LONG TIME RUNNING
Our search for the quintessentially Canadian band defines us more than The Tragically Hip’s music ever could
Fans got their first taste of one of the most anticipated tours in recent memory in Victoria as The Tragically Hip took the stage for an electrifying concert at the SaveOn-Foods Memorial Centre downtown.
That isn’t my lead: It’s the brainchild of the journalist sitting beside me, whose refulgent laptop screen I can see clearly in the dark of the arena as he pecks away at his opus. Never mind that the show hasn’t started yet. That, evidently, is no reason for an enterprising reporter to remain idle.
“Gord Downie,” he writes, “lead singer of the qui… the quint… quinti…” How do you spell quintessentially? As in “Gord Downie, lead singer of the quintessentially Canadian rock group the Tragically Hip.” Microsoft Word proffers its little red squiggle. There it is. Coming along nicely!
The Tragically Hip did shortly take the stage for its concert last month, certainly electrifying, at the Save- On-Foods Memorial Centre — all as my man on the laptop had divined.
A few hours earlier, all over the sprawling concrete welcome mat of an entrance, a battalion of local journalists, dozens of them, equipped with shotgun microphones, single-lens reflex cameras and great cataracts of live-broadcast paraphernalia, fizzed and squirmed impatiently, poised to report.
They’d come to document the hysterical teeming crowds of ardent Hip fans, but the crowds weren’t obliging. There weren’t any. By 5:30 p.m., it still looked to me as though the journalists outnumbered the civilians three to one.
A young TV news anchor in an ill-fitting navy blazer and too-long jeans practically ransacked the will-call line for consenting parties to interview, waving over his cameraman when he found one like a vagrant signalling that he’d found a morsel of edible food in the trash.
A nervous-looking woman in a pantsuit, mike clutched in fist, rehearsed a speech to herself quietly — “It is electric here. Fans are excited to be part of this historic night” — waiting for her cue to go on the air, her producer a few feet away absorbed in a BlackBerry.
Most others took positions by the merch table, ready to pounce on zealous buyers. I saw one fan, a portly fellow in a homemade Hip shirt, do three interviews with different stations. He was loving it.
This was the circus, the whirlwind, the national pandemonium ablaze on tour. The circus has descended upon The Tragically Hip for the simple reason that lead singer Gord Downie was diagnosed in May with terminal brain cancer.
The eager circus constituents — not only journalists but promoters, ticket retailers, broadcasters, scalpers, basically anyone who stands to make money because Downie is going to die, which is a deplorable number of people — had converged in Victoria with a whole lot of other people, namely The Tragically Hip’s fans. And that convergence has proved to be equal parts ghoulish and bizarre.
At about 6:30 p.m. the doors open, and the few hundred Victorians enthusiastic enough to be punctual start piling into the venue, dodging late or leftover reporters and very large hoarse-voiced men looking to buy and sell second-hand tickets, who bark “anyone SELLING” over and over. (“Two-fifty minimum,” one of them told me gruffly when I asked, curious about the going rate.)
Inside, a pair of tiny women are selling programs for the show, but nobody seems interested, instead making a collective beeline for the beer, which is plentiful, bad and, like everything else here, not cheap. One of the first things you notice at a Tragically Hip show is that nearly everybody is drinking beer. The beer lines never get shorter, not even for a minute, all evening long.
But naturally the real action was on the floor, where sundry metal folding chairs had been arranged for the comfort of the fortunate and moneyed. These people had made a serious investment for this experience. Right in the front, three rows from the stage, I met Trevor and Danica, a couple who’d flown in from Fort McMurray, Alta. Their tickets had set them back $1,500 — procured from Ticketmaster for a sixth of that price and resold to Trevor and Danica by a man who claimed he couldn’t use them. In any case, to Trevor and Danica this was all money well spent. They were about to see The Hip! They were 20 feet from the stage!
“Saw them in Kingston and was friggin’ awesome.”
“Kingston? That would have been friggin’ awesome.”
“It was a friggin’ awesome show, man.”
