Hot like wasabi when I bust rhymes
The world’s your oyster shell
So what’s that funny smell
You eat the bivalve anyway
And you’re sick with salmonella
You get your Ph.D.
How happy you will be
When you get a job at Wendy’s
And are honored with employee of the month…
Toad, who is rapidly becoming my favorite music blogger, has been writing a lot about “Dad Rock” lately. You know the genre, the kind of music that your Dad sings along to when it came on the radio, the compilations that they sell at the gas station on Father’s Day for forgetful children, the songs that he knows only a few lines of and sings repeatedly rather than learning the whole tune. Well, what’s vaguely disturbing is that some of the music of my youth is becoming today’s Dad rock. I guess that’s appropriate since I’ve become a Dad myself. I’d like to humbly offer another band that fits squarely in the Dad Rock genre - The Barenaked Ladies.
I became a fan of the Canadian pop group with a marketer’s dream name upon the release of “Stunt” in 1998. In the autumn of that year I was in the hunt for a Ph.D. program and for reasons that are still unclear to me, I was a hot prospect. I felt like what a top shelf high school football player must feel like when it’s recruiting time for the big colleges. I had colleges phoning me, colleges flying me out to wine and dine me and colleges throwing fat stipends at me. It was a glorious time. (My eventual choice, the University of Missouri, probably regrets the expenditure now.) During one of my visits, to Iowa State, I heard this record for the first time. I remember my hosts singing along happily to “One Week” on the drive from the Des Moines airport to Ames and being instantly attracted by the Ladies’ clever penmanship and tongue-in-cheek ‘rap’.
Like Kurasawa I make mad films
Okay I don’t make films
But if I did they’d have a samurai
Gonna get a set of better clubs
Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs just so my
Irons aren’t always flying off the back-swing
Gotta get in tune with ‘Sailor Moon’
Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
That make me think the wrong thing…
It was three years later when The Barenaked Ladies really made their way into heavy and permanent rotation in the soundtrack to my life. In the late spring of that year my grandfather took ill while visiting my parents in Florida. He and my grandmother had to fly back to Canada for medical treatment leaving their van down south. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. and a bit bored, so I offered to fly over to pick up the van, drive the van up to northern Ontario and fly back down to Missouri. Despite the obvious sad nature of the circumstances, I looked on a road trip as an opportunity that might relieve my ennui. And I just might have had an ulterior motive.
You see, I had met Dr. O’C in February and we were undertaking a very complicated** and long-distance relationship. Now, I’m nothing if not cagey (Machiavellian, some have said) and I thought maybe I could have a chance to see this woman that I had fallen so heavily for if I pitched this as a trip to an exotic part of the world. The wilds of northern Ontario, don’t you know, bears and moose and the rugged frontier of North America. Remarkably enough, it worked. I convinced Dr O’C to fly out and meet me in Toronto and accompany me the rest of the way. With this to anticipate, as I hit I-95 north from Florida, I was a man with a mission.
A few days and eleven hundred miles later, I picked Dr. O’C up from the airport and after a couple of nights in Toronto, we headed north for the eight hour drive to my grandparents’ home. I’ve never had the love of the road that a lot of my countrymen do, but I didn’t want that stretch of the trip to end. We would have listened to a lot of music on that trip - probably Gomez, Steve Earle, The Dandy Warhols, Lucinda Williams and Barenaked Ladies. I had “Stunt” on this weekend and it brought this trip back to me in a flood.
The Barenaked Ladies never sounded better than they did on that road trip. They’re not a great band, but their sharply clever lyrics were tailor made for barreling out of North Bay, through ramshackle old mining towns like Temagami, Englehart, Swastika (really) and Cochrane. The Barenaked Ladies’ irresistible pop licks sound perfect when listened to in a minivan driving through the granite strewn hills and around the azure lakes of northern Ontario with a woman that you’re falling in love with.
We didn’t see any bears on that trip and we didn’t see any moose. We did nearly get devoured alive by the most ubiquitous wildlife in that part of the world, the black fly. We decided to stop for a picnic by a lake just outside of Tarzwell. As we opened up the back of the van and started to make sandwiches, the sky went dark and before we knew what was happening we were under attack from all around. Recognizing a losing battle, we hopped back in the van and took off, but even with windows wide open I think we still had a few of those blood thirsty bastards in the van as we pulled in to my grandparents’ driveway.
There’s a lot I will never do
Some fantastic, I know it’s true
But none as much as my want to be with you
It’s over seven years since that trip and our relationship is a lot different. For one thing, happily, it’s much less complicated. We have a son together and three continents under our belt. We’ve been through some tough times and we’ve been through some wonderful times. But over every single day of that seven years, I’m as happy to see Dr. O’C as I was when I picked her up in Toronto in 2001 and “Stunt” will always make me smile as I remember this road trip.
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* The photo at the top of this post was taken in one of those mall photo booths in my Grandparents’ home town. It is still my favorite of the two of us.
**A story for another time, I’m afraid.
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The Barenaked Ladies’ “Stunt” is available from 
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