HIP. HERE. NOW.

It is upon us. No dress rehearsal - this is our life. One more show to go. Just over 24 hours away. The band united a nation. First, slowly over the course of years of faithful commitment to the True North, and then again underlining it these past few months since we first heard the news, in one long concert event that has reached across the country and by the end of Saturday night will have gone around the globe. The band has reached an end that took thirty years to arrive at.

It may be true that not every Canadian is a fan of the Hip, but that fact that so very many of us are and that so many of those are snarling mad for them more than make up for those who yawn. So many of us won over throughout the years (I can walk you to the place in my hometown where I heard Small Town Bringdown when it first came out. Yea, I've been here all along.) All our home towns were cryptically being sung of then, and again over and over through the years. They shot a movie once, in my hometown, it's where I saw the Constellations pushing around a weathervane Jesus while stranded at the Unique Motel. Gord Downie managed to speak specifically to and of all of us.

This goodbye has been so unusual – unique even. Bands have broken up before. Musicians have died. Great things have come to an end because of tragedy and illness. But how many times have an artist’s fans been gifted with a farewell like this? How many times have the artists been gifted with it? Bowie – he knew what was coming and he made it art, but none of us knew what it was all about until he was gone. And we never got a chance to say goodbye. Prince – just gone. Even Spirit of the West… while close in essence… they didn’t fill arenas and there was no last great work – the magnitude was not there, and though I did not get to see any of those last shows, it sounds as though off-stage John Mann had already lost much of himself (which is heart-breaking). But in this case, Gord (and the rest of the fellows too, but let’s face it, their tragedy is that after thirty years of being the ‘other guys’ in Gord Downie’s band, they end has really – understandably - been ALL about him facing his final bow) has also been given this gift. 

I was fortunate to get to see them on the second night of the tour – the first of the two Vancouver shows. It wasn’t the best concert I’ve ever seen, nor the best Hip concert I’d ever seen (Tie: Canada Day 1992, Thunderbird Stadium or November(ish) 1993 Royal Theatre, Victoria – too hard to call.) but I have no doubt it is the one that I will remember the most. There is a moment – a very long moment – that will probably be the single most memorable concert moment of my life (and hey, I saw U2 right after the Enniskillen bombing). Grace, Too was the last song of the main set and there was a point where Gord stopped and looked out at the crowd where a look came over his face….  It went on for probably half a minute. I think we can safely say that Gord Downie was not known for his emotional honesty. Which is not to say that he was a disingenuous performer exactly, but that his style was (and for one more night, IS) a weird fantasy world of mime performed to dense, sung poetry and surreal monologues. Whether he had entered the persona of a doomed sailor, or an ill-fated pool-cleaner or half of a Canadian Bonnie & Clyde, or any of the thousand other characters from tales he vaguely told in a thousand different concerts, he was rarely showing us what Gord Downie himself felt. But not in this moment. He took in the crowd. Appreciative of them and appreciative of the moment. Appreciative of the place in our country’s history he has been given. A place he built out of a thousand pieces of the obscure Canadiana he appreciated. He wasn’t saying “thank you.” He was just being with us for a moment, knowing that all the tiny pieces like this one – that each we had taken for granted as they past had added up to something bigger and this moment embodied it. His part in our collective history, mirroring the impact of his career. Obviously, I don’t know what he was thinking in that moment – but that’s what I took away. Then the moment passed and the mime returned, hitting balls and throwing javelins into the crowd – shining a microphone-shaped flashlight out into the dark….

The moment in question occurs shortly after 2:45 - but you're going to watch the whole thing, right?

