BARCLAY TELLS GORD DOWNIE STORY HIS WAY,
Writing the history of a band as beloved and iconic as The Tragically Hip is a challenge for which Michael Barclay is eminently qualified.
As well as writing a weekly music column for this newspaper for many years, the Toronto-based Barclay has spent much of the past quarter-century writing about music for publications like the fondly-remembered Guelph weekly Id, as well as Exclaim, Maclean’s, and CBC, and his writing has also appeared in the Globe and Mail, Billboard, and the New York Times. He is also the co-author (with Ian A.D. Jack and Jason Schneider) of “Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995,” a definitive read for any music fan, Canadian or otherwise, for which Gord Downie wrote the foreword.
To his impressive resumé, Barclay can now add “The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip,” an unauthorized biography released on ECW Press last month that charts the band’s rise from Kingston, Ont., bar band to Canadian icons — a success story whose tragic finale included the band’s emotional final tour and nationally televised farewell concert in 2016, and Downie’s death late last year.
In a phone interview this week, Barclay explained his willingness to take on such a daunting project.
“I wanted to write the book that I wanted to read,” he said. “I was worried that, if a biography was written, it would just be pretty straightforward and maybe even a bit dull, because this is a band of middleclass guys who were successful right away and no major bumps in the road, and then a tragic ending. And so, the challenge is, how do you make that into an interesting book? I mean, there’s lots of drama at the end of the story, but they’re very private people and I think if you’re looking for the raw, emotional drama of what Gord Downie was feeling in the last two years of his life, that’s a story that’s up to the family to tell. This is a book about the rest of their career, about why we cared about them in the first place, and about all the things that this band made me contemplate over the last 30 years, everything from poetry and music, to American success, to mentorship, right up through to reconciliation and dealing with disease in art.”
Though The Hip attracted a diehard fan base throughout their career, Barclay said he wanted “The Never-Ending Present” to be accessible to everyone.
“I wanted to write a book that superfans would want to read, would need to have on the shelves, but I also wanted people who just tuned in 2016 to find out the full story. I wanted to write this for people who are not fans of the band’s music necessarily, and draw them into a really compelling story and have a cultural conversation. It’s much like Gord Downie said that night, “Everybody is invited, everybody is involved,” that’s something he said at the last show, and that’s what I want this book to be for as well. And so far the reaction has been great, from my 79-year-old aunt to people in their 20s, to people my age who are too cool for school to ever like the band, to the superfans. So it’s gotten exactly the kind of reaction I was hoping for.”
That said, given the lack of an official blessing from the band, there has been a mixed response online from some fans, and most notably from The Hip’s guitarist Rob Baker, who tweeted, “Don’t believe everything you read. I saw a few paragraphs and almost blew my coffee out my nose.”
Barclay said Baker’s reaction “is a bit rich, because I offered the band the opportunity to fact-check the book and they declined. All of my information is from the public record, things the band said themselves, and things from interviews I did with people who worked with them directly,” he said. “This is very much their story told through the other people who were there when it happened — the producers of the records, for example, the opening bands, old friends of theirs. All of those voices are in this book, and the band’s voice is in the book as well, again from the historical record.”
The book title’s reference to “Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip” is explained by Barclay’s admiration for Downie’s solo career, particularly the singer’s first solo album, 2001’s “Coke Machine Glow,” a musical detour that confused many of The Hip faithful at the time.
“I don’t think an official biography of The Tragically Hip would even talk about Gord’s solo records, where I think that three of them are as good or better than any Hip record. That first record in particular really intrigues me because it was such a left turn, and it really baffled a lot of people when it came out. I’ve always loved it, and I’ve always wanted to know the story behind it, so for me as a music fan it was fascinating talking to the people who made it,” he said.
An early fan of the band who was then “hot and cold for about 25 years” on the group, Barclay said writing the book gave him the opportunity to reconsider lesserknown material from their body of work.
“It’s interesting when a band is suddenly finite, and then when you go back and listen to things more closely, you hear a lot of things you missed. There were entire records that I’d written off that I found a lot of things to enjoy on. Some of my favourite Tragically Hip songs today come from albums I had never listened to before last year — I mean, I listened to (them) initially, enough to dismiss them, but obviously I missed things that I now think are really quite beautiful,” he said.
Barclay attended one of the Toronto shows on The Hip’s last tour, as well as the final concert in Kingston, and was writing an article about the group for Maclean’s at the time that, helped by overwhelming public reaction, eventually sparked the idea for the book.
“During the tour, I was writing an article and I didn’t know what it was going to be, they kind of gave me carte blanche, and so I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to start talking to people.’ And so I talked to Sarah Harmer, Dave Bidini, John Samson, Steve Berlin, Peter Garrett, and I started posting them online, before I’d even written the article, and just thought, ‘Well, maybe some geeks will be interested in these.’ And they went totally viral, people were really interested in them, and I think that’s because a lot of what was being written was largely just ‘rah-rah Canada’s band.’ And I think there’s so much more to the story than that, and that’s why I wanted to write the book I did.”