Back in the nosebleeds, with my man’s opus in progress and laptop screen aglow, a rank of men and women in hockey jerseys, Solo cups of beer in hand, reminisce about vintage Hip shows as they wait for them to take the stage.
There’s a fellow with shoulderlength hair and an Indiana Jones-style hat on his head wearing a Shania Twain T-shirt that may or may not be ironic. There’s a middle-aged woman with the most lurid purple hair I’ve ever seen on a person.
These are the diehards, Hip fans from way back, all but vibrating in anticipation.
And then there are those, you feel looking around, who seem to have an almost dutiful aspect, because of course this isn’t just a concert.
It’s an event — a “historic night,” as that anchorwoman put it earlier. Then the lights dim and the canned music stops and the band steps onto the stage, and we’re off, history in the making, the electrifying concert. Downie is in a lustrous hot-pink metallic leather suit and black leather ankle boots, tearing into Boots or Hearts.
Everybody stands, cheers and lifts their Solo cup skyward. When The Hip play New Orleans is Sinking next, and Poets and Wheat Kings a little later, and Ahead by a Century last, the crowd sings along in unison, something like 10,000 people, not counting the journalists. It’s very good.
All of this — the 10,000 fans, the hockey arena, the metallic leather suits, the whole loud rapacious circus with its interview-seeking journalists and rebarbative scalpers — would have been unthinkable, a wild fantasy, to a coterie of teenage intellectuals in Kingston, Ont., in the early 1980s.
The Tragically Hip formed as most rock bands do: inauspiciously and uninterestingly. Downie, raised in tiny Amherstview, went to high school in nearby Kingston, where he sang with a punk group called the Slinks. His classmates, Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker, had a band of their own at the time called the Rodents, and they played punk songs too. The three got along, sharing a lot of the same taste in music, rock especially. Soon they ditched the punk scene, on the verge of obsolescence anyway, and formed a rock band together. They called it The Tragically Hip.
By the time they left Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute and went on to the obligatory postsecondary education — Downie enrolled at Queen’s University in film studies, still an emerging discipline in those days, and quite a highflown one for a fellow from Amherstview — The Hip’s live show, a set mostly made up of bar-band staples, was in demand enough locally that they found themselves performing nearly every weekend, often for cash.
People liked their sound. When they weren’t playing, they were pursuing the avenues customary among musicians in search of fame: recording sessions, demomailouts, even the odd battle of the bands. Downie, meanwhile, more or less abandoned school.
The big break, in the parlance of the rise-to-fame narrative, 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 and were impressed enough by the talent that they felt compelled to reach out to the band, inviting them to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Toronto to perform a short set at Larry’s Hideaway downtown.
The Hip obliged, and Gold and Gregg signed them to their management company on the spot. Then the quick ascent: a 30-minute self-titled EP, major-label distribution by way of RCA, a couple of minor radio hits. The decade’s end loomed and a bona fide career was taking shape. All that was left: Record an album! Top the charts! Penetrate the stratosphere!
I’m standing in front of the stage at the MTS Centre in downtown Winnipeg two weeks after the Victoria show, talking to Mike, Cheryl and Ryan. They’re wearing matching homemade shirts that say something like, “This ISN’T the last tour!” in big block letters.
“It’s time to celebrate,” Cheryl said. “I have read sh---y reviews for the past 20 years, and now all of a sudden every review is overthe-top amazing. Where were you? It’s the same band!”
Mike, Cheryl and Ryan swear to me up and down that they bought their front-row-centre tickets on Ticketmaster, the moment they went on sale, at face value. “I would never, ever support a scalper,” Cheryl insisted.
Mike, Cheryl and Ryan have to be just about the only people within 50 feet of the stage who acquired their tickets at face value through traditional channels. The common refrain among the denizens of the floor section — not just in Winnipeg, but at every stop along the tour — is that tickets vanished before anyone had an opportunity to buy them. All the fairly priced tickets were secured by robots and computer algorithms too complicated for any layperson to understand.
The circus loved the story of the avaricious scalpers, exploiting a man’s terminal illness for the sake of black-market profiteering, while the cash-strapped Tragically Hip fan yearning to see the band perform one final time languished. These stories went on to be talked about as much as Downie’s diagnosis, and yet still everyone managed to miss the point.
