TORONTO β Winding up a rock band is never easy, but for members of Sum 41, the experience has been an odd mixture of confusion, camaraderie and ultimately acceptance. It started two years ago with a surprise email from the band's leader Deryck Whibley, who's also their main songwriter.
He told them, that after many years of anxious contemplation, he had finally decided to pull the plug on the band. Sitting alongside guitarist Dave Baksh in a Toronto record label office, the two musicians are reflecting on life without Whibley in their immediate orbit and how within a blink everything is about to end. It's everything in between," said Baksh of playing the last shows. Missing from this discussion is Whibley who, unlike the band's other two Ontario-based members, lives in Las Vegas and was unable to make it back to Canada for a run of press interviews in early January.
That left his two lifelong friends to pose for photos without their familiar frontman, an absence that casts an unintentional weight over the proceedings. In some ways, it feels as if Sum 41 has already closed the book even before their curtain call. It's taken a lot of emotional effort to get to a point where, as Baksh puts it, they've come through the five stages of grief to arrive at acceptance.
They recognize now that Whibley had to end Sum 41 for himself. There was no other option after his message landed. What can we do to help this happen? Whibley and his bandmates burned bright and loud during the pop-punk heyday of the early aughts. They partied hard, rebelled against whatever stood in their way, and established themselves as one of the bratty forces of teen angst for a generation.
In his 20s, Whibley became tabloid fodder. He married and divorced Canadian pop princess Avril Lavigne, had a fling with Paris Hilton and was caught in many an unflattering photo by the paparazzi outside trendy Los Angeles clubs.
