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| Barenaked Courage! August 09, 2001 From Grammy wins to dealing with a band member's cancer, the BARENAKED LADIES have ridden the wild rock 'n' roll roller coaster -- and have made it through to tell the tale! ET hung out with the guys on tour for a special backstage look, and sat down with singer/guitar player ED ROBERTSON for his inside view on one of the hottest bands today! ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT: So, with the group, when was it that you had finally made it? Was it when "One Week" came out or earlier than that? ED ROBERTSON: I think there's been a string ... a whole series of "we've made its" and you're never really aware that there's a lot of other levels to go. I think we thought we made it when we signed a record deal in 1991. Then we thought we made it when we won Album of the Year, and Group of the Year in Canada in '92. But, you're not kind of aware at the time that the other five billion people have no idea who you are at that point, so we've been pretty fortunate to have a series of successes. ET: A lot of your music talks about relationships, girlfriends, marriages, affairs and all that stuff. Where does that come from inspiration-wise? ED: I think it comes from all over. Everything is a mixture of fact and fiction with the names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. But, I think sometimes we've written about things that are deeply personal, but we'll write about it in a light manner or in a different context that kind of removes some of the severity. I think for us we just try to write about what's interesting to us. And relationships never cease to amaze me, how complex they are and how things just resonate with people. I'm always astonished when we finish a song ... to think "whew, this song didn't exist before we wrote it." I always feel like I don't know where it came from and I never know what I'm going to say and how I'm possibly going to say something different. When we manage to do it or manage to gain some sort of insight and say something in a way that it hasn't really been said before, I'm always really proud of that. ET: I know there was a point in the band's past when you came close to breaking up at one point. What happened there and how were you able to pull it together? ED: It wasn't even a question of the band. I think it just got to a point where we were working harder then we've ever worked in our lives and we were less successful than we've ever been. I was just kind of at that point that like, "Gee, I'm in my mid-20s and I spend all my time away from my friends and my family. I live in dingy clubs and crummy hotels or broken down tour buses and I make less than I would make as the manager of my local McDonald's." It was just the antithesis of glamour. I think it just got to a point, "Where are we going, what are we doing?" We were losing, I think, some of the joy of what we do because so much was just focused on the grind of it all. But, I think it was the music and the shows that kept us through that and I have to give a lot of credit to TERRY McBRIDE, our manager. I think his belief helped me believe long enough for things to start going up hill again. ET: KEVIN HEARN's struggle with leukemia. What was that like for you and what was it like for the band? ED: It was definitely the most difficult thing that we've ever gone through. For me, it was less about the band and more about someone that I really cared about being really sick, and having to face that. I'm kind of a blind optimist and I have a tendency to over optimize situations and kind of skate by and make the best of things. But, when someone you love might die and it's a near certainty that their chances of surviving are much less than their chances of dying, there's kind of no looking on the bright side of that. There's no silver lining to that and there's no ignoring it. So for me, it was really difficult and it was a real challenge to understand. Kev fought for his life, he came back, and we're just so, so happy to have him alive. He was back on the road seriously long before he should have been and was still nowhere near as healthy as he needed to be. It was a unifying experience and in the end, it was such a joyful thing to be on stage and to look over at Kev ... it doesn't occur to me all the time now because I'm just used to having Kev around and having him healthy. But every couple shows I'll look over and see this beautiful man on the stage with me -- this incredible performer, gifted musician, and once in awhile I'll thank God. We almost lost him. And I'm just so happy to have him on stage. ET: He's totally cancer free now? ED: He just passed his two year check-up recently and he's doing great. He's off all his medications now and he's back. He's totally back. ET: What's your favorite memory of performing on stage? ED: I have a thousand favorite memories of performing on stage. There's kind of heavy favorite memories of performing on stage, and then there's just moments of mayhem that I loved too. One of my favorite performances ... NEIL YOUNG does this concert called the Bridge School Benefits in San Francisco, to benefit this school for handicapped kids. It's an amazing performance -- you perform on stage with the kids from the school, and they surround you on the stage. It's one of those things where you're so aware of the fact that the music you're making is actually doing something great, and it's making these kids happy, it's making everyone in the audience happy. The money from the event is funding this program, and so it just makes you feel great about being a performer and being a songwriter and stuff. |