Rewind is an oral-history series documenting the creation of Toronto’s most important albums. In this edition, we expose the literal naked truth behind a record that shocked the Canadian music industry by selling over a million copies—despite that awful album cover.
Twenty years ago, Barenaked Ladies—a group of five oddballs from Scarborough—shocked our nation’s music industry. In 1991, the fun-lovin’ folk-pop group made history when a recording that was originally supposed to be their demo, known as The Yellow Tape , became the first homegrown independent release to go platinum (signifying sales in excess of 100,000); their next trick, however, would blow that feat out of the water. With many in the Canadian music industry still dismissing the Ladies as a novelty act, the band would opt to ignore domestic labels altogether and sign with Sire, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Warner Brothers. Their Sire debut, Gordon , would eventually sell a million copies in Canada, and start them on a long, twisted road to American fame.
Prologue
A small group of Scarberian nerds launches a plan for world domination.
Tyler Stewart (drummer, Barenaked Ladies) : I met the guys at the Waterloo Buskers Carnival in 1990. I was playing with some buddies from Guelph, and the Ladies were there, too. At the time, it was just Ed [Robertson], Steven [Page], and Jim [Creeggan]… I saw this three-piece, and they were just the most interesting thing I’d ever seen. I said to the guys, “I’d love to sit in with you guys some time in Toronto,” and I just kept coming back every week and eventually they let me in the band.
Steven Page (former guitarist and vocalist, Barenaked Ladies) : Ed Robertson and I knew each other from elementary school; he was a grade behind me. I didn’t really know him that well. He was kind of this rocker kid and I was painfully nerdy. In high school, we had a battle of the bands—I think I was in Grade 13—and I was one of the judges and his band came out. I knew he was kind of a Kim Mitchell guy—his thing was Kim Mitchell, Max Webster, Rush. His band came out, and they did some of that stuff, but then they also did Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel and all types of other things. And I remember thinking, “Oh, this guy is pretty talented.”
Jim Creeggan (bassist, Barenaked Ladies) : I was way more serious then than I am now. I was coming from being a classical musician. I was studying to be a symphonic player. This band was just my side thing.
VIDEO
Part I: The Yellow Tape era
In 1991, the Ladies were famously banned from playing a New Year’s Eve event at Nathan Phillips Square after then-mayor June Rowlands claimed the band’s name objectified women. The subsequent media firestorm turned the band into instant celebrities, and transformed their demo tape into the best-selling Canadian independent recording of all time. Canadian major labels, however, remained unimpressed.
Stewart : There was this crucial event: June Rowlands banned us from playing in front of City Hall so, literally overnight, we went from being this up-and-coming Toronto club band to being national household names. The only thing we had out at the time was that five-song cassette.
Page : As we were touring, I’d call ahead to Sam the Record Man in Halifax or wherever and said, “Hey, we’re coming, can you take 10 of our cassette?” And then they started calling and asking for more. That was the start of the spread of us outside of Toronto. We wanted to be more than a Toronto band. There were so many great bands at the time that were just Toronto/Southern Ontario bands. We wanted to be part of the broader country.
Creeggan : In the six months [after the New Year's Eve ban], we sold 80,000 tapes. It was originally made as a demo.
Page : We were a hot commodity, but almost no one in Canada wanted us. Most people in the Canadian industry saw us as kind of a novelty thing: “It’s a little bit embarrassing, it’s kind of cutesy, and we don’t really get it.” Then someone would say, “Well, you have to go see them live.” So they’d see us live, and they’d go, “Oh, well, they’re great. But it’s a live thing”—any excuse they could find to not commit.
Creeggan : We didn’t really need to get a record deal, because we already had the publicity. We’d also won this CRTC grant that CFNY was giving out for their battle-of-the-bands thing, so we had $100,000 to make our album.
Page : The first offer we had was from A&M —it was this terribly piddly little offer, but I’ll always be appreciative that they stepped up at all. From there, the other labels started to get involved with increasingly better offers, but I always kind of got the sense that that they didn’t really know what to do with us. They had to sign us because we were popular, but we would kind of get buried.
Stewart : The Canadian majors came to the table with offers, but they were all much lower and much shorter than what we were looking for.
Creeggan : We thought, “Well, if we let an American company ride on our coattails in Canada, maybe they’ll help us break in the U.S.”
Page : Everyone tried to warn us against going with an American label, partially out of Canadian pride. Then I heard that Seymour Stein at Sire was interested. He sent a scout out to see us play Carleton University—[the scout] called back and told [Stein] to sign us.
