By Emilia Hwang
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Before the quadruple platinum success of “Stunt,”
Barenaked Ladies enjoyed a modest but loyal cult following. The
band toured nonstop, eventually gaining popularity with its
signature high-energy, take-no-prisoners stunt of a live show.
“If there wasn’t a crowd we’d just be doing
this in a room by ourselves,”said Barenaked Ladies bassist
Jim Creeggan in a phone interview from Cleveland. “We do have
a strong live following and I think that’s something that
we’d like to keep coming back and keeping the stoke and
fire.”
In 1998, this five-person Canadian band, also known as BNL,
broke new ground and hit the mainstream with its unique,
fast-versed radio hit “One Week.” “We like to
keep things new and fresh,” Creeggan said.
For BNL, improvisation is the key to delivering spontaneous and
unique performances night after night.
Notorious for recording one song on every album while naked in
the studio, the band is also known for its outrageous exploits on
stage.
Constantly morphing its repertoire with senseless banter and
improv, BNL delivers energetic sets that also incorporate parodies
of pop hits.
Audiences that have witnessed the band’s seamless covers
of hits from pop culture icons ranging from Eminem and Britney
Spears to Biz Markie and Celine Dion have come to expect unique and
dynamic sets at every concert.
“I don’t know if there’s a lot of pressure,”
Creeggan said. “There’s five of us so there’s
always an opportunity where someone might want to just blend into
the scene, and somebody has enough inspiration to step out. So
there’s enough of us so that we don’t always have to
beon completely.”
Creeggan, who formed the duo known as The Brothers Creeggan with
his brother and former BNL band mate Andy, has been known to steal
the show with uncompromising solos on his stand-up bass. He said
that the band members look to each other for inspiration when
collaborating on the unrehearsed aspects of the show.
“It’s just kind of inner instinct, to pull anything
out of the fire,”Creeggan said. “We just have the
instinct, like somehow it has to be rescued. And I think
that’s something that everybody shares in the
band.”
Though the band members channel their collective energy to
create musical mayhem on stage, they also rely on the crowd to
supply energy and enthusiasm to the communal experience.
During the “Stunt” tour, the band members had the
opportunity to invite different people from the audience on to the
stage. They selected people with certain characteristics each
night.
“I got to go up there and stand with tall lanky guy
brothers,” said Creeggan, who once looked like a skinny
Carrot Top.
During their stops in Los Angeles, the band members have been
known to invite two dancers from the audience on to the stage. In
homage to the BNL classic “If I Had $1,000,000,” the
two young boys don green dresses and sneakers and have become an
unexplainable staple of the band’s L.A.show.
“You know, your guess is as good as mine,” Creeggan
said. “They were in the audience and just really enthusiastic
dancers in green dresses ““ that I think only could happen in
L.A. We saw them getting down out there and had to bring them up on
stage. They were doing like back flips off my riser and stuff like
that.”
Although BNL toured last fall to promote its latest album
“Maroon,” the band brought their screwball antics back
to L.A. on Aug. 14 to promote the new single “Falling for the
First Time.” In October, the band delivered the
crowd-pleasing “Every-Song-We’ve-Ever-Written”
medley. This time around, the band performed older tunes in their
entirety.
“We’re playing the hit songs that people love to get
down to, but we’re also getting into our songs that get buried
sometimes,” Creeggan said.
Though the popular “One Week” (featured in
“American Pie” and “10 ThingsI Hate About
You”) garnered BNL mainstream success, it also led to the
band’s inevitable overexposure. Beyond the run-away hit,
however, isa diverse anthology of work that has been buried beneath
the poppy-rap ditty.
“It was really good for us to have that publicity,”
Creeggan said. “I know that sometimes the cover of the book
doesn’t say everything about what’s inside the book, but it
can give you some idea about what we’re about. That’s what
doing these shows does, it sort of gives people animpression of us,
one side of us. If they wanted to dig a little further into the
puzzle, then the music’s there and we definitely are proud of
it.”
With the band’s success, Creeggan has learned that he
cannot control how people listen to the band’s music, let
alone how they feel about it or incorporate it into their
lives.
“Everybody has their own way of relating to the
band,” he said. “I mean, if it’s putting on a green
dress and doing back flips, I can dig it.”