Barenaked Ladies Early Canadian success

The full band's first release of note was the 1991 Yellow Tape. It was a demo tape originally created for the band's performance at South by Southwest and was the first recording to feature all five members.They spent between $2000 and $3000 on it, and sent a copy to all the labels in Canada; they were refused by all of them.The band turned to selling them off the stage, and wound up selling a lot of them. Word of mouth spread, and people began asking for the tape in local stores. The stores began asking the band for copies of the tape, and the demo tape became a commercial release.Sales began to snowball based simply on word of mouth and their live shows, and the tape became the first indie release by any band to achieve platinum status (100,000 copies) in Canada.

Sales of the cassette tape were jump-started when the band was taken off the bill for the 1991 New Year's Eve concert in Nathan Phillips Square outside Toronto City Hall because a staffer for then-mayor June Rowlands saw the band's name and felt it objectified women. The band shrugged it off and booked another show at McMaster University.However, the media got wind of the story and decided to write about it as an example of political correctness gone too far. The first article earned the paper a large quantity of mail against City Hall's decision. The story became more and more prominent until about a week after New Years, when the band was asked to take a photo in front of City Hall for the front page of the Toronto Star.

The stories targeted Rowlands even though she had not been directly involved in the decision to remove the band from the concert, as the decision had come from a direct representative
of City Hall. The following week, sales of the Yellow Tape exploded. The City Hall story has followed the band ever since; Robertson credits the scale of the story to it being a slow news week.Another major break for the band in 1991 came in November of that year when BNL contributed a cover of Bruce Cockburn's "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" to the Cockburn tribute album Kick at the Darkness. That song became the band's first Top 40 hit in Canada.

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