Another article on La Presse talks more about Kathleen Lavoie’s involvement with the Simple Plan book (thanks Charbel for letting me know).
In the article, Kathleen (who is a jopurnalist) says that three years ago she approached the guys from Simple Plan for the first time about turning their story into a book, but at that time they thought it was too early in their career to have a biography out. Yet she persisted and last year at the soundcheck for their concert for Best Buy in Quebec, they finally told her they were willing to do it.
Kathleen is very familiar with Simple Plan ever since their first album came out in 2002. She even accompanied the musicians on the road in 2005, during a series of concerts in Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Chicoutimi and Rimouski.
Yet she still managed to discover some surprising things – for example how exactly have Pierre and Chuck become friends: apparently the friendship started when the boys were 12 years old and all because of a t-shirt of a rock band that one of them was wearing at school during PE, which was the only time it was allowed at their high school.
To complete the story, Kathleen needed to be very precise about all the information. For example it took her a while to figure out the date of the first concert of the band, when they still included only four members (David was still in Reset), but were already called Simple Plan. Turns out the first Simple Plan show (without David) was on January 22nd 2000.
“There were no printed tickets for that show. The band opened for Bald Vultures to shoot a video they would show the agents. Finding the right date took us two weeks!”