The scalpers, the ticket prices, the surge in demand — these are symptoms. The underlying cause is what we’ve all manufactured, what the circus has devised and sold — all this weepy hand-wringing and sentimental nationalism, the crocodile tears splashed over the front page. Gord Downie isn’t dead yet, but I’ll be damned if we haven’t turned this tour into his funeral.
Back at the MTS Centre, the floor section filled at the leisurely pace you see when people know they have great seats. I talked to a group of middle-aged men, burly and blue-collar in the best goodold-boy Canadian fashion, who told me they’ve been friends for 25 years, since college, “the year Fully Completely came out,” as one of them unimprovably put it.
The Hip had always been a bonding element in their relationship, and now they’re spread out across the country: one in Ontario, one in Calgary, one in Saskatoon and one local Manitoban. They convene in Winnipeg for a nostalgic blowout weekend.
These are the fanatics, the ones who’d have given anything to be here. They even seemed suspicious of me, with my journalist’s impurity, part of the circus, circling the event like a fruit fly.
I sympathize. They’ve got this marvellous hard-won ardour, and I’m rooting out a story. What right do I have to say with authority what any of this means? What right does anyone?
I fight the temptation to philosophize. We’re here for a show: a rock concert, a real barnburner. Time to celebrate, as Cheryl said.
I bought a Solo cup of beer and took my seat — not a laptop in sight! — and there’s the band, Gord prancing out aglitter again, this time kicking off with At the Hundredth Meridian. How can you not sing along? “If I die of vanity, promise me, promise me / If they bury me some place I don’t want to be / You’ll dig me up and transport me, unceremoniously / Away from the swollen city breeze, garbage bag trees / Whispers of disease and the acts of enormity / And lower me slowly and sadly and properly / Get Ry Cooder to sing my eulogy.”
Holy mackerel, what a wonderful song.
The first thing nearly everybody says about The Tragically Hip is that they’re an excellent live band, and more specifically that Gord Downie, a raving maniac on stage, is a mesmerizing performer, ranting and whooping and juddering prostrate on the floor. All of that is true.
There he is, tossing the microphone, losing it, trying to pick it up and toss it in the air with his feet, pointing it like a ray gun at the audience. Or he’s improvising lyrics or making the delivery arch and playful, like when he sings Tired as F---, from the new record, and ekes out the title swear with all the mischievous defiance of a child sotto-voicing a dirty word.
The country may be treating this event with an almost funereal solemnity, welling up at the thought of a farewell, but Downie certainly isn’t. Seeing this band live is about as grave as Mardi Gras.
“In five weeks,” a music critic wrote in a feature for 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.”
Several industry figures were wrong, needless to say. Fully Completely — a very good album, I feel I should point out, and practically a greatest hits collection all on its own — was never recognized internationally, a deficiency it shares with every record The Tragically Hip has put out.
“Gee, we sold 300,000 copies of this record in Canada,” Gord Sinclair said in an interview years later. “There’s 10 times as many people in the States, so 10 times 300,000 is … I think I’m gonna move next door to Bruce Springsteen. Two weeks before the record comes out, all the record company is saying is, ‘It’s gonna be big, boys, look out!’ Then the week after, no one returns our calls.”
The band members 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 featuring marquee talent like Wilco and Sheryl Crow 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, on the other hand, they couldn’t sell 100,000 copies in five years.
Day for Night, the followup to Fully Completely and the record positioned best for U.S. success, is a good album, maybe a great album, but it isn’t the sort of album that clinches mainstream stardom. This was 1994 — the year of Parklife, of Mellow Gold, of The Downward Spiral, of The Blue Album, of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Compared to any of those, two decades later, Day for Night sounds — well, it sounds like a rock album, but not the kind of rock album that lights up switchboards or changes lives.
