By Steve Newton
Back in 2018 my coffee-table (beer-table?) book about Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, simply titled Gord Downie, was published by New York City’s Sterling Publishing.
It included a chapter titled Canuck to the Core, which took an in-depth look at how Downie’s lyrics focused on Canada, the country he so dearly loved, and how the Tragically Hip’s sheer Canadianness may have hurt its chances for major success in the lucrative U.S. market.
Although my editor at Sterling, Barbara Berger, did an amazing job shaping my work and guiding my newbie self through the publishing process, large swaths of the copy I originally sent to her for Chapter 3 were edited out, mainly because the book was meant to put only a positive glow on Downie and the Hip. The lengthy quotes from my 1996 interview with Downie, where he strongly speaks out about the band’s peculiar relationship with America, didn’t make the cut.
With the current wave of Canadian patriotism sweeping the country thanks to Donald Trump’s shocking tariffs and threats to our sovereignty, I reckon the time is right to let hardcore fans have an unfettered look at how Gord Downie viewed things back in the heyday of the Hip. I started the chapter by pointing out some of the many ways Canadian people, places, and things were referenced in the band’s songs, then I used quotes from interviews I’d done with fellow Canadian music greats like Tom Cochrane, Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor, and Odds’ Craig Northey to get the point across.
Downie’s rant about the chasm that existed between the band’s success in Canada and its success Stateside–and how he felt about it as a proud Canadian–shows up in the chapter’s second half, but there’s a 50% tariff for any Americans who want to read it.
The Tragically Hip’s overt Canadianism is one of the things that has drawn fans to the band and kept them there forever. Their self-titled EP mentions Toronto’s Regent Theatre in the CD-only track “All-Canadian Surf Club”, and Up to Here’s “38 Years Old” was a fictionalized retelling of a jailbreak from a prison near the band’s Kingston hometown. But the band’s fondness for expressing the Canadian experience was taken up a notch on Up to Here‘s followup, Road Apples, which had the original working title of Saskadelphia.
“We had several names for the record,” guitarist Rob Baker told me in 1991, when he was still known as Bobby Baker, “and the American label—we’re signed directly to MCA USA—felt that all of our titles were too much inside jokes, or that they sounded too Canadian. And they’re really giving us this, ‘Oh no, Americans won’t understand it.’
“So we said, ‘Oh, how about Road Apples,’ ” Baker said, recalling the old slang for horseshit. “And of course they had no idea what road apples were in Los Angeles. They said, ‘Oh yeah! Songs that you wrote on the road! We love it!’
“At that point everyone was a little pissed off that we were encountering so much resistance from the American label about the name of the record, and the fact that we’re Canadian…and proud of it, I guess.”
Proud indeed. Also on Road Apples, the Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie was mentioned in “Born in the Water”, Ontario’s Canoe Lake was referenced in “Three Pistols”, and way over on the left coast, the Golden Rim Motor Inn in Golden, B.C. got the nod in “The Luxury”.
But it wasn’t until the next album, 1992’s Fully Completely, that the Hip’s infatuation with all things Canuck really came to light. The lyrics mention everything from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to legendary explorer Jacques Cartier to former Toronto Maple Leafs player Bill Barilko. The opening song was even called “Courage (For Hugh McLellan)”, in reference to one of the country’s top literary giants, the author of such books as Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes, and The Watch That Ends the Night.
“For some odd reason, I was drawn to Hugh MacLennan in this last year,” Downie explained to me in November of ’92. “I’d never read anything by him, and then just sort of plowed through a bunch of his books. And I just found that, coupling that with the reading of the Globe and Mail, you see a lot of similarities and how a lot of things just haven’t changed.
“He’s just generally a great Canadian voice, and I think a lot of people in Canada are moving towards some kind of things that identify us. Maybe there’s some kind of resurgence in Canadiana. I mean, we’re certainly doing our part. But maybe it’s more a reflection of [the fact that] it’s the most time we’ve spent in one place in Canada in a long while, this past, say, nine months. So listening to the TV and radio, reading the paper, you couldn’t help but get that sense.”
