Like many things I probably couldn't imagine my pop culture world without today - Buffy, C.S.I., Amanda Palmer - BNL was more my brother's thing than mine. Between the two of us, he tends to be the earlier adopter in the family and his youthful BNL fandom knew no bounds. There was a summer in Saskatoon when I got tickets for an outdoor, multi-band music festival where BNL was playing and sent my boyfriend at the time with Arthur as he was about... oh, twelve years old ... at the time. I had to work that day but I believe that they had a pretty good time. Arthur asked me later if I remembered The Simpsons episode "Homerpalooza" where they go to a Lollapalooza-inspired music festival and Lisa comments,"It smells like Otto's jacket!". My pre-teen little bro smiled at me when I said I did and declared proudly,"I know what she meant now!" Now that I think about it, he might've actually known that particular concert scent before I did too.
It's the quirky nature of memory that I cannot pinpoint when it was that I sent Arthur to that concert. Even Arthur's not sure exactly. He says that it was the year they released the "Born on a Pirate Ship" album so that dates it around 1996. And it goes to show that life before the Internet is truly the modern Dark Ages in that I cannot find a record anywhere online that the Barenaked Ladies played any concert festival in Saskatoon that summer or the next.
So for the fun of it, here's a video made a little over ten years ago where the boys of BNL pay tribute to the wonderful booth known as "Speakers Corner" where they brought their music and faces to the public for the first time ten years before THAT.
Wow, I'm feeling old now.
Holy crap that video is both fantastic and fantastically depressing with those year tags in the corners. I remember what that first one was new.
ReplyDeleteI think we may be melding two concerts into one here. The Born On a Pirate Ship concert was a stadium show. I remember you came to pick me up and gave me money for a t-shirt to buy. The wacky-tabacky-smell concert was that yearly MuchMusic festival...Summer...something...anyway I remember Green Day was the headliner on that one. BNL might have played but I definitely remember Green Day.
I was originally looking for entire original Speakers' Corner video but this one was kind of cool.
DeleteYeah, still can't find coverage on either concert by your description. The stadium show was at Sask Place (as it was known then). Would the Green Day concert have been before or after that? I only remember sending Mark with you to the outdoor concert. Would that have been a summer visit after you'd moved to Edmonton? Melding concerts makes sense. Funny how the memories are squished together like that.
Yeah, summer after the move sounds right. Definitely after the stadium show. I think the Sask Place show was my first concert ever.
DeleteI've come to the conclusion that all your early BNL memories are figments of our collective imagination... If it doesn't exist on the Internet, it can't possibly exist...
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