Posted by 
In my first year of university I lived on an all-guys floor in residence, my roommate and I were both music students (he was a keyboard player, I played guitar and bass) and we got along famously.
There was this other guy on our floor from Scarborough, and he had a couple of friends who were in a duo that was playing around Toronto. This guy had their 4-track demo tape that he thought was pretty good, so he laid a copy of it on my roomie and I.
They called themselves The Barenaked Ladies and we thought they were pretty good too. My roommate and I learned one of their songs (If I Had $1,000,000; the only song on the 20-or-so-track demo that they ever released on a major album) and added it to our late-nite jam repertoire.
After the Xmas break our floor-mate came back and told us his friends were getting a full band together. They had found a drummer and told him they were looking for a keyboard player and a bass player, he told them about us and said he could arrange for us to audition. My roommate and I considered it for a few days and finally decided to decline, the argument being that we were both in first year of university and joining this band would mean dropping out without really giving school much of a chance.
I’ve never really regretted not auditioning for The Barenaked Ladies, not as they grew in popularity with the release of the Hamburger tape, not when they sold almost 200,000 copies of their first album on the day it came out (in Canada alone), not even when they exploded in the US, and the main reason why I’ve never regretted it is because of the two guys that actually got the gig, Jim and Andy Creeggan.
(Not to mention the absolute fact that any chance of our phone ringing would have been completely eliminated once the Creeggan Brothers showed up to audition.)
I think the BNL album Gordon is a great, great record, and the contribution of the brothers on bass and keys/percussion is absolutely top-notch. Somehow along the way I found out that the Creeggan brothers had a duo of their own (no surprise there, really) called the Brothers Creeggan. I bought both of their albums and became a big fan. When I saw they were coming to Ottawa on October 16th, 1999 I jumped at the chance to see them, even if it meant patronizing Zaphod’s II, the vanity project (what wasn’t?) of the owner of Zaphod’s, a popular live music spot downtown.
Zaphod’s II was upstairs from Bank Street, just a few doors down from Barrymore’s. I only saw a handful of shows up there before the place closed down after a short run, and I remember enjoying this show immensely.
I think Andy had left BNL by this point – he recorded on their follow-up album and quit the band before touring it, replaced by Kevin Hearns, formerly of The Look People – but he and his arena-touring brother were total pros from the outset, entertaining and fun to watch and with great chops to back it all up. I don’t know if many others in the room knew all the songs but I sure did, and I loved it.
This would have been somewhere around the time I was booking shows in Ottawa and I think I remember talking to one or both of the guys about bringing them back to town. I can’t say for sure if the conversation happened, but I do know that either way I never did book them, but I sure would have loved to.
Todd Man Out 