Of course, you can’t really call a band “Canuck to the Core” until they write a song about hockey, but the Hip had that covered on Fully Completely. Because the album was released before the Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series, Downie didn’t have the opportunity to wax poetic about the social ramifications of Canada stealing the glory of the States’ national pastime, but in the much-loved “Fifty Mission Cap” he dabbles in Canadian sports with a tune based on the curious story of ’50s NHL player Barilko, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances during a fishing trip.
“The story itself, to me, is really haunting in that I hadn’t heard it before,” Downie told me, “and once I started sort of thinking about it, you know, basically ripping off verbatim a hockey card, I started talking to people about it. And it was interesting, the different stories that came out from the old-timers and such. I went to the reference library here in Toronto and checked out the old Toronto Stars from 1951 and basically followed the chronology of events from the playoff semi-finals right up to basically the Hercules [military aircraft] flying over Timmins looking for him. And it was creepy.
“It’s a good story,” continued Downie. “That series, all five games went into overtime and the winner was his, and he wasn’t necessarily noted as a scorer. There were great pictures of him being held aloft at old Maple Leaf Gardens. And that summer he went on a fishing trip and disappeared in a plane with a dentist, and then all kinds of stories sort of arose. There were thoughts that maybe he had defected, you know, during the McCarthy era, defected sort of back to the Soviet Union and was a spy and playing hockey with the Russians. And someone else had him high-grading gold with this dentist friend of his, which was entirely illegal. The RCMP were right on his trail. Paul [Langlois]’s old man lived in that area, Smooth Rock Falls/Timmins area, and some of those people heard planes going overhead.
“So it’s a simple song, but it sort of evokes… I don’t know. Interest. I guess we all know about Emelia Earheart, and Leopold and Loeb. And Al Capone and stuff. It’s nice to know something like this.”
The Canadian references continue unabated on Fully Completely. “Looking for a Place to Happen” name drops Jacques Cartier, “Wheat Kings” references David Milgaard, a Canadian who spent 23 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit; and “Locked In The Trunk Of A Car” draws upon the kidnapping of Pierre LaPorte, a Quebec cabinet minister, during the FLQ crisis of 1970. “At the Hundredth Meridian” is a reference to the 100th meridian west, which is a line of longitude that separates much of Western Canada from the Central and Atlantic regions of Canada and is where, as Downie accurately points out in the chorus, “the Great Plains begin”.
While Fully Completely is probably the most overtly “Canadian” of all the Tragically Hip albums, the band still had the Canuck vibe going big-time two years later on Day for Night. The album’s second track, “Daredevil”, brought to mind Niagara Falls, Ontario, with the lyrics about somebody going over a waterfall in a barrel. The next song, “Greasy Jungle”, has Downie singing about driving down a road to Hazeldean–a community in Kanata, Ontario–to eat sandwiches and coffee at a funeral home. Springside Park in Napanee, Ontario, is mentioned in “An Inch an Hour”, and Highway 401–which stretches 515 miles from Windsor, Ontario, to the Ontario/Quebec border–gets a nod in “Titanic Terrarium”.
The references to Canadian locations, people, and events became slightly less common after Day for Night, but they still popped up pretty regularly–if you were knew where to find them. Two fan-club offered bonus tracks from the 2002 In Violet Light album, “Problem Bears” and “Ultra Mundane”, mention Lac Memphremagog, Quebec, and Etobicoke, Ontario, respectively. 2005’s World Container cites both Moonbeam, Ontario and Mistaken Point, Newfoundland in “Fly”. A bonus track on 2009’s We Are the Same, “Skeleton Park”, refers to a supposedly haunted park in Kingston, now known as McBurney Park. Calgary, Alberta and Attawapiskat, Ontario are name-dropped on 2012’s Now For Plan A via “Take Forever” and closing track “Goodnight Attawapiskat”. And the Tragically Hip’s latest album, 2016’s Machine Man Poem, features an ode to a southwestern Ontario city, “In Sarnia”.
