IN MEMORY OF ...
From Gord Downie to Mary Tyler Moore, Ian McGillis pays tribute to some of the many artists whose passing left a void this year.
Art endures, but as we’re reminded seemingly more frequently every year, its practitioners are subject to the same frailties as the rest of us.
The past 12 months brought losses across the culture spectrum, with music being hit especially hard. Here is a salute, by no means complete, to some of the creators who left us in 2017.
The Tragically Hip was more than just a very popular band — its members represented a coming of age for their country. For the first time, Canadians gave a mass embrace to a band that hadn’t first cracked the American market. If anything, the more the Kingston quintet were rejected in the U.S. and abroad, the more they were taken to Canada’s collective heart. Lead vocalist Gord Downie (Feb. 6, 1964 – Oct. 17) wrote Canadiana-steeped lyrics that repay any amount of attention the listener cares to give them; being in an arena full of people singing along loudly to every complex line was a powerful experience. A figure at once down-to-earth and enigmatic, Downie handled his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer with stoicism and courage, embarking on a 2016 tour that gave Hip Nation the chance to say a proper cathartic thank-you and goodbye, recording the valedictory solo double album Introduce Yerself, and using much of the time he still had to bring attention to the injustices wrought upon Canada’s First Nations peoples. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke into tears upon paying tribute to Downie, he mirrored the national feeling.
Tom Petty (Oct. 20, 1950 – Oct. 2) was one of the last great unifying rockers. Pandering to no one, he appealed to nearly everyone, hitting the scene in the 1970s with a style that combined the economy of punk with a classic pop-rock songwriting sensibility and embarking on a string of hits that barely let up for 40 years. The early favourites never faded and every few years another jewel was added to the crown. As junior member of the Traveling Wilburys, Petty attained equal footing with childhood heroes, while among fellow musicians his influence crossed genres and generations. The shock of Petty’s passing from a heart attack at 66 was at least partly softened by the fact that he left on a high, having just completed a three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl with his long-serving band, the Heartbreakers.
History tends to place an air of inevitability around musical developments, so we shouldn’t lose sight of the sheer audacity of what Chuck Berry (Oct. 18, 1926 – March 18) achieved with his hot-wiring of blues and country music, a riff-driven and lyrically rich style that came to the world’s attention with Maybellene in 1955 and formed the foundation for rock ’n’ roll. The St. Louis native was, in many ways, a difficult man, with some dubious personal proclivities. But he’s one of a very few entertainers who can be said to have measurably changed the world. Fats Domino (Feb. 26, 1928 – Oct. 24), by contrast with his contemporary, couldn’t have been more unassuming. The Fat Man, his 1949 debut, started a string of dozens of hits (among rock’s first wave, he was second only to Elvis Presley in Top 40 entries), working variations on the same genial, easy-rolling, piano-driven New Orleans beat. Domino was a cherished figure: when he was found alive after briefly being thought to have perished in Hurricane Katrina, the outpouring of public affection was enormous.
My Cross to Bear, the 2012 autobiography of Gregg Allman (Dec. 8, 1947 – May 27), is one of the most harrowing tales in music, encompassing family tragedy, addiction and the star-crossed hard luck of the Allman Brothers Band, the blues-rock group he founded with his late brother Duane. But it’s an ultimately redemptive tale, too. The Allmans persevered to reach fame and greatness, and before he died the singer/keyboardist/guitarist had not only beaten his drug demons but released a brace of acclaimed solo albums. (In a twist typical of the Allmans saga, drummer and original member Butch Trucks also died this year.)
Among the generation of Seattle grunge rockers who struck unlikely pay dirt in the 1990s, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell (July 20, 1964 – May 18) always seemed the least likely to meet the fate of Kurt Cobain. But the soft-spoken singer — possessor of a voice of operatic range and elemental power, and a songwriting touch that produced at least one stone classic in Black Hole Sun — had long fought a private battle with depression. For reasons that are still unclear — an accidental overdose of Ativan may have played a part — he hung himself in a hotel room hours after playing a show with Soundgarden in Detroit.
Chester Bennington (March 20, 1976 – July 20) and his rapmetal band Linkin Park bypassed the critical gatekeepers to establish a direct connection to a generation of young people who identified with his emotional vulnerability. Deeply affected by Cornell’s death, and fighting his own fight with depression, Bennington hung himself on what would have been his friend’s 53rd birthday.
