By Steve Newton
Tonight (September 28, 2024) the first two episodes of the four-part documentary, The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, are being screened at the Vancouver Playhouse as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Director Mike Downie and the four surviving members of the band will walk the red carpet and take part in a Q&A after the film.
That event is sold out, but for those who’d like a refresher on the Hip’s beginnings and its first recordings, here’s the uncut, unedited version of the first chapter from my 2018 book, Gord Downie, which was titled Straight Outta Kingston.
I hope it’s not all full of typos and factual errors and whatnot.
It has long been said that what makes a lasting rock band is the undying friendship among its members, and the Tragically Hip is a prime example. Lead guitarist Rob Baker and bassist Gord Sinclair grew up across the street from each other and have been buddies since they were three years old, so it only made sense that, while students at Kingston Collegiate, they would perform together at a variety show as the Rodents. Lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie met the two while studying at Kingston’s Queen’s University, where he dabbled in political science and whatever else interested him at the time.
“I did quite a tour of the various faculties,” Downie told me during a roadside phone call from Brantford in September of 1989, one month after the release of Up to Here, “but I didn’t go to enough classes for any of it to rub off on the new album.”
In 1984 the group–bolstered by drummer Johnny Fay and saxophonist Davis Manning–started playing Kingston pubs and then found gigs wherever they could.
“We played around Eastern Ontario a lot,” Downie said, “which can be pretty desolate at times, as far as live music goes, you know, sort of playing in front of the salad bar and stuff like that. And then gradually moved towards Toronto and played around Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe and all around Ontario.”
The band’s earliest set-lists were mainly composed of songs by blues-inspired British rock bands from the ’60s.
“When we put the band together we found that we were gravitating to a lot of Yardbirds, early Stones covers,” said Downie, “that kinda stuff. Not new, but sort of to that era in time. And it was solely due to the fact that that was the stuff we were listening to, and we wished that other bar bands would play that stuff. So instead we compromised and formed a band ourselves and played that kinda stuff.”
When asked to describe how healthy the Kingston music scene seemed when the Hip was first starting out, Downie noted that the preponderance of post-secondary educational institutions probably helped.
“It’s real hard to tell,” he said. “When we were growing up there, I mean like any town, there’s a bunch of bands, and everyone knows who everyone else is–especially in the music community. Plus it’s got Queen’s University there, which brings in a lot of different tastes, if nothing else, and makes it a semi-fertile spawning ground for a band, because at least there’s an open-mindedness about the city.”
When I interviewed Baker in 1991, he suggested that the band’s success had given the musical community in its hometown a much-needed shot in the arm.
“When a band gets out of Kingston and starts to play around—has a video on TV or whatever—then it gives other musicians from the town hope,” he said. “The music scene here went through sort of a slow time, where there was just live music in a Mexican restaurant one night a week or something, but now it seems to be really turning around. I can’t claim that we’re responsible for it, but right now there’s a lot of bands playing around in Kingston.”
While the name the Tragically Hip has become synonymous with the greatest rock music Canada has ever produced, it’s origin is pretty simple. The guys just lifted it from a video compilation by former Monkee Mike Nesmith called Elephant Parts.
“There’s one skit in there that is sort like a TV plea,” Downie explained: ‘Send some money to the Foundation for the Tragically Hip.’ And that phrase has also appeared in an Elvis Costello song. It crops up every now and again, and it’s just a name that we like.”
In 1986 the band’s legendary lineup was cemented with the enlistment of guitarist-vocalist Paul Langlois–and departure of saxman Manning–and soon after the quintet was “discovered” by Bruce Dickinson of MCA Records, who signed them to a worldwide recording deal. But the signing–which would be a dream come true for most musicians–did not come as a big surprise to Downie.
“If you’re aiming for a hole in one, and you get one, you feel lucky,” he mused, “but at the same time you can justifiably say, ‘Well, I was aiming for the hole anyway.’ This is what we were shooting for, so we were very much involved in the step-by-step process of trying to get a worldwide deal. It’s something that we were consciously chasing.”
