Hip frontman was much more than a rock star
REMEMBRANCE: Canada embraced quirky, frenetic Gord Downie fully, completely
Gord Downie passed away Tuesday night after a more than yearlong battle with brain cancer. The country mourns the loss of one of its most celebrated musicians, and the industry is undoubtedly poorer without him here. But before he passed at the age of 53, Downie had the rare privilege to make peace with the inevitable and to wish the nation, and his millions of fans, goodbye. He undertook a sprawling farewell tour across Canada in the summer of 2016 that will be remembered as among the most important to grace the nation — an extraordinary gift bequeathed by a dying man to those who adored him. It’s sad to lose Downie. It’s a blessing that we could cherish and savour one last year.
“Gord knew this day was coming — his response was to spend this precious time as he always had — making music, making memories and expressing deep gratitude to his family and friends for a life well lived, often sealing it with a kiss … on the lips,” his family said in a statement after he died surrounded by his children and other family members.
“Gord said he had lived many lives. As a musician, he lived ‘the life’ for over 30 years, lucky to do most of it with his high school buddies. At home, he worked just as tirelessly at being a good father, son, brother, husband and friend. No one worked harder on every part of their life than Gord. No one.”
Downie was born in the small town of Amherstview, Ont., in February of 1964. He attended high school in nearby Kingston, where he was the lead singer of a punk-rock group called The Slinks. Downie’s classmates, Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker, had a band of their own at the time, called The Rodents, and the three admired one another’s taste and sound. At a certain point they decided to abandon the nearly obsolete punk scene and form a rock band together. They called it The Tragically Hip. The Hip honed their style in small clubs around the city. By the time they graduated Kingston Collegiate and enrolled in university — Downie elected to study film at Queen’s — their live show, consisting mainly of covers of bar-band staples, had become popular enough locally that they were performing nearly every weekend.
Music would slowly become a fulltime gig for the band: when they weren’t on stage they were composing original music, recording demos and mailing out CDs to record label execs, even attempting the occasional Battle of the Bands. Downie quit school to focus on his career. It would soon prove a legitimate one: the band’s big break arrived courtesy of a pair of upstart Canadian music moguls named Jake Gold and Allan Gregg, neither of whom was much older than the band. Gold and Gregg had been sent a demo tape by a friend. They were impressed enough by the raw talent that they invited the band to make the twoand-a-half hour drive from Kingston to Toronto to perform a short set at Larry’s Hideaway downtown. They obliged, and Gold and Gregg signed them to their management company on the spot.
“In five weeks,” a reporter wrote in Billboard magazine in 1992, “MCA’s alternative hard-rock act The Tragically Hip’s aggressive new album, Fully Completely, has racked up Canadian sales of 210,000 copies, leaving several industry figures predicting the band is now poised for international recognition.” But it never happened like that. Fully Completely never earned international recognition; no Hip album ever did, and to this day even the band’s bestknown singles are virtually unrecognizable to American listeners.
The band received the key to the city of Kingston in 1991, the same year they won a Juno for Canadian Entertainer of the Year. “New Orleans is Sinking” was already canonical. “Courage” was swiftly inescapable. The Another Roadside Attraction tour, a sort of travelling festival organized and headlined by the Hip, was enormously popular, and thanks to Dan Aykroyd, a fellow Kingstonian, they performed “Nautical Disaster” and “Grace, Too” on Saturday Night Live. They really did seem poised for international recognition. It simply never came. In Canada the Hip sold more than 200,000 copies of Fully Completely in five weeks. In the United States they couldn’t sell 100,000 copies in five years.
Rock critic Robert Christgau called Downie a “deep thinker.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. That perception — Downie the intellectual, the rocker with his nose in a book — may indeed have contributed to the band’s America disfavour. The “candidly ornate and obscure art-rock” dismissed out of hand by critics across the United States never seemed too esoteric for our national tastes, for whatever reason: the Hip remained a fixture of Canadian radio no matter how baroque, arcane or extravagant Downie’s inclinations proved to be. Of course the most enduring Hip hits were those invigorated with anthemic clarity and roaring pop-rock hooks. Nobody can resist an earworm. But we may take it as a point of civic pride that our airwaves found room for even the most experimental efforts of a man less a singer than a poet.
Much of the Hip’s appeal has to do with exactly this tension. Bar-rock on a stadium scale and with a delicate sensibility — how do you reconcile that? Downie himself struggled often with his sense of artistic identity. He never knew what to make of the character of his own fame. He vociferously criticized attendees of an outdoor Canada Day concert when, impatient for the headlining Hip to take the stage, they began booing and hurling bottles at Daniel Lanois; he insisted that if this was how his fans were going to behave, he’d rather not have any. Of the many diehards who would routinely travel stateside to support the Hip’s American shows Downie was mystified, even contemptuous: “The homesickness mixed with alcohol is a pretty potent brew,” he recalled to author Michael Barclay in his book Have Not Been The Same: The Can-Rock Renaissance. “I had no affinity for the people that would do that.” He was widely admired. He never seemed quite comfortable with the admirers.
Going public with his terminal diagnosis in May 2016, Downie’s last year was defined not by resignation or defeat but by joy and enthusiasm. That was the prevailing register of last summer’s farewell tour: he seemed not sick, not tired, not infirm, but grateful, impassioned, ecstatic. It was as if, seeing the thousands of zealous people filling stadiums and arenas across the country night after night, Downie’s long-standing skepticism about his audience evaporated, freeing him to accept their love openly and with appreciation. The man up there in a glittering purple jumpsuit and top hat, belting barn-burners into the nosebleeds, did not seem remotely unsure about the crowd’s affection. He had an obvious affinity for these people. Because ultimately that tension between rocker and artiste needn’t be resolved — the two sides of the man and the music don’t have to be reconciled. Downie was a deep thinker. Downie was a rock star. Canada has always loved him for being both.
Downie’s family thanked his fans for the respect, admiration and love they gave him over the years.
“Those tender offerings touched his heart and he takes them with him now as he walks among the stars.”