I’m trying hard not to put expectations upon tomorrow’s show. I'll watch the CBC broadcast from Kingston in the Woodward's Atrium - practically home. I’m going because it’s the last. I’m going because it is something that Canadians across the world will be sharing.  (For two hours or so, we will collectively quit paying attention to the Olympics. This band means a lot to Canada.) I’m going because I can share it with Jodie and December. (The former isn’t a Hip fan, but understands the importance. The latter doesn’t really even know the Hip yet, but someday I hope she will look back and recognize that the event was significant to me and that she was glad to have shared that.)  I do expect they will do the same thing they’ve done across the country where they spend the first half hour playing to each other, all but ignoring the audience – which is a tremendously powerful statement of brotherhood. I expect the crowd will sing along to even the most obscure of tracks. I expect I’ll cry before its over – hell, I’ve been crying intermittently about it being over since May.

And yes, Gord, you were always right. We will miss you. None of this “wait and you’ll see” bullshit. We will. Fully. And Completely.

Gord Full Stop

“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 49^th 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 100^th 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 10^th or 12^th 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

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.

Defending the Music XXI: A Million Different Voices Singing in Tongues

At last.


Number 21 of 21. The artist who was mocked, starting this entire series of posts, defending my choices for favourite music acts.


This is the only artist on the list who is an individual (though an argument could be made against that), and the timing is excellent as I saw him play live not 72 hours ago.


It was fucking amazing, and that should not be much of a surprize as he - and his band - have been making music together for over forty years.


I am speaking of Bruce Springsteen, and to a lesser extent, the E-Street Band. I will just as happily listen to the Boss's solo tracks as stuff with E-Street and lump it all together as Bruce Springsteen... and I am not alone.

Note that I only have one artist in my list of 21 who is an individual - Bruce Springsteen. He is that good. He can keep pace with 20 other bands that rely upon the creativity of an entire group.

I do recall hearing Born to Run and Thunder Road on my local radio station in Prince George, CKPG, as a kid. But I was hardly a Springsteen fan. I was well on my way towards being a punk rock kid by then. The chances of 'The River' making my playlist could not have been detected by the greatest science of the day. In fact I once allowed someone to play my guitar when I was about 15 and when he played 'The River' I felt the need to wash my poor instrument.

When Born in the U.S.A. came out my Dad bought it through Columbia Music House. My response at the time was something like "Aww, Dad, that album has been out for months. It's SO old." And sure enough it had seen two, or perhaps even three singles by that time. It would stay on the charts for fucking ever and it would seem like every song on the album made the top ten at one time or another. This is definitely hyperbole, but not by as much as one might assume. Seven of the twelve tracks on the album made the top ten and another, not even released as a single(!), cracked the top forty.

We can safely fast forward fifteen years during which I was pretty much unaware of Springsteen. I knew he won an Academy Award for the song he wrote for Philadelphia and had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and got married to one of his bandmates, but really I wasn't interested. The closest he came to really registering on my radar was when Rage Against the Machine (of all people) did a cover of one of his songs... which I found I actually quite liked.

Then someone flew a plan into a building in New York and changed the world.

Springsteen responded with what for me would proved to be his most important album. Some people saw it as opportunistic - capitalizing on the grief and disaster, but not me.

My friend Norm exhorted me to give The Rising a listen. I evaded it until he gave me a copy, at which point it became nothing but capriciousness to not give it at least a token listen. Musically it was a revelation for me. Damn he's a good song-writer - I suppose that ought to go without saying if someone is going to have as long and illustrious a career as he had had. In many ways The Rising said many of the things that were lingering in the back of my mind. He personalized the incident and stepped away from the cliches that had already developed. He was the only artist with the voice to say the things I needed to hear without getting all jingoistic about it.

Roughly a year later I had been cast in "Of Mice and Men." As is my practice, a ritual developed around the show for me - I won't get intot he philosophy of that here, though it may be worth commentiing upon at another time. In this case the ritual included walking each night to the theatre - about a 45 minute trip across town (as it turned out, usually in the pouring rain). I was going to need some music for the trip. The very first night, I stopped at a store to choose the disc that would be my ritual disc for the trip. It turned out to be a really easy selection. The thin edge of the wedge was already in. When I saw Springsteen's Greatest Hits disc on the shelf I knew that it was the appropriate choice - after all, the RATM song that I had liked had been "The Ghost of Tom Joad", so there was an obvious Steinbeck connection. That and the additional ties between Americana and my own developing musical tastes made it a shoe in.