And who could forget “Bobcaygeon”, off 1998’s Phantom Power. That beautiful, whimsical-sounding ditty–named after a town in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario–won the Juno Award for Single of the Year in 2000, and deservedly so. Phantom Power also included the raging rocker “Fireworks”, with its mention of Canadian hockey legend Bobby Orr and Paul Henderson’s winning goal for Canada against the Soviets in the historic 1972 Summit Series.
While lovingly embraced by its devoted followers, the Hip’s continuous identifying with, and mirroring of, all things Canadian no doubt hampered its efforts to break through into the lucrative American market. In fact, the band is almost as well known for being ultra-Canadian as it is for not being well known in the United States–at least as far as relative success goes. When I did the last of my five interviews with Downie back in October of 1996 the Tragically Hip was at its peak of popularity. At that point the latest Hip CD, Trouble at the Henhouse, had sold about 100,000 copies in the U.S., which, while a respectable number, still paled drastically next to the 500,000 it had moved in Canada during the previous five months.
When I called the Tragically Hip’s manager, Jake Gold, to inquire about any strategy the band might have with respect to business in the States, he declined comment with “I don’t do interviews.” One well-informed person who didn’t mind ruminating on the Hip’s curious situation was Vancouver rocker Craig Northey, a good friend of the Hip whose group, the Odds, opened for them the previous year on the Day for Night tour.
“I think what Gord Downie has said before is that if they had kept making their first record over and over again, until it finally hit home, then it mighta worked for them,” said Northey. “But they kept evolving without thinking about it, and Canadians followed it, and now they’re all along for the ride, and it’s a huge bus they’re on.
“Americans might even feel somewhat excluded,” he added, “like they might not understand how it got to that point, and maybe that’s great. Maybe we can all rest comfortably now, knowing that there’s things that are culturally relative, that we don’t have to struggle so hard to have a Canadian identity if that’s going on.”
Tom Cochrane is another much-loved Canadian artist who, like the Hip, has recorded songs encapsulating the Canadian experience. His tune “Big League”, which opened his 1988 album Victory Day, is one of the finest songs every written about hockey. It’s right up there with Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “The Hockey Song”, I’d say.
When I interviewed Cochrane in 1996, after the release of his solo album Ragged Ass Road–which was named after a street in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories–he weighed in on the subject. (Four years earlier his hit single “Life Is a Highway” accomplished what no Hip song ever did in the States, reaching #6 on the Billboard Hot 100.)
“I think the Hip just need that one accessible ‘Shiny Happy People’ pop song, and that’ll do it for ’em,” Cochrane told me. “You know, through the early ’80s, when it was a very corporate scene, I was told by management that ‘This is about business, it’s pop music, it’s about America,’ and I fought against a lot of that. I think I helped forge an atmosphere in Canada where now Canadians will embrace a band like the Tragically Hip and make them the heroes that they deserve to be.
“Who cares if they’re not big in the States or Europe or whatever? That’s not important. Canadians will say, ‘We’re proud of this for what it is, we know it’s good, we don’t have to have somebody else put their stamp of approval on it.’ ”
While many Canadians will choose the Tragically Hip when asked to pick Canada’s best band, there of course are others who will argue to the bitter end that Rush is more deserving of the title. Or the Band. And some will no doubt put Blue Rodeo in the running as well. When I interviewed Blue Rodeo singer-guitarist and co-songwriter Greg Keelor in 1992, he had his own thoughts on the “success in Canada vs. success in America” question.
“When you think of [Canadian] bands like Sarah McLachlan or the Skydiggers or 54-40 or the Tragically Hip,” Keelor noted, “they make music that’s really important to them. It’s like their own personal religions, but at the same time, people really like it, and that’s really cool. We’ve got our fair share of corporate jerk-off rock bands, too, but it just seems that in America—because it is such a huge industry down there—that there’s a lot more concern and attention [given] to that corporate aspect.”
