The last thing I'd thought I'd do when I first started this Blog is that I'd comment on celebrities, but today's news really floored me. Steven Page, lead singer for the Barenaked Ladies, busted for Cocaine possession???
Let me take you back to 1992.
Ralph, in his typical fashion, had managed somehow score tickets to see John Wesley Harding at the Junkyard Blues Club in the strip mall near the house in Casselberry. He asked me if I wanted to come with him, and I passed on it since honestly I never really heard of him, and having been fired from Comair, having missed the first Gulf War, and dealing with a lot of emotions around a certain Redheaded girl that I was madly in love with but had no hope of being with, I really didn't have the desire to go. So he comes back a couple hours later, babbling excitedly as he is often inclined to do, about how great the opening act was. The image he described, 5 young guys, crammed on that tiny stage, singing funny songs, telling jokes, dancing boy band like choreographed dance moves, it was a blur. I guess I kind of regretted not going, to hear him tell me how funny they were, but I thought about it at the time that it probably wouldn't have pulled me out of my blue funk.
Within a couple of weeks though, I was flipping through the channels, (this is pre-cable days for us if you can believe it) and depending on the atmospherics and time of day, my TV would pick up this low wattage independent affiliate TV station somewhere in Central Florida that would broadcast a Headline News like channel that I think was out of Chicago. At a certain point in the news hour, they went to an entertainment reporter who conducted an interview in the studio, like actually in the control room, of this band, these 5 guys from Canada. Man where they funny! Witty repartee, self effacing humor, slightly chubby, glasses, and incredibly talented! I confirmed with Ralph that this was the band that he saw that night, and my heart sank as I realized that I really missed out on having seen these guys live. As soon as the interview was over, the search was on for their first album, GORDON.
After searching through several record stores, (nobody had ever heard of them, even after they got over the shock of me asking them, "Excuse me, but do you have Barenaked Ladies?") I found the album at Peaches. (Remember Peaches?) I rushed home, and wanted to jump right to the song I had seen the video they showed on that interview program, ENID, because usually albums by musicians where I only know one song usually suck, so why not jump to the one song I already knew? For some reason though I decided to give the album a listen from the beginning. I'm so glad I did! Imagine the first song opening with HELLO CITY, a soft, jazzy opening that was somehow familiar. The singer goes on to sing about the lameness of touring towns with people who, for a lack of a better phrase, are assholes. And what's this?, grown men harmonizing? In age of Grunge? And wait, how is this song ending, with a line from the HOUSEMARTIN'S song, Happy HOUR? Oh man was I hooked! The next song, Enid, the song from the video I saw starts off with a static-y, haunting, Depeche Mode-ish voice singing, "The silence, the terror, the pain, the horror as your mom comes downstairs.." and then abruptly breaks into this completely upbeat, jazzy, poppy number that was the antithesis of anything on the radio at the time. Then the song GRADE 9 comes on, humorously talking about being the geek who gives a passing thought to joining the High School football team but knows in his heart he'd rather be watching Star Trek the Wrath of Khan and listening to Duran Duran. And as if that wasn't enough, the song no kidding goes into riffs from Tom Sawyer and The Spirt of Radio by RUSH and a quick homage to Vince Guaraldi's Linus and Lucy! I didn't stand a chance.
For the first time in my odd little life, I was actually ahead of the curve on something! I got into Elvis Costello, The Clash, and The Police long after their zeniths, but Barenaked Ladies, I latched on to them and refused to let go. I started to project on them my own values, my own point of views, telling myself that these guys were like me, or I was like them. (If only I had any discernible talent) They were nerds, they had bad haircuts, they were funny, they managed to put into words everything I ever felt about anything when it came to life or love.
As time went on, they put out more albums, and I made it a point to show up at Peaches on the given Tuesday that the new album came out. Imagine the challenge in getting details about these guys, remember this is in an era of the early days of the internet when putting in the words "Barenaked+Ladies" into Alta Vista gave you a bunch of returns for porno sites. The album liner notes had an actual physical address for joining the fan club! No www, can you imagine?
