UNAUTHORIZED AND UNEQUALLED
A new biography captures the essence of The Hip’s courageous Downie
It hardly needs recapping, fresh as it is in Canada’s collective memory, but the basic facts are this: the singer and lyricist of our most popular band is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer; the band’s valedictory national tour is the scene of large-scale emotional catharsis; fully one-third of the country watches the final concert on TV; the singer then takes it upon himself, in the little time he has left, to complete an artistic reconciliation project addressing the national shame of residential schools. He dies, aged 53, on Oct. 17, 2017.
Michael Barclay, music critic and co-author of the definitive CanRock history Have Not Been the Same, was closely watching Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip along with nearly everyone else during this time. Concerned lest the Hip’s multi-faceted history be “reduced to flag-waving or a cancer narrative,” he decided to tell it himself. Denied access to the band members (“I did not necessarily expect them to talk, and I respect that. It was a very emotionally sensitive time, for one thing ”), he went ahead regardless, and The NeverEnding Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip (ECW, 482 pages, $34.95) is the fruit of his determination. Woven from a vast range of secondary sources as well as new interviews with crucial figures in the band’s community and orbit, shot through with both a critic’s rigour and a fan’s fervour, it’s a book fully worthy of its beloved subjects’ unique place in the Canadian firmament.
So, all good, right? The best biographies are invariably the unauthorized ones, after all. But Downie’s bandmate Rob Baker wasn’t having it, and the guitarist took to social media to let the world know. “Don’t believe everything you read,” Baker tweeted in April. “I saw a few paragraphs and almost blew my coffee out my nose.”
Baker’s words were uncharitable at the very least, especially considering that the band’s camp had declined the proffered chance to check the finished manuscript for precisely the kind of inaccuracies Baker claimed to see, but declined to specify, after the book was out in the world.
“I wrote a book about what nice guys they are, and (Baker) said it was largely fictional,” Barclay said evenly on the phone from his Toronto home last week. “So take that for what it is. He has mused about writing his own book, so maybe he views this as competition. Which he should not. You’d really have to ask him.” (The Montreal Gazette reached out to the Tragically Hip’s record label, and was relayed this message: “The Michael Barclay book was not authorized by the band, so they would not quote on it.”)
The supreme irony of this scenario is that The Never-Ending Present is as respectful, in intent and effect, as any biography can be. Barclay truly comes to give the Tragically Hip their due.
“I wanted, in the midst of all the emotion at the end, to tell why we cared so much about this man and this band in the first place,” he said. “So, not just the story of their last couple of years — which is huge; you could write a book just about that tour, about performers dealing with disease in a very public way, about reconciliation. But also about the role of poetry as lyrics and vice versa, and performance and hockey and tribute bands and so many other elements that lead to a much bigger conversation.”
For Barclay, that conversation encompasses some things the faithful might deem apostasy: a refreshing candour about some of the band’s lesser-regarded later work, and a calling-out of the bad behaviour shown by overly macho segments of concertgoing Hip Nation.
“I resisted the dominant notion that if you don’t like this band, you’re not Canadian,” he said. “That kind of bullying superiority really came to fruition during the (final) tour, and it’s something I just find so obnoxious. So, in a book where I’m completely complicit in asserting the cultural dominance of my subject, I wanted to make sure that that other perspective was in there. Seriously, it’s OK not to like this band!”
Not wanting death to take over the narrative, Barclay still does Downie’s tragedy justice. The singer’s diagnosis, illness and passing came at a time when a spate of music-icon deaths — Leonard Cohen, Prince, David Bowie, Tom Petty — was teaching a generation a kind of performative grief, expressed mostly online. The difference with Downie, Barclay emphasized, was the public aspect.
“It’s extremely rare that we are confronted with tragedy, reckon with it, and then watch it play out. Normally we hear about the death of an icon, we go through the mourning, and then we move on. But this time we literally went to see him. When he did die, I don’t know that sadness was the emotion that I felt. Ask anybody who has had terminal family — there’s relief that the pain is over. That’s a very different kind of public grief than what we saw with Bowie or Prince.”
Legacy being such a modernday buzzword, how would Barclay foresee the Hip’s standing in, say, 2028?
“Well, elementary schoolchildren know who Gord Downie is. They don’t know who (Blue Rodeo’s) Greg Keelor is. And it’s because of the tragedy and (Chanie Wenjack-themed Downie solo album) Secret Path. If he were still healthy and alive, would that album be as impactful, or would it be just another solo album that gets a modicum of attention? The world had not been clamouring for a new Gord Downie solo record. So it’s the last two years of his life that define his legacy, and there’s no question that he is now a Terry Fox figure in Canadian history. He’s at that level.”
And the legacy of the band and its music moving forward?
“I’d say a lot of that rests with the future of rock ‘n’ roll itself,” he said, sounding less than bullish on rock ‘n’ roll’s prospects.
Asked to choose a personal favourite song from the Hip canon, Barclay went all the way back to 1989 and the lead single from the band’s first full-length album, Up to Here.
“It’s Blow at High Dough, and the reason is a line in the chorus,” he said. “I’ve known this song my entire life, I’ve sung it out loud, but somehow until 2016 I didn’t notice this: ‘Sometimes the faster it gets, the less you need to know / But ... the smarter it gets, the further it’s gonna go.’ That sums up their entire career, how smart they were in the way they conducted themselves professionally and musically. For them to have been that aware right at the start is really something.
“From the solo work, I’ll say Trick Rider — a song about parenting, about trusting your child, with a gorgeous harmony from Julie Doiron. I love that whole record (Coke Machine Glow), but that song especially.”
One of the most indelible images among the many from Downie’s graceful and courageous final months happened at a Toronto Raptors home game, when the visibly ailing singer approached Drake courtside.
The two embraced, and Canada’s biggest current international music star paid sincere homage to the man he would soon address in a posthumous tribute as, simply, “Legend.” An unplanned meeting of two very different Canadian worlds and generations, it was a powerful moment.
“It was,” agreed Barclay, who describes the scene in the book. “That was a magnanimous thing for Downie to do, and very much in character. And hey, what wouldn’t you give to find out what they were whispering to each other?”