Stewart : We signed with Sire for five records.
Page : I was so excited to have Sire be the label signing us. I remember being a teenager and looking at records spinning on the turntable, and they always had the Sire logo: The Pretenders, The Smiths, Talking Heads—most of my favourite acts were on that label.
VIDEO
Part II: À Québec
The Ladies hire a producer, book time at Le Studio in rural Quebec, and mistake a recording session for a ski trip.
Michael Phillip Wojewoda (producer, Gordon ) : I knew the band and had seen them around town. And I knew they were pitching for producers, so I put my name in the hat.
Creeggan : We interviewed a few guys. John Goldsmith a little, because we really like Jane Siberry, and then we talked with Michael Phillip Wojewoda—his work on [The Rheostatics' 1992 album] Whale Music just blew our minds.
Wojewoda : At one point, I had them come in and do some singing for one of the songs on Whale Music , and do some “oohs and ahhs.” And then I needed them all to leave the studio, because this was before computers, so I had to load things in and move stuff around and do all these kind of tricky things to make the moody intro—so they went into the other room with [The Rheostatics] and were just jamming like crazy. And after that, they came in and said that they had a really great feeling watching me work, and they’d like me to do it.
Stewart : We really wanted to record at Le Studio—Rush had recorded there, Bowie had recorded there, The Police had recorded there.
Page : In Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” video , they’re playing there.
Creeggan : I remember Michael Phillip Wojewoda was very suspicious of us. We all went up to Le Studio, and we were picked up in the van at each guy’s parents’ house. We all lived with our parents, except for Tyler; he lived on his own, subsidized by his parents. And as each guy got in, the van got fuller and fuller of winter sports gear. You go by Ed’s, he’s got a snowboard; [brother/keyboardist] Andy and I have cross-country skis…
Wojewoda : All of them lived with their parents in Scarborough at the time, and I was picking up the Creeggans, and they brought their instruments, and then they started cramming all these snowshoes and skis into the van. And I said, “There’s not going to be a lot of time for recreation.”
Creeggan : Michael was like, “I hope you guys know we have to record a record.”
Wojewoda : They were like, “Well, we didn’t know what to expect…”
Creeggan : I actually wound up going from the residence to the studio by cross-country skiing over the frozen lake every morning.
Page : It was like summer camp. You’d work really hard and play like crazy; then, at night, you’d just hang out and watch movies and laugh your heads off. You’d go really late, get up the next morning, and do it again. We spent three weeks there, then went back to Toronto and do a couple weeks of overdubs.
VIDEO
Part III: Barenaked Ladies as Barenaked Men
The band and their producer take a novel approach to a creative blockage while recording “The King of Bedside Manor,” and accidentally start a Barenaked tradition of recording songs in the nude.
Page : It was probably Michael’s idea. It was one of these things where we wanted to get this hyped-up energy—you’re singing the right words and playing the right chords, but it just wasn’t working. I think, at one point, we’d done enough takes and we were going nuts and he said, “Okay, everybody strip down.”
Wojewoda : It wasn’t my idea. I think it came from one of them. They would get naked all the time. There’s a story where they were on tour, and someone cut them off on the highway or something, and they slid the side door open and showed people their enormous wangs.
Creeggan : We might have done naked takes before that. When you come up against a brick wall when you’re recording, you pull out one of the Brian Eno cards and it says “go back to basics” or whatever. So, in this situation, we came up against a brick wall and we needed more energy, so we were just like, “Screw it—let’s strip down.”
Wojewoda : We decided that, for that song, everyone would be naked. We could rehearse and set up the mics clothed, but the bed tracks would be naked, the vocals would be naked, everything would be naked.
Creeggan : We convinced everybody except Jean Diamont, the assistant engineer, to strip down.
Wojewoda : [Diamont] wound up more embarrassed than any of us about not being able to get naked.
Page : We were all 21-year-old kids, just laughing out heads off.
Wojewoda : But then I thought, “It takes six hours or so to mix a track.” I wasn’t going to sit there naked for the whole six hours. So I was clothed for that, but then, when the mix was done and you were happy with it, you’d actually print it to a reel-to-reel tape. So we all got naked just for the print—that way, every single element of the song was done naked.
Creeggan : You know what? It brought energy to the take.
Page : At the end of the song, there are all these kind of cartoon noises—car crashes and stuff. We put that in there to cover up Tyler screaming, “I’m naked!” We didn’t want to give that away.
Stewart : It became a tradition to record one song naked on every album. It’s always the fastest, most energetic song on the album.
Next Page : The Ladies tap into their serious side…
