In 2005, after two days off in Salt Lake City, Hearn had disappeared until the band had security break through his hotel room door. When Hearn went back on the road with BNL after surviving leukemia, he lacked the caregiver he would become. “Lou’s a legendary prick and a real taskmaster, but Kev was able to draw out his humanity - the last ten years of Lou’s musical career wouldn’t have occurred if Kevin had not been at the centre of that.” “People who are brilliant the way he’s brilliant, they generally keep their genius close to the vest,” says Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics, longtime friend of Gord Downie and publisher of the West End Phoenix. Strange, huh?”įrom 2007 to the end of Reed’s life, in addition to his BNL gig, Hearn became Reed’s band leader. Reed spent the party holding Hearn’s hand. By the time the two men met backstage at one of Reed’s New York concerts, the room was crowded - Willem Dafoe, Philip Glass, Neil Young. He told him to endure and Hearn, inspired, made his own cancer album, H-Wing, which he sent to Reed, and Reed loved. Then Reed, who happened to share a label with BNL, sent Hearn an email that changed his life. “Music has always been that for me,” he says. At the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, he listened to Magic and Loss, Lou Reed’s record about cancer. “I started chemo during the One Week video, and the record went to number one while I was in the hospital going through my transplant,” he says. When he asked the doctors when he might get back to touring, he was told that, with leukemia, he might have five months to live. He tried to hide it, but during a session, he fell to the studio floor, writhing in pain. We had number one singles, toured all over the world, and he became a signature member-he forged us into the band we still are today.”īy the time Barenaked Ladies released Stunt in 1998 - the album that opens with the massive and massively polarizing “One Week” - Hearn was sick. “He redefined the sound of BNL and that’s arguably our most successful time period. Musically and emotionally, Hearn gave the band, including Page, with whom he’s still close, a boost. “Steven Page was essentially having a nervous breakdown, struggling to maintain his sanity,” says Stewart, adding that they subsequently fired their manager and toured for two years. ![]() Drummer Tyler Stewart asked Hearn to join his band for a two-month tour. He was 21, playing with Corky and the Juice Pigs, when keyboardist Andy Creeggan decided to leave Barenaked Ladies, then riding their hit If I Had $1000000 and breaking into the States. ![]() “I loved how his music could let my mind float away,” he says.Īt 19, Hearn joined his first band, Look People, and was making ends meet working at President’s Choice and scoring Straight Up, a CBC drama with Sarah Polley. He remembers being nine years old when he first heard Walk on the Wild Side, and when he discovered the Velvet Underground in high school, he taped a picture of Reed up in his locker.
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