The Barenaked Ladies Of My Youth...

I nearly lost my shit yesterday when I read about Steven Page of BNL fame being busted in Fayatteville, NY, for cocaine and marijuana use and possession. A former housemate of ours recently moved back in with her parents who just moved to Fayatteville from Michigan, and she cliamed nothing exciting ever happens there. Well that's a lie...

I e-mailed the article to my honeymooning sister in Prague with the subject "What the fuck?" because BNL was the first concert I ever went to with her at Massey Hall when I was 12. When they were BIG. I'm talking Stunt! just came out and One Week was fucking played everywhere kind of big. We got picked up on Shuter Street by my dad in his blue pick-up when he got off working a 12 hour shift at the Main plant downtown. I fell asleep in the truck on the way home, high off the adreneline of having snuck into better seats in the balcony to hear a crooning Ed Robertson sing Light Up My Room. That was the height of sophistication and emotion at 12...

So I was thrown for a loop to hear about fourth degree drug charges being laid against a recently separated, father-of-three Steven Page in upstate New York. It's made all the worse by BNL's recent tour for their children's album Snacktime! (Snacktime!? Really?) and the fact that there's never really a good time to get busted for drugs in America. Ever. Because the charge against him carries a maximum sentence of 15 years, which could put a damper on BNL's Disney-affiliated North American tour. Or on Page's ability to be there for his children's lives! And all this because someone left a car parked awkwardly with a door left open in front of their apartment - and because he was caught with a tonne of blow on the table and sticky fingers...

I'm not going to poke fun - this is too sad for that, actually. I respected him too much as a kid to degrade him now. He made a costly mistake, which he's probably never going to be able to live down, which is too bad for him. So instead of putting a picture up of him looking super sketchy like most people have done, the above image is Page as he should be recalled. Happy, nerdy, and doing his thing...Gordon-styles!

(And that probably is him in Grade 9 - Christ he looks young...And bigger. So he probably wasn't doing blow just then...)