Anniversary edition offers interesting finds for Hip fans
Road Apples 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
(out of 4) The Tragically Hip. Universal Music Canada
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Has it been 30 years already that the album “Road Apples” has been around? Where does the time fly? For Kingston’s the Tragically Hip, we know how time played out: a rise to glory as Canada’s quintessential rock band, eventually releasing 14 albums, filling venues and winning all sorts of honours before singer Gord Downie’s truly tragic glioblastoma diagnosis was made public on May 24, 2016; the beloved group making a final appearance in their hometown that was nationally televised by the CBC and drew an estimated viewership of 11.7 million. A legacy for the ages. When “Road Apples” was recorded and released in 1991, it was just at the moment when Kingston’s finest rockers really caught on with the crowd, as their rugged live shows crossed the “bubbling under” threshold to the “must-see” stature that would transform and transport them into the majority of Canadian hearts.
There was such a surge in popularity that it was easy to forget that “Road Apples” was only the band’s second album, preceded by “Up to Here,” the Don Smith-produced blueprint that yielded such gems as “Blow at High Dough,” “New Orleans Is Sinking,” “38 Years Old” and “Boots or Hearts.”
It’s no surprise that the second album was amusingly named “Road Apples,” a sardonic reference to tarmac-deposited horse waste, because this was an extremely fertile period in the band’s canon.
Also produced by Smith, the effort served as an important bridge to the skilful refinement of “Fully Completely” that would follow two years later: Downie’s grainy tremolo was passionate and only somewhat disciplined; the granular guitars of Rob Baker and Paul Langlois provided blistering bluesinspired licks and satisfying fills; along with the sinewy rhythm section of Gord Sinclair on bass and Sammy BoDeanish backing vocals with drummer Johnny Fay supplying the centrifugal propellent that, in a live setting, always accelerated the momentum to a blazing payoff.
And then there was the clever imagery of Downie’s often cryptic lyrics: “Little Bones” combined New Orleans references with political disillusion: The long days of Shockley are gone/ So is football Kennedy style/Famous last words taken all wrong/Wind up on the very same pile/2.50 for a decade/And a buck and a half for a year/ Happy hour, happy hour/Happy hour is here.
Pick any fan favourite on “Road Apples” — “Twist My Arm,” “Cordelia,” “The Luxury,” “Three Pistols” — and each lyric reveals the mind of a poet who leaves just enough clues to intrigue you about the song’s subject matter but refuses to spell it out, inviting you to draw your own conclusions.
As the ever unpredictable frontman, disappearing into his own world within plain view of his concert audience, Downie was no less enigmatic.
The “Road Apples 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition,” out Friday, is a four-disc set that includes the Ted Jensen-remastered studio original; the recently discovered and issued six-song “Saskadelphia”; a disc of demos and outtakes called “Hoof-Hearted,” and the 15song-set “Live at the Roxy Los Angeles, May 3, 1991” — which offers plenty of proof of Downie’s willingness to go off on entertaining and improvisational tangents, often in the middle of songs.
For example, at the Roxy performance of the nine-minute “New Orleans Is Sinking,” Downie uses the “Peter Gunn”-flavoured bridge to describe his previous job as a man who “cleaned and scrubbed the killer whale tank at an aquarium” and somehow becomes the victim in a love triangle between the two whales.
He tells the audience of 500 or so that “Twist My Arm” is “a song about delivering pizza to a crack house” and that a bout of appendicitis might be coming on at the end of “She Didn’t Know.”
This spontaneity was what Downie fans often lived for, even though it more often than not caused people to scratch their heads in wonderment. But, along with the band’s electric power, the Roxy concert reminds us that the Hip’s unequivocal vision was almost fully and completely realized by that point in time.
There are some interesting finds in the nine-song “HoofHearted” demos, not the least of which is an acoustic rendition of “Little Bones” that finds Downie softly and repeatedly crooning the two lines of the chorus before finishing off the lyrics at a later date.
“Angst on the Planks” is an earlier, straight-ahead version of “Cordelia” that lacks the melodic magic of and sports much different lyrics from the final work, but it’s a good glimpse into the Hip’s creative process and how they sometimes resorted to drastic reimagination to get the job done.
“If You Lived Here” is a June 1990 demo of an unreleased song and, upon hearing it, you understand why the Hip chose to skip it; there isn’t really anything distinctive about it and it’s easily forgettable.
The “Born in the Water” outtake sounds a little fuller with an extra guitar; “Fight” adjusts the mood ever so slightly to a bluesier hue and the brooding “The Last of the Unplucked Gems” is extended by a good minute and a half from its original 2:04 time frame.
“Road Apples 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition” offers Tragically Hip fans somewhat of a completist view of a creative period that, bookended with “Up to Here,” pole-vaulted the band into the hearts of millions of Canadians: literally, both albums passed the million-sales mark in this country, not the easiest milestone to accomplish.
Not only did it provide a harbinger of a dazzling career to come, but “Road Apples” cemented the Hip’s fan base with an appealing musical adhesive that time refuses to tarnish — it still sounds as good and fresh as the first day you heard it.