Head Tale

So I woke up today to the very sad news that Gord Downie, lead singer of the Tragically Hip, has terminal brain cancer.

Obviously, as you age, it’s natural that your own heroes and icons will age ahead of you. But 2016 has been a rough year where we lost some top-shelf music icons – David Bowie (okay, he was in 69’s so that’s not entirely unexpected, especially for someone who presumably indulged in the rock star lifestyle for most of his time on earth), Prince (57) and now we’re faced with losing Gord Downie (currently 52 years old).

(Side note: there are lots of reasons it may seem more celebrities are dying than ever before – we have more of a celebrity culture, more “levels” of celebrity, social media magnifies the impact of each death, and like I said, as we get older, the people we idolize also get older ahead of us.)

Of course, the biggest difference is Bowie & Prince were worldwide superstars whose influence and impact seemed distant and remote whereas Gord Downie *was* The Canadian Rock Star leading a band who defined Canadiana by connecting with Canada.

(To put it in perspective, every year or two, you could expect to see the Gord Downie playing in Regina, Saskatchewan, alone or with the Hip, in a concert hall or hockey rink or as part of a festival or whatever.) To see Bowie or Prince, you basically had to travel to Winnipeg or Edmonton or a much larger centre.

It’s also being regularly pointed out that the Hip are perhaps the only band in Canadian history who made it really big in Canada without needing to also do so in the States – everyone else, from Neil Young to Alanis Morrisette to Justin Bieber – found their biggest success south of the border.  And ironically, the Hip’s embracing of their home country – everything from their lyrics to their appearance to even their names (where else but Canada would you find a band with not just one but two members named “Gord”?) – might be part of what undermined their chances of breakthrough success in the US and beyond.

So many people are sharing their Gord Downie memories today (must be weird for him if he’s surfing the Internet to read all this – but probably nice in a way too.  What do they say?  We should have our funerals while we’re still alive so we know how much we were loved?) and I’m no exception having had a long history with the Tragically Hip…