Lil Peep (Nov. 1, 1996 – Nov. 15), forger of a wholly original emorap fusion and assumed to be on the cusp of pop stardom, instead became a cautionary tale of the opiate epidemic when he died of a fentanyl and Xanax overdose on his tour bus. The death from dementia of Malcolm Young (Jan. 6, 1953 – Nov. 18) effectively closed the book on the golden era of AC/DC, whose Back in Black is the bestselling hardrock album of all time. Malcolm was less flamboyant than younger brother and fellow guitarist Angus, but he was the true engine of the Aussie rockers, defining their nononsense sound with his indelible rhythm guitar. Dad-rockers and young hipsters alike mourned the passing of songwriter, guitarist and producer Walter Becker (Feb. 20, 1950 – Sept. 3), co-leader with Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, a band that brought the chops and cool factor of jazz to a string of immaculately crafted 1970s albums and had a long victory lap on reuniting in 1993. Skip Prokop (Dec. 13, 1943 – Aug. 30) was the drummer and main creative force behind Canadian 1970s prog/jazz/rock trailblazers Lighthouse, mainstays on Canadian classic-rock radio with One Fine Morning.
Glen Campbell (April 22, 1936 – Aug. 8) had a remarkably varied life: top-level session guitarist, substitute Beach Boy, TV and film star, and master balladeer, especially when interpreting the work of songwriter Jimmy Webb, most enduringly with Wichita Lineman and Galveston. Don Williams (May 27, 1939 – Sept. 8) got started in the 1960s folk revival and went on to pioneer an easy-loping Oklahoma country sound much emulated by Eric Clapton — and, interestingly, very popular in Jamaica and Zimbabwe. Singer-songwriter and politician Manno Charlemagne (1947/1948 – Dec. 10), who often ran afoul of his country’s Duvalier regime, achieved a reputation as the Haitian Bob Marley. The emotional response across Quebec on the passing from cancer of singer Patrick Bourgeois (June 16, 1962 – Nov. 26) testified to the lasting impact of his band Les BB, which sold hundreds of thousands of albums in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a mix of mainstream rock and power ballads. The broadcasting career of Stuart McLean (April 19, 1948 – Feb. 15) was proof of the loyalty that good radio can inspire: the Montreal West native’s CBC series The Vinyl Cafe was appointment listening for millions of Canadians for 20-plus years from 1994, the host’s offbeat storytelling style following in the tradition of Peter Gzowski. Winnipeg native Monty Hall (Aug. 25, 1921 – Sept. 30) was the quintessential 20th-century game-show host, his upbeat and dryly humorous style becoming so ingrained in the collective mind over the decades-long run of Let’s Make a Deal that a particular math puzzle is universally known as the Monty Hall problem. Betty Kennedy (Jan. 4, 1926 – March 20) felt like family to generations of Canadians as a panellist on Front Page Challenge, which was beamed into living rooms weekly from 1962 (the show itself started in 1957) to 1995. If she was on that panel as the token woman, which may well have been the case, she made you forget that with her easygoing but sharp style.
It took a while for some of us to realize it, but Trailer Park Boys was a true classic of Canadian workingclass satire. John Dunsworth (April 12, 1946 – Oct. 16), as alcoholic park supervisor Jim Lahey, was the solid point around which the show’s younger loose-cannon cast revolved. The Nova Scotia native and theatre actor also did fine work in the supernatural drama series Haven. Montrealer Vincent Warren (Aug. 31, 1938 – Oct. 25), a longtime lead dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, was frequently compared to Rudolf Nureyev. People who were there still talk about his performances in Tommy and Carmina Burana. In later years, he devoted himself to establishing an archive of Canadian ballet history.
Two men who ended up as titans of comedy were born — and died — in uncannily close proximity. It’s hard to imagine 20th-century pop culture without Jerry Lewis (March 16, 1926 – Aug. 20). Movie star, Dean Martin sidekick, filmmaking auteur beloved of French cinephiles, and tireless musculardystrophy telethon leader, Lewis also gave a brilliant and counterintuitively straight performance in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Insults being a very hard form of humour to pull off, we may never again see the likes of Don Rickles (May 8, 1926 – April 6). It always took a certain bravery, or perhaps masochism, to sit in the front row at his shows. Rickles worked until the end — he was a main attraction at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival as recently as 2014 — and as anyone who squirmed in his presence will attest, he never lost his edge.