“I’m not aware of any other contemporary Canadian or international band which has had the sustained continuing success of The Tragically Hip in this market, except maybe U2,” Ross Reynolds, the president of Universal Music Canada, said in 1997. But even U2 spent the ’90s trying to keep up with what they sensed was an epochal cultural change. The Tragically Hip never had an Achtung Baby or, I don’t know, an OK Computer. They were a rock band, and they made rock albums, and to hell with cultural change.
These are the fanatics, the ones who’d have given anything to be here. They even seemed suspicious of me, with my journalist’s impurity. Several industry figures were wrong, needless to say. Fully Completely was never recognized internationally.
In 1997, the band put out Live Between Us, a terrific live record and, more important, a persuasive argument that what The Tragically Hip does best is perform loud music to arenas full of people. At home, Live Between Us wasn’t so much released as it was launched like a blockbuster: There was a fullthroated promotional campaign, advance pre-sale offers, special midnight openings at record stores across the country, burbling hype from the media, radio play, effusive reviews and sunny prospects from buyers for Sunrise Records and HMV. Abroad, there was zip — in the United States, the album didn’t even have a distributor.
“Interviewers always ask us about our success or lack of success in the States, which I find absurd,” Downie told a magazine around that time. “All we’ve ever wanted to do was be successful on our own terms.”
But still the interviewers asked and speculated and preached about it constantly. So obsessed was the Canadian media with the narrative that it hasn’t changed much at all since.
What could it mean, this phenomenon? Of course, we all get so defensive about the whole thing, protective even, as if we can hardly help ourselves.
The Tragically Hip’s local celebrity and foreign obscurity — why, did you know they play in tiny nightclubs in the United States? — is a subject of such enduring fascination to people in this country that it’s become a veritable point of pride. They’re ours! You don’t understand them! The Tragically Hip are intrinsically, fundamentally, indispensably of our land! They’re quintessentially Canadian!
It’s 6 p.m. last Wednesday evening in the platinum section of the Air Canada Centre in Toronto. All around me, everywhere, people are in a state of furor, running amok, going mental. A young woman, otherwise perfectly sensible-looking, is zooming down the floor-section aisle toward her front-row seat, literally shrieking with joy, or what I supposed was joy, with her hands waving about in the air above her head.
A very large man, prodigiously pink-faced, is bounding down a set of wide stadium stairs carrying a precarious stack of transparent plastic cups filled to the brim with beer — carrying them in one hand, almost like a parlour trick, and doing it with such abandon that everyone he passed looked stricken with vicarious anxiety.
A man in crutches with a cast on his leg hobbles down the same stairs, nearly falls, recovers and starts dancing, a bit like when someone stumbles as they step off an elevator and try to make it look like a deliberately fanciful skip. Needless to say, Toronto is thrilled.
This is three shows for me now, something like 50,000 attendees among them, and it occurs to me that the only black people I’ve seen are wearing shirts that say “security” — which does make you wonder about these breathless claims on behalf of the band’s universality. We’re in Toronto, the most diverse city in the country, and to look around the room you’d think we were at a Scandinavian summit.
Toronto is home for me, so a lot of people I know are in attendance this evening, including several people I’d never heard mention liking The Tragically Hip. But there’s also Ryan, one of my closest friends and the most enthusiastic Hip fan I know. Ryan bought a pair of tickets for $400 online that turned out to be nonexistent. He was scammed, which is even worse than being gouged by a scalper.
“I literally stepped out of my office and cried my eyes out,” he says. But Ryan isn’t easily discouraged. He bought another ticket, a $250 single, authentic this time, thank God. He also made a donation to the Sunnybrook Foundation, the charity where proceeds of the ticket sales are set to go.
Ryan is thrilled, even though he has a ghastly cold, and as showtime approaches we take our seats on opposite ends of the arena. Then the loudspeaker announcement I’d heard twice before: “The show will begin in five minutes. If you’re not in your seats when the show begins, I will be very disappointed.” That usually does the trick. And in five minutes out strolls Downie et al., this time starting with The Luxury.
Watch the same show three nights in close succession, and you begin to notice certain things about the audience. For example, whenever the band begins its routine suite of songs from Man Machine Poem, the new album, typically 15 or 20 minutes into the set, people just stream out in the hundreds, as if on cue.