When I did my interview with Downie in 1996, it was for a Tragically Hip cover story in the Georgia Straight, and my editor at the time wanted the main focus of the story to be on the chasm that existed between the band’s success in Canada and its success Stateside. The conversation started out great, me informing Gord that since we’d last talked I’d gotten married and bought a house, and he replying, “Well done. Being you is a two-man job!”
But when I explained to him what the proposed theme of the cover story was, he described it as “dull”. And when I asked whether he thought the Hip’s recent performance on Saturday Night Live had helped push sales down south, that set him off on a ten-minute rant about how he views his art and his band’s ultimate goals and aspirations. At the time I was a little bummed that I’d ticked him off so much, but when I look back on it now, maybe he just needed to vent. So I like to think I was doing him a favour, prodding him to release some demons.
“Aww, jeez,” he started out, sounding exasperated. “Aw. I don’t know, you know, I don’t really know. I mean, the weird thing is, Steve, is I can think with the other side of my brain, and I can do this interview. But I don’t really think that way, is the bottom line. I enjoy the work, you know. I enjoy the work of being in a band; I enjoy touring in America. We’ve been going down there for almost ten years now, and each record has sold more than the one previously. We’ve always managed to seemingly build on where we left off from one record to the next. I mean ultimately there’s so much focus placed on this, but generally, if you’re thinking of the Tragically Hip and this is the best you can do–or the best one can do, not so much you–as far as coming up with the story on the band…
“And I knew this was gonna come up, and you’re not the first, but there’s a lot more there, obviously. I don’t mean to sound all cunty to you, but I mean Network magazine—did you see that in Sam the Record Man? You should check out the cover they did, called ‘The Last Temptation of the Tragically Hip’, with this really bad sort of best-artist-in-Grade-10 rendering of me on a cross. It’s real classy stuff—you can put sarcasm in brackets if you’d like. Really absurd, you know, and if it’s such a story, why don’t people come down and check it out? You should come down and see a show down there.
“We just finished about 90 dates across America this summer, playing clubs for the most part—which maybe would seem like a tragedy to some, but mostly it seems like a tragedy to anyone that never goes, that’s probably never even been down there. And ultimately the people that go to the shows are really happy about it. A lot of Canadians came down, they spent their summer holidays following the band around, really glad to see the band in a small, intimate setting. And the band is very happy to play small, intimate settings. We’re very thankful that we have a very paradoxical career, you know, we’re very proud of it. And we’re very proud of everything we’ve accomplished, both in Canada and America, and in Europe. And we continue to be proud.
“But the thing we’re most proud of is just the work, you know, where touring begets writing, and writing begets recording, which begets more touring. It’s really simple, and it’s really our only story. We enjoy the work, and if you came down and saw a show, you’d realize that those people at that gig–no one’s complaining. There’s nobody complaining, least of all us. We have a fantastic time. We played 90 shows down in America, and I can probably count the number of bad shows on one hand, where I walked off the stage and thought, ‘Well, that was unfulfilling. That was a waste of 48 hours or 24 hours and boy I miss being home.’ I mean that’s ultimately what prompts you to do good work, you know. You’re gonna be away from home, away from the personal life that feeds what you do, that feeds your art. I mean that’s what I believe.
“So when you have a bad gig, or an unfulfilling gig, all that floods in. So on the road, generally, you’re kind of like a boat, like a sailboat, and the diameter of its hull is making a depression in the water, or an indentation in the water, so all you’re trying to do is with your hands is keep the water from coming in and flooding out your chalk drawing, or your temporary piece of work, because that’s what the road is. It’s all very temporary and ethereal and it evaporates faster than water off a sidewalk. All that said, that’s what I enjoy about it. I enjoy the work, and when I’m working I feel like an artist, you know. And it’s not an artist in the industry sense of being petulant and whiny and unpredictable and all of those things that someone might class an artist. I mean an artist is someone who works.
“So five shows, maybe on one hand, the rest were incendiary, you know, just coming off the stage and feeling like we’d taken a total flight of fancy, as though the stage and the audience and the entire room had fallen away and that we were ultimately taking detours and being self-indulgent and creating and writing as the show was going on. The fans are there, and they’re part of it. It just becomes this sort of workshop environment, and they’re part of it–it’s an entirely self-reflexive thing. And it’s more than just what you’re reading or what you’re seeing in your stats about the band.