Jeanne Moreau (Jan. 23, 1928 – July 31) was celebrated worldwide for her role as one-third of the love triangle in François Truffaut’s 1962 nouvelle-vague drama Jules et Jim. Her performance established her as a new kind of cerebral art-house sex symbol. The film was merely a hint at a career that was one of the most varied and long-lasting in all of French cinema. Mary Tyler Moore (Dec. 29, 1936 – Jan. 25) was one of the defining cultural presences of the 1970s, her eponymous and selfproduced sitcom a subversively feminist undertaking at a time when a single woman making a career in the big city was still its own statement. It was a big step forward from the kitschy Dick Van Dyke Show, and a bridge to her extraordinary Oscar-nominated performance as a grief-stricken mother in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People.
Not many people, if indeed any, ever straddled worlds like Sam Shepard (Nov. 5, 1943 – July 27), a giant of American avant-garde theatre and then, seemingly by accident, a leading man in both Hollywood (Fool for Love) and Europe (Voyager). Harry Dean Stanton (July 14, 1926 – Sept. 15) came to stardom late, his performance in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas a tour de force all the more impressive for involving very few lines. He was also an accomplished musician, with an affecting line in Tex-Mex ballads.
A distinguished career in theatre and film notwithstanding, John Hurt (Jan. 22, 1940 – Jan. 25) will likely be most remembered for his role in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, where he conveyed great pathos and nuance despite being all but hidden in makeup and prosthetics. Roger Moore (Oct. 14, 1927 – May 23) was already a star for his years in The Saint when he became arguably the most suave of all the James Bonds in a seven-film run, from Live and Let Die in 1973 to A View to a Kill in 1985. Fame appeared to be a curse for David Cassidy (April 12, 1950 – Nov. 21). The erstwhile heartthrob star of The Partridge Family, who died of liver and kidney failure, never really found a viable second act to follow that musical sitcom’s 1970-74 run. Some perfectly good, glam-tinged solo albums never stood a chance to be taken seriously in their time, but are ripe for rediscovery. Many viewers watching Della Reese (July 6, 1931 – Nov. 19) play Tess on the long-running supernatural drama Touched by an Angel may have been aware of her track record as a TV actress (Chico and the Man, Charlie and Company), but fewer knew she’d already had a long and acclaimed career as an R&B singer, nurtured by gospel great Mahalia Jackson.
The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense and Philadelphia are three films representing three very different genres, but all are masterful, and all the work of one director: Jonathan Demme (Feb. 22, 1944 – April 26). He somehow always felt contemporary and his influence shows clearly in the work of younger directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, who cites him as a hero. In the 1970s, Tobe Hooper (Jan. 25, 1943 – Aug. 26) saw his low-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre break out of the drive-in circuit to become an incalculably influential film, the big bang of modern horror. Poltergeist, among other films, later brought his name into the mainstream. A hard year for horror fans also saw the passing of Canadian-American George Romero (Feb. 4, 1940 – July 16), the visionary behind the 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead and its many sequels and spinoffs, and thus the progenitor of a subgenre that refuses to die. Further depleting the filmmaking ranks was the death of John Avildsen (Dec. 21, 1935 – June 16), director of Rocky I and V as well as the counterculture classic Joe.
Canadian literature bid some of its most beloved figures farewell this year. William Weintraub (Feb. 19, 1926 – Nov. 6), who was equally important for his work with the National Film Board, wrote a classic of popular history with City Unique, about his home city of Montreal in the 1940s and ’50s. His charming late novel, Crazy About Lili, was the fruit of his long-standing fascination with burlesque dancer and frequent Montreal visitor Lili St. Cyr. Ojibwa author Richard Wagamese (Oct. 14, 1955 – March 10) came to the forefront in 2013 with Indian Horse; the story of a residential school student and aspiring hockey star was a finalist in the CBC Canada Reads competition. Two Giller Prize alumni, both of whom gained wide recognition relatively late in their careers, also passed: Bonnie Burnard (Jan. 15, 1945 – March 4), who won in 1999 for A Good House, and Richard B.
Wright (March 4, 1937 – Feb. 7), who won in 2001 for the historical/epistolary novel Clara Callan.