Sales of The Yellow 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;
[12] the decision was further affirmed by city councillor
Chris Korwin-Kuczynski.
[13]The band shrugged it off and booked another show at
McMaster University.
[4] 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, but in fact had been out of town at the time. The following week, sales of the Yellow Tape exploded — by February 1992, it was outselling even
Michael Jackson's
Dangerous,
Genesis'
We Can't Dance and
U2's
Achtung Baby in some downtown Toronto record stores.
[14] They received enough publicity from the incident that
MuchMusic offered them its second-ever
Intimate and Interactive special on January 17.
[15] The tape eventually became the first ever
indie release to achieve
platinum status (100,000 copies) in Canada.
[3]
By the end of February,
Toronto City Council revised its rules for event bookings at Nathan Phillips Square in the hopes of avoiding another similar controversy.
[13] The City Hall story has followed the band ever since; Robertson credits the scale of the story to it being a slow news week.
[3][5][7]