The first clue that the Barenaked Ladies' breakthrough debut Gordon is 20 years old has to be the album's cover.
Well, it's a bunch of clues, really. The ugly fonts. The sloppy graphics. The freshly scrubbed faces of the barely-out-of-high-school quintet. Perhaps most importantly, the haircuts - front-man Ed Robertson wearing a pineapple-like 'do, his black hair sprouting wildly atop his otherwise shaved head, while drummer Tyler Stewart has his own strands organized into dreadlocks.
To the band, the album feels like it came out yesterday. But it sure doesn't look that way.
"Absolutely the worst album cover in the history of music," Stewart sighed in a recent telephone interview. "It's like some crappy font with photos of us wrapped around it. We're all looking overly cute and earnest.
"It's just ... terrible." Added former cofrontman Steven Page: "I think even from the first time we saw the album cover, we looked at it and cringed."
Of course, the cover didn't matter.
With the Toronto band's five members still in their early 20s, Gordon hit stores back in July 1992. A month later, it occupied the top spot on the Canadian Billboard album chart, a position it would hold for eight consecutive weeks. Fuelled by a series of pervasive singles including Brian Wilson, If I Had $1,000,000 and Be My Yoko Ono, the album has since reached that rarefied air of diamond certification in Canada.
And to think, at the time the goofy band couldn't have seemed less in step with mainstream rock.
The band formed in 1988 in the rough-and-tumble Toronto east-end enclave of Scarborough as the brainchild of childhood friends Page and Robertson. Talented songwriters both - with wide-ranging tastes in pop music and keen senses of humour - Page and Robertson initially committed their compositions to tape on a four-track in Page's basement before recruiting Stewart as well as brothers Andy and Jim Creeggan to round out the band.
"When we first started, Ed and I were just making tapes in my basement, [then] sending them off to record companies and thinking we were going to get a record deal," Page recalled in a recent telephone interview.
"I mean, that's the way [we thought], as naive 1819-year-olds."
The group's lofi tinkering did eventually result in a breakthrough in the form of the self-released 1991 smash semi-demo fondly referred to as The Yellow Tape.
The 17-minute, five-song collection organically captured the attention of music fans across the country. In a couple months, Stewart says they sold more than 80,000 copies of the cassette.
The success of Gordon, thus, didn't come out of nowhere. Still, the band was too busy to necessarily gather the sense that they were on the cusp of something big.
"Back then, we just played everywhere," Stewart said. "We played the opening of bakeries, we played people's weddings, we played public shows, we played private shows, clubs, theatres, everywhere."
If the quality of Gordon's songwriting didn't betray the band's youth, the hijinks they got up to while crafting the album might have.
They recorded at Le Studio, a scenic space located just south of Morin Heights, Que., overlooking Lac Perry. Since the lake was frozen at the time, Jim Creeggan would cross-country ski across every day en route to recording. The band insisted upon including appearances from a dizzying number of their Toronto musician friends, including Jason Plumb, Bob Wiseman, Kate Fenner and members of Moxy Fruvous and the Rheostatics.
But underneath the frivolity, the band was carried by a real undercurrent of ambition.
"I think we really did feel like, in a way, we were trying to make a record that wasn't being made elsewhere," Page said.
To hear Stewart tell it, the band's pop potpourri was formed by the Creeggan brothers' multi-instrumental versatility, Page's vocal prowess, Robertson's country-coloured songwriting and his own enthusiastic rock drumming.
The lyrics at times veered from irreverence straight into silliness, but the group's sharp harmonies and deliberate instrumentation distinguished the Barenaked Ladies from a disposable comedy act.
But critics, much less record executives, weren't sure exactly what to make of the band.
"It was like, are these guys for real?" Stewart recalled.
Indeed, the Barenaked Ladies were certainly out of step with what was happening in mainstream music in 1992, with grunge having gurgled up and redefined the mainstream just months before (Nirvana's Nevermind had spent 10 weeks atop the Canadian album chart earlier in '92).
Certainly, few bands were getting rich off goofy acoustic ditties.
"I think that's what stood out at the time because there was [U2's] Joshua Tree kind of overly dramatic rock, and we were [entering] the grunge era of turned-up guitars and disaffected, disenfranchised people complaining," Stewart said.
"So us singing about having a million dollars or lying in bed like Brian Wilson did ... I think it was a bit refreshing. It was an anomaly, we were kind of the only ones doing stuff like that."
Still, the band doesn't look back without some regrets about those times.
"We were so determined about being these nerdy kids from Scarborough and just being ourselves, but I look back and think: Why the hell did I have a beard?" laughed Page, who left the group to pursue a solo career in 2009.
"We looked bad. Everything. From the shorts, Tshirts, the whole thing. And we kind of knew it."
"But the beauty of it," Stewart added separately, "it didn't matter. It was about the music."
Gordon didn't bring the band success in the U.S.
That came later, when 1998's Stunt went four-times platinum and established a fanbase south of the border.
But for special moments in the band's history, it's hard to compare with Gordon.
"We'd go on years later to have some pretty major success in the U.S. and sell a lot more records, but at the time, guys in their 20s, our first album, it was really something," Stewart said.
"It's probably the most crucial thing that ever happened to us to get us rolling. And it sustained us, honestly, for the next number of years because the next couple albums in Canada, we kind of fell off the face of the earth," he added.
"So it's absolutely essential to our story. And I can't believe it's 20 years ago."
