After Saturday night's Barenaked Ladies concert (pictures shown with this article), my son and I hung around behind the Louisville Palace for a little while with a couple dozen other people to wait for any signs of the band. Sure enough, before long, singer-guitarist Ed Robertson came out, talking with everyone and posing for pictures. He was, as all accounts I had previously read indicated, a really nice and normal guy. He was genuinely glad to greet people, and even if it felt obligatory to him, he gave off no indication that it was. He signed and posed as often as you asked.
Knowing that Robertson turns 40 this fall, I told him I just turned 40, and that it wasn't so bad. I joked that Tyler Stewart, the band's drummer, is 42 and he gets along fine. Robertson joked back, saying, "Yeah, but we're going to be replacing him soon." When I told him how much I liked them playing When I Fall, he pointed at a lady in the crowd saying she requested it, and since she had the music of the song tattooed on her back, he might have felt a bit obliged.
I'm not much on the celebrity bandwagon; I don't read In Touch or People or any of those magazines and have no envy of the famous. But getting a chance to talk to a songwriter and musician whom you have respected for a while is - here's a very professional journalism phrase - pretty cool. Other than brief exchanges in the 90s with Mary Ramsey of 10,000 Maniacs after a waterfront concert and band Del Amitri in the Phoenix Hill Tavern parking lot, and meeting The Watson Twins during a Kentucky Center for the Arts tour a couple years ago, I haven't had too many run-ins with musicians visiting Louisville. The Watson Twins, by the way, could not have been nicer or friendlier. Maybe it's because they're Louisville natives.
I heard about Roger Daltrey walking around the Galleria, or was it Oxmoor in 1982 when The Who played Freedom Hall? And Bruce Springsteen signed autographs at a hotel restaurant and bar in the winter of 1985 during the Born in the USA tour, which, by the way, was closer than I got to him on a chilly night in November 1996 again standing in the Louisville Palace parking lot.
But this isn't about my run-ins or near misses. I write this so that you can tell other Louisville.com readers about your experiences meeting musicians. Where in town did you see them? How did they act? Nice or gruff? Did they say anything about Louisville?
So, please exercise your ability to leave comments and share your experiences. Perhaps it was tender moment with Lita Ford behind the Toy Tiger? Just let us know. All I hope is that your rock star was as nice as Ed Robertson.