The band soon found itself in a Toronto studio with producer Kenny Greer, who Canuck-rock fans know best as the guitarist in Red Rider, and whose scintillating steel work lights up such early ’80s hits as “White Hot” and “Lunatic Fringe”. The sessions yielded the band’s self-titled, seven-track EP (eight if you got the CD), which was largely written by Sinclair, who penned the catchy singles “Small Town Bringdown” and “Last American Exit”.
While a worthy document of a young, riff-based band feeling its oats, The Tragically Hip is not generally regarded as one of the band’s best albums. Only one of its songs–the Downie/Baker penned “Highway Girl”–made it onto the 2005 compilation Yer Favourites, whose tracks were selected by the band’s fans on its website. But it would only take one more album for the Hip to hits its creative stride big-time.
Before the Tragically Hip came along, Kingston, Ontario was probably best known for being an early stomping ground of comedian Dan Aykroyd, and for Kingston Penitentiary, which opened in 1835 and didn’t officially close until 2013. Another Ontario prison, Millhaven–which opened in 1971 and was originally built to replace Kingston Pen–was immortalized by Downie’s retelling in “38 Years Old” of a prison break that took place there in 1972. (In that song–which was included on the 1989 Up to Here album and released as a single in April of 1990–the year of the jailbreak was changed to 1973 for rhyming purposes.)
“Where I grew up is a place called Amherstview,” said Downie, “outside Kingston, and even closer to Amherstview is a place called Millhaven Penitentiary, which is a sort of maximum security institution. There’s a lot of prisons around Kingston. And I remember one summer that there was this big huge jailbreak, and it sort of threw the outlying area into a real panic. But I remember being that age and sort of thinking, ‘Wow, this is scary,’ but at the same time it made that summer really memorable. So I just thought it would be good to pretend and take the actual jailbreak on a personal level.”
The poignant “38 Years Old” has endured as one of the favourite songs of hardcore Hip fans, even though it peaked at No. 41 on the Canadian RPM singles chart. It was the fourth single from Up to Here, after “Blow at High Dough”, “New Orleans Is Sinking”, and “Boots or Hearts”. That album was a huge success for the band, achieving diamond status in Canada (over one-million copies sold) and scoring them the Juno Award for Most Promising Group of the Year, an accolade previously earned by such memorable Canuck acts as Bachman-Turner Overdrive (1974) and Rush (1975)–and such forgettable ones as Myles & Lenny (1976) and THP Orchestra (1977).
But according to Downie, the band was successful long before the gritty riffs of “High Dough” became standard fare on Canadian airwaves. As he explained to me in October of 1996–when he called from Toronto before three sold-out Vancouver shows on the Trouble at the Henhouse Tour–the quintet felt like winners from the get go.
“I was in the dentist the other day,” he recalled, “and the receptionist in there, Bonnie, has a kid who’s learning how to play guitar, and he’s getting into a band, so whenever I go in there she talks about the band. She sort of said, ‘How long had you been together before you were successful?’ and I said ‘One day’. And she kind of looked at me really cockeyed. And I was in a bad mood—’cause it was early in the morning and I was in the dentist’s, for chrissakes—so I was like, ‘One day.’ She kind of looked at me and raised an eyebrow. ‘One day?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, exactly.’
“’Cause once we went into the basement and learned a song, we felt successful. Then we learned two songs, and then we got a gig, and on and on—and that’s the way musicians think. I don’t know about other people—I mean, I don’t know about all musicians either—I mean some are more driven than others. We were just happy to be together, and that’s the way we’ve done everything.”
Downie’s assertion that the longtime friends in the Tragically Hip were “just happy to be together” was seconded by Baker when I interviewed him in June of 1997. A month earlier the band had released its first live album, Live Between Us, which had debuted at #1 on the Canadian album charts. I had mentioned to the lead player that the album’s sterling production had helped reveal the oft-overlooked role of rhythm guitarist Langlois, who showed great instincts while laying down the group’s chordal flooring.
“He’s developed into an excellent guitar player,” agreed Baker. “It’s funny, because when he first joined the band he was playin’ like he knew about four or five chords. He was tryin’ to master the barre chord at that time, but it didn’t really matter. The fact that he was a friend was much more important.”