Within a few months I also owned a copy of "Live in New York City." And within another year I pretty much owned his entire catalogue.

He remains one of the best song writers of the past fifty years, and proves it album after album. When his latest single was relased, Radio Nowhere, I was stunned that a man approaching retirement age could rock that hard.

Last week - a week ago tonight, in fact. I recieved a phone call from my friend Mark asking if I was a fan. I told him that I was and he asked me to come use his extra concert ticket. It didn't take any real provocation.

The concert was spectacular. He opened with my favourite song, 'Atlantic City', moved on to the hard rocking 'Radio Nowhere' and just kept on killing. During those first few songs I thought to myself that Bruce was looking his age, but 3 hours later he was looking a lot closer to the 35 years old he was back when he recorded the 'obscure outtake from Born in the USA', that they played for allegedly the first time ever live.
The raw energy of his performance was inspiring - and is legendary. On top of that, the nine members of the E-Street band make up a wicked group of musiciians who have been playing together for around 40 years... is it any wonder that they can turn a relatively sedate gospel-blues number like Reason to Believe into something that had more in common with heavy metal, with The Boss literally screaming through his harmonica (which was sonically awe inspiring, and something he apparently started doing after the best clip I could find of the song in concert).

I have only ever been to one other concert where there was such an air of mutual belonging. As Mark said, this show 'wasn't a concert so much as a revival.' The house was packed with true believers, and any doubt as to why they felt that way would have been put to rest long before the crowd leapt (and admittedly in come cases creaked) to it's feet for the opening chords of 'Born to Run'.

A week later I still have "The River" pleasantly coursing it's sad path through through my skull. It was amazing.

Defending the Music XIX: Disappointing you is getting me down.

Down to the last three.

This one is practically a given for a Canadian my age... though simply saying that is likely enough to elicit a tidal wave of denial. Certainly there is a significant segement of the population who is in denial about thier love of The Hip. Okay, that's not fair. What there is is a segment of the population who are either deliberately contrary, or whose taste is significantly out of whack with the popular taste of their countrymen. More power to them.

I've already done quite a discussion of my discovery of the Hip and how it affected my life, so this will be kinda short.

What is it about the Hip that makes them so enduring? Well, I do generally like their music - have since the very first listen. But it's the live experience that elevates them to a level of musical divinity. I've seen them five times in concert. Four of them rank amongst the best concerts I've ever seen. I don't know that it's something that traslates any way except in person.

Foremost in the live Hip experience is Gord Downie's stream of conscious rambling. I could recite word for word long strings of verbal effluvia that have excaped his mouth at concerts I've been to. The most famous example is the so called 'Killer Whale' monologue. Too bad it wasn't caught on video as well.

There is probably something perverse that bolsters the love of the Hip in that they are 'ours', by which I mean I'm kind of proud they never really broke in the U.S. They're more special as our secret. I've kind of made similar comments in other installments - how there is something less special in a way about the bands that have gone big. This one just happens to be additionally tied up in national pride. There is no doubt that the Tragically Hip's music is inextricably entwined with the Canadian experience. Gord Downie's poetic reference set is unapologetic in it's Canuck affiliation. We love him for it. Some day he ought to be our official poet laureate, not just the populist one.

The last line of Ahead by a Century stands as the single most affect lyric ever for me. I had experienced that feelsing, but never had the words by which to express it. The first time I heard the song, that last line cut me to my soul. I know I'm not the only one. It's that universal, and if there is no other example of genius in Gord Downie, he will always have 'Disappointing you is getting me down.'

On top of it all, I've got an amusing tale about flirting inadvertently with Paul Langois' wife at the Kingston Busker's festival. For the record, it was clear that she thought it was quaint - when I realised who she was with, it became apparent why... not to mention I was practically a kid.