• I probably got into them around the time of “Up to Here” in 1989 or so when I was in Grade 10 (or given my theory that was a year or two behind any new cool things, it was probably 1990 or 1991!) 😉  At any rate, I’m pretty sure “New Orleans is Sinking” is one of those songs that you hear once then put on repeat (after recording it from an FM radio station to a cassette tape natch) and listen to multiple times in a row.
• I didn’t follow them quite as widely as some mega-fans did but I’ve seen the Downie and/or the Hip live multiple times – in Regina, Saskatoon, as part of the “Another Roadside Attraction” festival (also in Saskatoon), a Gord Downie & the Miracles show at the Regina Folk Fest. Shea and I did a road trip to see their free Canada Day show in Winnipeg in support of War Child in 2000. There’s even a review I posted on a Hip fan board sixteen years ago still kicking around – wow!)
• I also got to see an on-stage interview with Gord Downie at Calgary’s WordFest around 2002 maybe?  He did the interview, took questions from the audience and even answered my go-to Q&A question – “What are you reading right now?” I think his poetry book “Coke Machine Glow” was either coming out or come out yet but he did a couple acoustic songs from the album of the same name.  (I hate that I can’t remember what his answer was – I was about as nervous asking him the question in a full theatre as I’ve ever been speaking in public in my life!)
• I think the Tragically Hip are the only band I went to a midnight album release party for the night that “Trouble at the Henhouse” came out in early May 1996. I still remember going to the CD shop on north Albert St. (can’t remember the name) which was the only one doing a midnight launch, standing in line excitedly then listening to the album on the drive home then again, on repeat, into the early hours of the morning, once I got home.
• During the Phantom Power tour in 1999, Shea and I had tickets to both Saskatoon and Regina shows.  I think they had a promotion where a local radio station would announce a secret location and the first handful of people to get there first would get an upgrade to right in front the stage.  For the Saskatoon show, we weren’t as familiar with the city so just started our quest downtown at a spot near their central library (of course).  The radio  announced the tickets were somewhere near the University so suddenly, you had a bunch of 20-somethings driving like idiots out of downtown towards the Uni (in hindsight, this promotion might not have been the safest idea in the world – I remember getting passed on the left, the right, cut-off and nearly side-swiped as we tried to get there quickly but safely.)  Having had a “practice run”, we decided to stake out the University of Regina for the next show which was perfect since our condo was really close to there as well.  Except, when we were getting to go out just before the radio station was set to announce the secret location, I realised I mis-placed the tickets for not just Shea and I but my sister and her boyfriend as well!  We tore the house apart then, forgetting the contest, I started calling around trying to see if we could get tickets re-printed (ah, the old days before Internet tickets).  Finally, Shea found them on my desk in a plain white envelope!  Meanwhile, we’d missed the radio show announcement of the secret location which was the Centre of the Arts, just a stone’s throw from the University of Regina where we were going to be…of course!
• The Hip released a documentary on VHS (!) called “Heksenketel” and a highlight is one scene where their tour bus driver is being interviewed as he drives across the bald prairie and he mentions the upcoming towns you’ll pass through – including my hometown of Indian Head.  (Side note: working at the IH Esso in high school, we’d occasionally have celebrities come through and – security fail – we used to pin the unused third copy of their credit card receipts the a board in the office to remember these encounters.  We had the Harlem Globetrotters, Aerosmith’s tour bus (but no Aerosmith – they flew I assume), and a few non-celebrities but unique license plates – for example, a couple guys who we found fascinating because they had motorbikes they’d flown over from Japan to go across Canada and had Japanese license plates!)
• I remember watching a Tragically Hip cover band (Practically Hip?) on the patio of Casino Regina.
• As referenced in that 2000 review above, I was fairly big into the Tragically Hip Tape Trading Community where various fans would record and distribute tapes (and later CD-Rs) of concerts.  In hindsight, this experience helped shape my view of online communities & culture and also the open-source, helpful nature of the early mainstream Internet.
• In the days before you could carry a library of music in your pocket, I was on a semester exchange to England but hadn’t brought *any* music with me on cassette or otherwise as I thought a Walkman and a few cassettes would be unnecessary weight for my travels. When I got to the college, I ended up buying a cheap (ten British pounds) clock-radio-cassette player at a nearby pawn shop.  Luckily, one of the other Canadians on the trip wasn’t as stupid as I was and had brought a mix tape of Tragically Hip songs.  He also had gone all in with a dual-cassette player at the same pawn shop so I was able to dub the cassette and along with a couple other mix tapes he had (Blue Rodeo, maybe 1-2 others) the Tragically Hip became a direct connection to home for me and probably even helped prevent me from being more homesick during my time away.
• That time Dan Ackroyd pulled strings to get the Hip a coveted spot on SNL but (if I’m being honest) the performance was a bit lacklustre – the Hip not really being a “flip a switch”-type of band that can be instantly “on” and instead, always seemed to need to build up their energy and momentum.
• I’m a beyond shitty guitarist but for some unknown reason, the opening riff of “New Orleans Is Sinking” is my go to starting point whenever I pick up my guitar to see if it’s (roughly) in tune.
• I’m a huge fan of that style of book that’s an album-by-album review the stories behind the songs along with other biographical elements.  These books exist for bands and artists like U2, REM, Bob Dylan, etc. but I always thought somebody should do one for the Tragically Hip.  (In fact, somewhere in the deep recesses of my computer, I bet there’s even notes and an outline for what a book like that might look like.  Unfortunately, I’ve always been better at starting book projects than finishing them so that never happened.  But maybe now, someone will take it on!)
• I have a minor connection to Gord Downie – in the earliest days of Facebook being open to members of the general public (after being only for University students at first) and before the current situation where there were official pages for bands/organizations/corporations/etc., I tried a “six degrees of separation” game to see who the most famous person I could find on the site (and be relatively sure it was the actual famous person, not an imposter.)  I think it was a writer friend who led me to “Friending” Dave Bidini from the Rheostatics (who’s also an author) which, in turn, led me to getting a friend invite to Gord Downie accepted!

• I titled this post “Gord Downie taught me to dance” and that’s sort of (unfortunately) true.  As you can see in the clip that leads off this post, Downie had a very unique style on stage – “spastic” might be a politically incorrect way to describe it.  Of course, as an awkward kid in my late teen years, I thought it was (and it is) incredibly cool and unique.  So, to this day, I do a Downie-derived spastic dance when I’m busting a move on the dance floor (although his style is fluid and cool and engrossing and mine is just…grossing!)  😉