Then in 1996, it finally happened. I got to see them live. My life at the point had improved to the point that I could actually afford a plane ticket to Portland Oregon to see the Redheaded girl (pointless effort in reality) and see my good buddy from DLI, Chris Carson. And the reason for it all? Barenaked Ladies was hitting this venue called "La Luna", and I was taking my friends with me to see a band they had never heard of. 3 hours later, Kate and Chris and I cannot wipe the smiles off our collective faces after having seen the one of kind show that is BNL live. That year, I came as close to a Deadhead as I'll ever get because I saw them again in Atlanta, and finally in August of '96, the House of Blues in New Orleans with Ralph, the night after the drunken sioree that was Cheryl's and Paul's wedding. We fly a new Airline at Orlando International Airport, Southwest, that for some reason has really cheap flights. The only flight was in the morning, so we got in and because of our budget, WALKED from the New Orleans Airport until we found a major road that we could catch a bus into the French Quarter. The street cleaners hadn't quite gotten around to cleaning up the quarter from the night before so we walked in what seemed like ankle deep plastic cups and plastic beads until we could find our first destination on our list, Cafe du Monde, where we enjoyed some coffee and beignets. As we sat in the crowded dining area, (why is it this crowded, this early in the morning?) Ralph and I imagined that this was surely the kind of place that the guys from the band would hang out in if they were in town to play a show. "Wouldn't it be cool to run into them here?" we asked each other, smiling at each other as powdered sugar fell like snowflakes on the front of our t-shirts. Upon finishing what is the equivalent of French crack, (so addicting) we then set out to find the House of Blues, to get our tickets at the will call window. Our plan was to literally stay awake for 24 hours, and we had 10 hours to kill before the show even started. As we wondered in what we thought was the general direction of the House of Blues, we were beginning to think we were lost, and that asking directions might not be a bad idea. Across the street from us, at what looked like an used musical instrument store, stood a guy alone, smoking a cigarette, who looked kind of familiar. Could it be? By himself? Here? "Ralph, I think that's Steven Page over there!" Ralph, in his inevitable style, shouts out across the street, "Hey Steve!" I cringe in a bit of embarrassment. But damn it if the guy doesn't turn around, and it's STEVEN PAGE! Now in about a second I go from being a bit mortified to being a bit terrified. I'm absolutely star struck. I don't know what to say, I really don't have anything in common with him, or at least I don't think I do, I'm not a musician, so I can't talk technical talk with the guy, and of course as a man I can't talk to this stranger about how his music makes me feel, how it speaks to my heart, that his music pulled me out of depression and self loathing, that's just something we men don't talk about right? Fortunately, the crutch we talk about is computers. Barenaked Ladies' live album ROCK SPECTACLE was cutting edge for the time by being an "Enhanced CD" with all sorts of goodies like Quicktime videos, a surfable GUI interface to play little games and the like. I don't know how many CD-ROM Drives Ralph and I went through trying to upgrade our computer enough to make the stupid thing play all the content on that CD. He could not have been more pleasant, given we really had him cornered, and can you believe we asked him where the House of Blues was, since we were there after all to see him play, and he all too calmly points back across the street to where we were standing, 10 feet away from the entrance to the House of Blues. (God, we're dorks) Before we knew it, a giant maroon striped tour bus pulled up in front of the place, and Steve, (to this day I have no idea what he was doing loitering in front of the House of Blues, at least 30 minutes before the rest of the band showed up) had to go on the bus to get some rest before the show, still, a good 8 hours from that point. Here we were, Ralph and I with Steven Page, our musical idol and self imposed sensitive nerd fellow traveler, without a pen for autographs, without a camera to take photos. Steve, of all people, actually recommended that there was a corner shop just down the block that might sell that stuff. (I guess he must have investigated that in his wait for the tour bus, before Ralph and I clobbered him with our adulation.) We said we'd go check it out, and be right back, and he said "ok" and as we walked briskly down the street, I kept thinking to myself, "If I was him, I'd jump on that tour bus so fast and lock the door as quick as I could." Unbelievably, less than 5 minutes later, he's actually waiting for us at the door of the bus, for him to autograph the back of our tickets, and to pose for photos. We thanked him again, and he actually said to us, since we had told him we were exhausted and thinking about getting a hotel room to take a nap since our "stay awake 24 hours plan" was seeming like a bad idea with every passing minute, he actually said to us, "Don't oversleep and miss the show, I hope you come back and check us out..." or it was something like that, I was in shock. Was this guy so nice, so normal, so unassuming that he actually was selling the band like a kid reminding his friends to check out his garage bands first gig playing the Sadie Hawkins dance? Dude, we bought tickets, we flew here at 6 in the morning, we were tired and a bit hungover, we were going to the show, don't worry!
What a great meeting, my brush with greatness, it's a memory I carry with me to this day. Me and BNL had a temporary falling out with 2003's Everything for Everyone. You could really tell the album had been crafted during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, and it had that anti-war, anti-unilateralism vibe to it, which at that point I finally realized that these guys aren't like me, they don't think like me. Honestly I'd have been more shocked if they had put out a pro-war album, that would have been ludicrous, but still it dawned on me that I cannot project myself on somebody else, even if I happen to interpret lyrics and melodies as those of someone who would otherwise be my emotional doppelganger. So I forgave them, not that they needed my absolution, as if I could even grant it, as if they were even in need of forgiveness for God forbid having their own point of view, and I moved on with them. I showed up on the first Tuesday for Barenaked for the Holidays, and for 2007's Barenaked Ladies are Me. The last time I saw them was last year in Orlando with Mike, Mike, Mike's cool coworker chick, and of course Ralph.
So today's news, about an arrest, about drugs, it just blew my mind. One of the things I projected on these guys was the no drugs thing. As a nerdy kid growing up, I wasn't even cool enough to be offered pot. In an era of Shawn Cassidy feathered mullets, with my military style haircut that my father dutifully drug me to the barbershop every month, I was perceived as a straight arrow right out of Joe Friday's Dragnet. With lyrics from the song GRADE 9 about being called names by the kids in school, I had assumed that we had the same high school experience. Of course by the time I was 17 I had enlisted, gotten a Top Secret clearance and had sworn an oath to support and defend the constitution, and that included not doing drugs. I took that seriously. Heck we even flew counter narcotic missions there for a while. Yea, I know, I've always felt like I'm a Don Quixote like character, tilting at windmills, be they Russian commies, Colombian drug lords, whatever. By the time I was 30, and had left the military, I felt it awfully stupid to go ahead and try it now, since everyone else I knew that actually had a normal upbringing had already tried it and looked back on the experience with varying degrees of regret, except the ones that were still doing drug of course. They seemed to not have that regret and in fact seemed pretty happy all the time....wait, that explains it now!
Steven Page, where ever you are, get better. Innocent or not, please take care of yourself, you've spent the last 18 years writing the lyrics to the soundtrack of my life, and I don't know about you, but I've got a lot more life ahead of me, and I need some music to laugh with, to think with, to love with, ok?
Thanks for reading this extraordinarily long post, a lot came pouring out, but that's what happens when you give some time and thought to a subject that means so much to me. Next time I'll share a much shorter story about my other star struck moment, talking to Ben Folds mom. :)
