 Songs, 30 Days (2012 Edition), Day Twenty Three: Completely Conspicuous by The Pursuit of Happiness

It's a Coulda-Shoulda-Been Bigger Band circa
the recording of the song discussed...

The Pursuit of Happiness remains one of my favorite bands, and it's a fine example of The Band That Is Killed By Its Early Success.

Pursuit--or TPOH as it was colloquially known by its fans--was an Edmundton-by-way-of-Toronto powerpop unit devised primarily as a vehicle for the idiot-savant-like genius of Moe Berg. While it's inherent Canadianness gave TPOH a little bit of a higher profile in its native country, we here in the States first became exposed to them through 'I'm An Adult Now,' a snarky, partially spoken word ode to struggling with growing old. It became something of a hit, wandering around the lower parts of the Top 40 in 1986....and then the follow-up single, "She's So Young," was launched, and most people realized that this wasn't a Funny Band Whose Lead Singer Made Jokes About Impotence, but a legitimate band with a real insight and a good trade in male/female harmonies. Berg and Co. struggled with their label, Chrysalis, and were dropped after the disappointing sales of their (admittedly artistically disappointing) second album, Two Sided Story. This led to their signing with Mercury, scoring another very minor hit with 'Cigarette Dangles, and then a spiraling out of control with two albums on Iron Music, a never-really-official break-up, Berg going off to write a rock opera, and the band kinda, sorta re-emerging in the last few years to record covers of Prince and do scattered shows in their native Canada. They never quite got over the disappointment most Americans had that they weren't the band 'I'm An Adult Now' promised, and is now a footnote in books about power pop and bad movies, as they were the featured legitimate band in the ill-advised sequel to Rock N' Roll High School, Rock N' Roll High School Forever.

Unlike the rest of Americans, I liked TPOH as a whole and sought out and eventually acquired all their albums. This song is from Where's The Bone, the first of the two Canadian-only albums they recorded for Iron. I actually feel that Bone is their best album (unlike everyone--including Razor And Tie--who toe the party line and claim that first album, Love Junk, is the only one worthwhile), containing a selection of songs that I get the impression are very personal without getting too personal like their final one, the embarrassingly confessional The Wonderful World of Pursuit of Happiness.

One of the reasons I liked Moe Berg's songwriting is the persona he adopts in most of his songs of the horndog who doesn't have the degree of control over his life he thinks he has, and 'Completely Conspicuous' is typical of that persona. This song takes the structure of Berg trying to defend himself to his significant other when he is caught talking to another woman. Berg's trademark whine jumps from protest to protest, coming up with justifications seemingly out of thin air (this is the 'modern world' of equality), then throws the situation back in his girl's face with his accusation of inequality when it comes to their social guidelines and the way she denigrates the woman he's speaking to, points out that this is why their relationship is in crisis...and yet, there are hints that the woman he's defending himself to has justification. This is demonstrated not only in the lyrics, but in the way we get female counterpoints whenever he stumbles back to the choral justification of 'she's just a friend'--followed by his admission that yes, he wishes she could be more.

I've always said that the female/male harmonies are something that makes TPOH stands out. Most line-ups--Berg has never seemingly been able to keep a female vocalist for long (I suspect Kris Abbot, who joined in 1988 is the only one who's last more than one album)--contain not one, but two female musicians who help him with this. And in the case of this song, the harmonies serve another purpose, namely to be the whisper in Moe's ear that reminds him that yes, he does have some nefarious purpose in talking to this woman. It's the typical Berg persona getting him in trouble again, and trying to scamble to recover when it all goes wrong.

I'm pretty sure everything TPOH is out of print, although the albums are available at some sites, including iTunes, digitally.  And if you're curious about the band, you can visit Incompletely Conspicuous, the official fan site, that contains a wealth of information including a massive amount of rare and live mp3s....

No video for this one...but here's one from the single for this album, the nasty 'Young And In Love'....

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...

36 Songs, 36 Days (2012 Edition), Day Eight: Stay Loose by 100 Mile House

This is a band I've never heard of; I got this track as part of a rather massive album released this past Canada Day commemorating Gordon Lightfoot. They're a trio--a husband and wife plus instrumentalist hailing from Edmundton, Alberta and...well, they're really good.

Now it goes without saying that this is a cover--but maybe because it is a cover of a song I'm not familiar with, I can judge the band on its own merits and not as a cover. While their folkiness is undeniable, the first thought I had upon hearing the early strains of the song was how much this sounded like early Talking Heads. There's a sparseness to the guitar that is reminiscent of those first few albums...and then the darkness comes with Peter Stone's voice, lightly accented but deep as a newly dug grave. And the true marvel is how well that nightmarish deep bass blends with his wife Denise McKay, who comes off as the ghost to Stone's demon, adding grace to the despair in her husband's voice.

You can sample more of this bands work on their website . You can also find Turning Back The Pages Of My Sweet Shattered Dreams, the compilation this song comes from here.

No video for this song, but here's a video for a song from the band....