Long time running
Why we’ll never see another band like the Hip,
This is not a eulogy for the Tragically Hip, for they are still very much with us.
This is not a eulogy for Gord Downie, for he is still very much with us.
But the Kingston quintet’s cross-Canada Man Machine Poem tour — which in light of frontman Downie’s recent diagnosis with incurable brain cancer will likely be its last — represents such a landmark moment in living Canadian pop-culture history.
For this moment is all ours. Canada will never know another Tragically Hip. And the rest of the world will never get to know the Tragically Hip as Canada has.
The band’s legions of fans and a nation’s worth of music journalists have remained baffled by the Hip’s inability to attain the notoriety abroad it has enjoyed at home for close to 30 years, but it never has and never will be cause for despair.
And really, “inability” is the wrong word. “Disinterest” might be more appropriate. Which isn’t to say the Hip hasn’t occasionally shown interest in breaking out beyond these borders. It never showed more interest in playing the industry game required to crack wide in the U.S. than it did in playing the industry game required to crack even wider here at home at the height of its commercial powers, after Fully Completely in 1992.
So if the Tragically Hip goes down as Canada’s best-kept rock ’n’ roll secret for all eternity, so be it. The Tragically Hip probably is Canada’s best kept rock ’n’ roll secret.
The Hip, blessed with Downie’s abundant lyrical gifts, has always been smarter than your average band. But in its early days — circa its self-titled 1987 debut, 1989’s Up to Here and 1991’s Road Apples — it disguised its braininess with a seductive veneer of down-’n’-dirty, blues-rooted barroom populism.
But Downie was already operating at a higher writerly level than most of the band’s bigger-selling contemporaries on the Canadian charts.
“I’m looking for a cemetery side road / I’m screaming like a lighthouse lamp,” he sang on “Cemetery Sideroad.” “I’m chasing after what I think that I’m owed / Like a French foreign-legion tramp.”
The Hip’s first single, “Small Town Bringdown,” didn’t dumb it down, either: “It’s a sad thing, bourbons all around / To stop that feeling when you’re living in a small town / You’re long and lean but things don’t get you down / You’re a top-ten kingpin in the borders of your hometown.”
For context: no one looks back on the 1987 Canadian singles chart to Men Without Hats’ “Pop Goes the World,” Haywire’s “Dance Desire,” the Northern Pikes’ “Teenland,” Frozen Ghost’s “Should I See” and Gowan’s “Moonlight Desires” for evidence of a poetic awakening in mainstream Canadian rock.
By the time the Hip hit its full commercial stride with Fully Completely — an album that would eventually sell one million copies domestically to reach the hallowed “diamond” status previously reserved for such export-minded homegrown acts as Bryan Adams, Corey Hart and Alannah Myles — it was already getting moodier and stranger and more expansive musically.
At the same time, Downie’s ever more confident wordsmithery dove deeper and deeper into such impenetrable subjects of Canadiana as the Hugh MacLennan novel The Watch That Ends the Night; the wrongful imprisonment of David Milgaard and the 1951 disappearance of onetime Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko after a plane crash in northern Ontario.
Those traits were taken up with even greater gusto on 1994’s Day for Night, 1996’s Trouble at the Henhouse and 1998’s maybe-best-of-all (for this writer, anyway) Phantom Power — three consecutive No. 1 debuts on Billboard’s Canadian albums chart that never would have reached those heights were it not for the mass goodwill lingering from the Hip’s more approachable earlier records.
“They were just a rock ’n’ roll band before this album,” music writer Jason Schneider wrote about Day for Night when it landed at No. 13 on Chart magazine’s list of the 50 greatest Canadian albums of all time.
“Songs about dead hockey players had indeed made us feel oddly good about ourselves, but Day for Night got inside the Canadian psyche in a terrifying way that simple nationalistic tall tales never could. The songs remain gloriously impenetrable, but their landscapes feel like home.”
Day for Night still dangled a few arena-ready anthems like “Grace, Too” and “Nautical Disaster,” both of which the Hip performed on Saturday Night Live in 1995 when they were still new enough to leave Canadian fans “scratching their toqueclad heads” as much as “everyone in America,” as Mike Usinger said last month in the Georgia Strait.
Those songs were more coiled and mysterious than calling cards such as “Blow at High Dough,” “New Orleans is Sinking” and “Little Bones,” but the vague, pensive and, yes, troubled Trouble and the tauter but still exploratory Phantom Power signalled the cryptic shape of things to come, right up to this year’s pointedly anti-formulaic Man Machine Poem.
The Hip, it was clear, had no interest in playing to lingering goonrock expectations. Most doubters remaining by the mid-1990s were forced to concede that the band was a far greater artistic force to be reckoned with than it had first let on.
In a sense, the Tragically Hip has united two strains of Canadian pop music. On the one hand, Downie belongs to the country’s proud lyrical and storytelling tradition established by the likes of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell.
On the other, the time-tested grind laid down behind him since 1984 by Rob Baker, Gord Sinclair, Johnny Fay and Paul Langlois could trace its roots to the sort of blue-collar Canrock stomp for which bands like the Guess Who were famous in the 1960s and ’70s. The fusion of these two sides made the Hip a unique proposition from the beginning and it has remained a unique proposition ever since. No other band has really managed to cop the Tragically Hip’s style.
Could the Hip have been even bigger? Maybe, if it had embraced selfaware rock stardom the way, say, U2 or R.E.M. — perhaps the closest “arty weirdos done good” analogy America has to the Hip — did at their respective peaks. But that wouldn’t really have suited the Hip’s everyman style.
The shiny suits Downie has worn on the Man Machine Poem tour demonstrate that he could have pulled off the “knowing showboat” thing with his usual flair, but artifice still isn’t the Hip’s thing. Honesty is.
As Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, who came to Kingston to produce 1998’s
“It even took me a while to grasp the idea that this is not just a band, this is a cultural artifact, what the Hip means in Canada.” STEVE BERLIN MEMBER OF ROCK GROUP LOS LOBOS
Phantom Power and 2000’s Music@Work, recently told Maclean’s: “It even took me a while to grasp the idea that this is not just a band, this is a cultural artifact, what the Hip means in Canada.
“There is nobody else like them. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Canadian who doesn’t love the Hip. Down here, I can’t think of someone on that level that means the same thing in the U.S., even Springsteen.”
One more tip of the hat to the Tragically Hip, then, for being so stubbornly better than they’ve had to be for all these years. And another tip of the hat to Downie, in particular, for clearing the way for people like Metric’s Emily Haines to bring poetry to Canadian hockey rinks.
As Calgary poet Laurie Fuhr told the Calgary Herald: “Hosers and dudes across Canada love the Hip and yet he slides in these moments of completely gorgeous poetry and it’s accepted through the vehicle of music. There are so many poets who could see the appeal of the Tragically Hip, but there are relatively few, as far as I know, Tragically Hip fans who would admit to enjoying poetry. It’s so incredible how Gord has put the three together: Music, poetry and being cool.” The Man Machine Poem tour touches down in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre on Aug. 10, 12 and 14 before wrapping in hometown Kingston with a show to be broadcast live on the CBC on Aug. 20.