It isn’t because the songs are bad. In a World Possessed by the Human Mind, the first single on the record and a staple of the tour, is maybe the best song they’ve written in 20 years. But The Tragically Hip are a hugely popular band — in Canada, anyhow — and at their degree of popularity they’re bound to draw a contingent of fans who don’t know Road Apples or In Between Evolution front to back, and who especially aren’t interested in digesting what the band has been up to lately. They want the hits, baby. What Blue and In Sarnia simply aren’t going to cut it.
Out in the concourse, a few big men in baseball caps sit at a small bar, drinking pints of Molson Canadian and watching the Blue Jays play the Tampa Bay Rays, happening at the Rogers Centre down the road.
A hit would come on — Ahead by a Century, say — and these big men would cheer and sing along, eyes still glued to the television. “And that’s where the hornet stung me / And I had a feverish dream / With revenge and doubt / Tonight we smoke them out.” A lovely song. The band performed it beautifully. Historic night! Electrifying!
The big men had a good time, I’m sure, downing those Canadians and singing along and watching the game. And all of this — the beerdrinking, the baseball-watching, the carousing in a hockey arena and gamely singing along — is part of the narrative, part of the story the circus wants to tell.
“We were playing to a lot of expats and the homesick and student travellers abroad, almost like the USO.” This is Gord Downie, talking to an interviewer about doing the club circuit in the U.S. in the mid’90s, when Canadians would cross the border to fill out the rooms.
“I’d make jokes about performing for the troops in these far-off places. They’d make themselves known, and in ridiculous ways. I would only notice it after the show when I’d be standing around talking and there would be one American saying, ‘You guys were pretty good,’ and then a guy from Canada going, ‘Yeah, f---in’ right! They’re Canadian boys, they’re more than pretty good!’ — really defensive.
“I understand it. The homesickness mixed with alcohol is a pretty potent brew … They’re not necessarily Hip fans … I had no affinity for people that would do that.”
To me, that says everything: the noxious civic pride and selfconsciousness, the bullying tone, the total incuriosity about what the band is actually doing, or trying to do. Downie, no doubt, resigned himself to the reality that he would never be a superstar in the U.S. many years and several albums ago, but that doesn’t mean he wants to be the opposite — the Canadian totem — either. I suspect he cares rather less about what he means to Canada than we do.
If there is a problem with The Hip’s domestic isolation, with them being stranded at home and not discussed or cared about anywhere else, it’s that the same people, the same Canadian journalists, have been exalting them in identical terms for close to 30 years. There’s been next to no discourse about The Tragically Hip by U.S. critics. They’ve never had an album reviewed by Pitchfork. Robert Christgau wrote about them only once, and not kindly. (“That northern nation’s favorite rock band … has progressed from a passable blues-band literacy … to candidly ornate and obscure artrock … Blame Canada.”)
Instead, we get the familiar bromides of a local media duty-bound to hail its national heroes. We get Hip clichés. We get the narrative. We get journalists on laptops and concert reviews that write themselves, before the show even begins.
All the paeans and panegyrics unleashed upon the nation’s arts pages since the announcement of Downie’s illness, all the odes to the great man’s genius and the unifying theories of What The Hip Mean, come ready-made, like prefab convictions. As the band heads into its grand finale in Kingston — to be live-streamed and widely watched across the land — it’s only going to get worse, more mawkish and maudlin.
The Hip will, of course, survive all that. They’ll emerge from the deluge of cliché unscathed. This tour is a testament to their merits as songwriters and musicians and live performers, unfettered by journalistic sentiment. What the band does well is clear without recourse to any trumped-up patriotism. They’re excellent, and that is enough.
It isn’t that the Tragically Hip are a strange symbol for our country to want to adopt. What’s strange is that our country wants to adopt a symbol so badly.
Maybe the impulse itself is what we ought to scrutinize and ponder and try to find the meaning of. Maybe that’s quintessentially Canadian.
Downie, no doubt, resigned himself to the reality that he would never be a superstar in the U.S. many years and several albums ago.