“If we weren’t in this band, some of us wouldn’t be playing at all,” Downie had told me back in ’89. “You have tiffs with someone when he has smelly feet in the touring van, but we all respect each other as friends first.”
When it came time for the five buddies to record the followup to their 1987 EP, Downie and his mates settled on producer Don Smith, who had recently worked with Tom Petty, the Traveling Wilburys, Keith Richards, and Roy Orbison. And their choice of studios was a long way from the hustle and bustle of Toronto this time. At the suggestion of MCA rep Dickinson they set their sights on Ardent Studio in Memphis, Tennessee.
“The Replacements recorded Pleased to Meet Me there,” noted Downie, “and Steve Earle did Copperhead Road there. And ‘The Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin was recorded there, too. But you mainly just go by other people’s opinions, and we certainly trusted Don. We wanted to be in a place where we’d be comfortable.”
While the Tragically Hip EP was like an appetizer of what the band could create as far as guitar-driven rock goes, Up To Here was a full-blown feast. It kicked off with “Blow at High Dough”, which has become synonymous with the incredible power of the Hip in concert. It opens with Sinclair’s quietly pulsating bass line and Fay’s light cymbal touches before Downie croons about somebody shooting a movie in his hometown and everybody coming from miles around to be part of it.
Baker’s slide-guitar snakes its way into the proceedings until, at around the 40-second mark, the song immediately transforms into the type of barnstorming boogie number that, in decades to come, would cause countless Hip fans to rock their socks off to the gloriously ragged guitar/bass/drums racket. Downie’s urgently delivered promise that he can “get behind anything” would certainly prove to be true.
“Blow at High Dough” was released as the album’s debut single in April of 1989, and reached #1 on the RPM CanCon chart, as did the second single, “New Orleans is Sinking”, which Downie told me was inspired by a trip he took to Mardi Gras with some fellow Queens University students and “the reckless times that ensued.”
One of the band’s most groove-oriented numbers, “New Orleans” is another showcase for Baker’s tasty, precise lead licks, as they slither in and out of the steady rhythms built by the other instrumentalists. One of Up to Here’s longer songs, in years to come the band would use its middle section to jam out on, and sometimes insert bits of other artists’ songs into, paying tribute to everyone from David Bowie to Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys.
In 2005, it was named the 16th greatest Canadian song of all time–coming in just ahead of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” and just behind the Band’s “The Weight”–on the CBC Radio One series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version.
When I interviewed Downie shortly after the release of Up to Here, I read him a passage from the band’s bio which stated: “Critics have said that this band will appeal to, quote, alternative connoisseurs and hard-core metalheads and everyone in between.” Then I asked him if he thought that was true.
“Uhhhhhhhh,” he replied. “I don’t really have the time, like when I hear stuff like that, to sort of think about it. ‘Cause you’re going out into a crowd, and I don’t think I say, you know, ‘Oh there’s some hard-core metalheads and some alternative fringe types, so we should be okay.’ We don’t really sort of get into deciphering what the crowd is and what the type of people are who like our music.”
When I interjected by saying that I personally thought the music on Up to Here was awesome enough to attract pretty well anybody for one reason or another, he thanked me for the vote of confidence.
“That’s cool,” he said, “but, you know, we made it probably first and foremost to fit our standards. When we’re finished a track in the studio we’re saying, ‘That was great. That felt good. That gave me a good feeling.” But we’re not saying, [in a radio announcer’s voice] ‘I think this will appeal to the under-16, female, white audience.’ I mean you leave that to the DJs and the people who write bios, I guess.”
Despite strong sales in its home country–Up to Here earned platinum status (100,000 copies sold in Canada) within six months–the album failed to achieve similar levels of success in the massive American market. That was the first real indication that–unlike other famed Canadian rock acts like Rush, Bryan Adams, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive–the Tragically Hip’s popularity would be mostly confined to its home country. For more on that strange phenomenon, see Chapter 3: Canuck to the Core.
© 2018 Stephen Ross Newton
To hear the full audio of all five of my interviews with Gord Downie subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with music legends since 1982.