ODE TO GORD DOWNIE
A toast to Canada’s unofficial poet laureate,
Even if you’re not a fan you probably know the lyrics. “Bill Barilko disappeared that summer / He was on a fishing trip / The last goal he ever scored / Won the Leafs the Cup / They didn’t win another till 1962 / the year he was discovered.”
So go the opening lyrics to “Fifty Mission Cap,” the Tragically Hip’s 1992 hit about Barilko, a Leaf defenceman who scored an overtime goal winning the 1951 Stanley Cup. A few months later, the plane he was on crashed, a mystery until the wreckage was found 11 years later in Northern Ontario.
If it wasn’t so tied up with their lack of wins, this song about a fallen sports hero might be the Leafs anthem today, sung aloud at the ACC during games. The lyrics Hip frontman Gord Downie wrote are more complicated though, much like life itself, and the song is about so much more than just hockey: a city longing for victory; thwarted talent; the vastness of the Canadian Shield. When word came this week of Downie’s diagnosis with terminal brain cancer, affection for him poured out across the country.
Downie is the Poet Laureate of Canada, in spirit if not yet by official appointment. His lyrics conjure Canadian sports mythology, historical figures, long struggles, regional sensibilities, and the geography itself. They resonate deeply too.
“Bobcaygeon” is their most Toronto of songs, about a cop leaving a country house, after maybe a weekend away, and heading back to work in the city. We get glimpses of that job with lyrics like these: “That night in Toronto / With its checkerboard floors / Riding on horseback / And keeping order restored.”
The checkerboard floor is the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen St. W., where the band often played. For those of us who don’t have our own cottage connection, the song is an invitation into Toronto’s town-andcountry mythology.
The band’s 2004 show at the Air Canada Centre became a featurelength concert film called, aptly, That Night in Toronto. When Downie sang the eponymous line, the skyline of Toronto was projected behind the band and the crowd roared. Watching that moment is infectious. Try not to get goose bumps.
Either overtly or by instinct, many Canadian artists of all stripes tone down or hide their “Canadianess” in order to have more international appeal, particularly south of the border. It’s hard to blame any of them: making a go of an artistic career in a country with a small population is a challenge, but the Tragically Hip have never ignored where they’re from.
Downie and his band mates make both direct and oblique references to Canada in their songs, sometimes unmistakably, other times a reference that not everyone might get. Their song “Wheat Kings,” about the wrongful conviction of David Milgaard, is also just a beautiful song that makes you feel like you understand Saskatchewan.
The voracious reaction from the crowd at the ACC when Downie sang the Toronto line in 2004 is evidence there’s an appetite for this kind of representation in Canada.
To understand our lives, they need to be reflected back to us through our artists. Of course the Hip aren’t the only ones doing this, but they’re able to fill arenas doing it, a remarkable feat.
Though they never hit it big in the United States, in border states like Michigan and New York, the Canadian mythology Downie spun found an audience there, too.
It helped that Hip songs are often anthemic and everybody can sing along. That, along with lyrics about places like Millhaven prison, Sault Ste. Marie, and Newfoundland’s Isle aux Morts, may be why the Hip are so often the soundtrack to Canadian road trips.
In many ways, Drake has continued Downie’s work with all his lyrical references to the “6ix.” Both have an unabashed confidence in being Canadian that doesn’t sound forced like so many Canadian cultural initiatives do. We need more Gord Downie songs, and Canada needs more artists who embrace our landscape as he and the Hip do, telling more stories of this complicated landscape. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.