“It makes no sense how it makes no sense.”
Blow at High Dough – from Up to Here
You pretty much have to be Canadian to know that 2016 has
struck again.
This morning the news hit my generation of Canadians like
the Rogers Pass avalanche. (The only way to do this right has to include a few
obscure pieces of Canadiana.) Gord Downie
has terminal brain cancer - a glioblastoma.
He isn’t gone yet. But I have to process this now. Forgive
me for eulogizing him prematurely. I can’t do this twice.
You may have to have hit adulthood in the late 80s or early
90s above the 49th parallel for this to be true, but for those of us
who did, this is Prince. This is Bowie. This is one assholebastardmutherfucker
of a year.
“There’s more worms than earth in the afterlife.”
Leave – from In Violet Light
I’ve lost track of how I ended up being the harbinger, but
it has become a bit of a sick joke among friends that this is all my fault. I
suspect that I wake up early enough that I am the first one tapped into the
news cycle… although Jodie has actually been the one breaking the news to me on
most of these things. Lemmy (three days
short of 2016), Bowie, Prince, very nearly Sinead O’Connor (and don’t begin to
think that drama is over yet) as well as a long list of diminishingly relevant
supporting cast from Glenn Frey (who touched our generation, but was really a
luminary of an earlier time) to John Berry – the Beastie Boys’ Pete Best, to
Phife Dawg… the depth of my rap and hip hop cred is admittedly shallow. It has escaped
few people that 2016 has it out for our music idols. In Canada we’ve already faced the farewell
tour of Spirit of the West, as John Mann cannot carry on due to early on-set
Alzheimers, and now we are awaiting dates for the final Tragically Hip tour. I
will try to be there. But I’m going to be a complete mess.
Both Bowie and Prince hit me. Bowie comes a hair short of
making my list of artists I think can do no wrong, and is responsible for one
of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Prince, I never loved, but I always
appreciated and I respect his impact on the music world. I didn’t cry for either of them. But this morning I wasn’t surprised when a
few minutes after getting the news I felt the tears well up in my eyes.
As 2016 cut swathes through pop-culture I was holding my
breath and crossing my fingers that at least my top three would get through
unscathed. But that hope is gone now. (U2 & Pearl Jam, to answer the
associated question.)
“Get Ry Cooder to sing
my eulogy.”
At the 100th
Meridian – from Fully Completely
I could take you to within yards of where I was when I heard
my first Tragically Hip song. I was listening to the radio on my way to a
friend’s house. The DJ had some blah
blah about a new Canadian band out of Kingston and then Small Town Bringdown was unleashed upon my future. A few years
later, playing in a band myself, our bassist suggested that we should play Blow at High Dough from “this new band”
he’d heard of. I was delighted that The Hip weren’t yet another of the long list
of bands that hit my radar once and then disappeared.
When I was touring in the early 90s with the Juanabees, The Hip were
always in high rotation and we did our best to convert non-Canadians to the
church of Gord – his bizarre mid-song sermons of fractured thought. “I’m wearin’ my red shirt!” he told us on
Canada Day in 1992, as he went on to muse about whether he should burn it there
on the stage or save it for the next 25 year benchmark of Confederation. It
looks like he should have burned it. That concert – their third in that day as
they played coast to coast – still stands as one of the greatest I’ve ever
seen. We had been in the sun all day and The Hip were probably the 10th
or 12th act of the day, but everyone in that stadium found the
reserves to give every joule of energy put out by the band right back to them
ten-fold. It was a revival.
“God has left the
museum for good.”
Scared –
from Day for Night
The band behind him was – is – a highly functioning rock and
roll unit, and it is unfair as it is inevitable to diminish their contributions.
Despite the fact that they were all better raw musicians than Gord, The Hip
were nothing without him. It wasn’t just
his riveting stage antics that did it.
While he wasn’t the greatest vocalist, indeed some of his cliché embellishments
were kind of mock-worthy (E.g. By 1994, his penchant for hopping up an octave
on the last syllable of a line was boringly predictable… fortunately he out
grew that one.), his lyrics made him an unofficial poet-laureate of Canada.
Each song was a perfectly crafted puzzle – always with enough clear intent to
invite you to glean more, but every one with enough depth and obscure
reference as to be tantalizingly out of reach.
And every now and then he would succinctly encapsule a universal feeling
with hideous economy that could strike me to the core. Never was this more the case for me
personally than with the last line of “Ahead By a Century.” By now I’ve forgotten what exactly was going
on in my life that made it so pertinent, but on the very first listen that line –
“Disappointing you is getting me down” – tore into my present with the violence
of the Lac Megantic explosion. I was in tears before the final chord faded.
“Did I read it all
wrong? Or have I just not gotten it yet?”
Bring it All Back – from Road Apples
Bring it All Back – from Road Apples
More than that though, over the
course of his thirty years in the spotlight, Gord focussed his own eye repeatedly on
a number of subjects that recurred throughout his poetry that seemed to tie
together his work into some kind of tangled unity. Numerous Hip songs make
reference to any number of nautical mishaps either in process (Nautical
Disaster) or in the narrator’s past (Fiddler’s Green), with varying levels of
direct (The Dire Wolf) and oblique (Locked in the Trunk of a Car) reference. The same goes with crime – usually lurid,
often Canadian; Hockey – Gord was a
goalie of accomplishment… at least at the Juno Cup; and of course more
diabolically dysfunctional relationships than any lifetime has time for. But
throughout it all it was unabashedly Canadian. Canadian in a manner that not only defined his style, but also in a
manner that could mark something as Canadian by right of having fallen under
his gaze. He loved Canada and he became a singular part of Canadian culture.
“Heaven is a better place today because of this. But the world is just
not the same.”
Heaven
is a better place today – from In Between Evolution
I saw them 5 or maybe 6 times. It would have been more if not that by some frustrating bit of fate The Juanabees tour was always travelling West when the Another Roadside Attraction Tour was travelling East. Without fail we would play Winnipeg while they were in Saskatoon and two days later we would have switched places. I'm not sure I'll handle it well if I go to this last tour, and maybe it would be best if I don't. But if the opportunity presents itself, I don't think I can afford to not see them one last time.
"Those melodies come back to me. Time beyond our heartbeat."
Escape is at Hand for the Travellin' Man – from Phantom Power
We have one last album. Man. Machine. Poem. Its due in a few weeks. Even the title scares me, like once again he has said more in three words about one idea than I can express in several pages of rambling. Of course he is much closer to whatever thought processes face the terminally ill. I feel like there are emotional hand-grenades destined to be hidden in there - little windows into his mind as he faces the event horizon of life. And we all know he is capable of expressing those ideas in ways that will fascinate, confuse and devastate. I eagerly want to tear into it, but I've avoided the pre-release single. I didn't have a reason before now. I don't want to face the reality that it is the end.
"When the birds can be heard above the reckoning carts doing some final accounting."
Poets - From Phantom Power
Fuck.
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