“And ultimately, what’s the fascination anymore? I mean these lines are blurring. I mean, there is a canyon, and it does seem like a rather large discrepancy [between American and Canadian sales], but ultimately the people that ask this question are really trying to see whether it’s affected our ego or affected our pride, and the answer is a flat no. We’ve managed to build our own studio, we’ve managed to realize most of our dreams, and we’re enjoying ourselves to the hilt.”
At this point in the interview Downie paused–possibly to catch his breath–and I took the opportunity to jump in and explain that I wasn’t trying to point out the band’s shortcomings as far as success in the U.S. goes, but just trying to pick his brain about why it might be that Canadian acts like Shania Twain or Alanis Morissette–which I deemed far less worthy than the Tragically Hip–do huge down there while the Hip has to struggle for recognition. His immediate response made sense, I suppose.
“Well I’m obviously the wrong person to ask,” he replied. “You know, I mean really. I’m the guy doin’ it. I’m the guy out there doing it. I’m living it. You know, and someone’s sort of saying basically, ‘Does this bum you out?’. You know, ‘When I pick this scab does it hurt?’ [Sighs heavily]. And I know that’s not what you’re doing, but when you said this to me I just realized that, for the next bunch of interviews I do, this is what I’m gonna be talking about. And I’ve talked about it ad nauseum. You know, I go down to the States, and they say, ‘Geez, you’re so huge up in Canada, you’re like Canada’s Pearl Jam, and down here you’re unknown. How do you feel?’
“And it’s like, ‘I feel fine, sell a lotta records up there, we got nothin’ to complain about.’ The Yanks think you’re huge up in Canada because the government props you up, you know, that it’s because of CanCon, that’s the only reason you’re huge. So you fight that while you’re down there. And then the Canadians up here are totally involved in all manner of American-bashing–which I don’t really agree with, and never really have. I believe in Canada, but I’ve never believed in Canada at the expense of any other country. But anyway, I mean that’s not really my point. Up here it’s sort of this, ‘We don’t need any kind of American affirmation to tell us what we like,’ but at the same time, ‘Gee, how are you doin’ in America?’.
“I mean America, I guess it’s the big leagues–for anybody–and you ultimately want to test your whatever-it-is-you-are against that sort of thing. But we have nothing to complain about; we sell a lot of records by anybody’s standards. And the weird thing is, I mean you can talk about Alanis Morissette or Shania Twain or the Tragically Hip, but the one thing that the three of us have in common is that we have nothing in common. We don’t write the same songs, we don’t play the same way, we’re all different.
“All musicians and artists are different, and you can look at any single one—Canadian or American—and look at their curriculum vitae, or look at their goals and aspirations, look at their mission statements, and they’ll almost all be different. And ultimately, if you want to take our success in Canada and exponentially translate it to America, you’re talking about us being Guns N’ Roses. Or Counting Crows. Or whatever. And ultimately it’s just something that I don’t think could ever happen to this band, and never really thought it could. And sometimes the thing I fear, in that context, more than American failure, is American success.
“We’re a band that have always sort of done things on our own terms, since the get-go,” Downie concludes, “and that’s not really gonna put you in good stead when you’re up against Jewel and all these other things. But having said all that, the ways I judge success are not even close to that. So when people ask me this question, usually my first reaction is ‘How much time do you have?’ Because it’s a long, complex answer, and it’s still being answered, you know.”
Although Downie was obviously not thrilled with my proposed focus for the Georgia Straight cover story, when it was published in November of 1996, with the headline “Hip at Home”, he didn’t hold any grudges. He actually autographed it and, remembering how concerned I was about having enough quotes for a lengthy cover piece, wrote: “Congratulations Steve. Three times as many words, eh?”
To hear the full audio of my five interviews with Gord Downie from 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1996 subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with the legends of rock.