Farewell to the Tragically Hip, rockers who helped Canada see itself anew.
G ord Downie’s announcement in May 2016 that he had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor shocked fans of the Tragically Hip, the Canadian alternative-rock band of which he had been the lead singer since its founding. A farewell tour was quickly arranged, complete with a final hometown concert broadcast live by the CBC—and reportedly watched by 11.7 million people, almost a third of the country’s population. When Downie died in October 2017, Canadians mourned the loss of a national hero.
Why were the Hip so beloved in the Great White North? Music journalist Michael Barclay suggests in his intriguing new book, The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, that “the story of the Tragically Hip is the story of Canadian music: the people who make it, the people who make it happen, and the fans who celebrate it every day.” Moreover, it’s a story of “Canadian culture itself, from Northrop Frye to Drake, from Jacques Cartier to Justin Trudeau, and everything in between.” Downie and the Hip were quintessentially Canadian, and many of their songs dealt with Canadian history, politics, and sports. The Hip opened a window into the country they loved—inviting listeners to better understand what it was and what it is, and to imagine what it could be.
The band was formed in 1984 in Kingston, Ontario, with a nucleus of high school friends: Downie, Rob Baker (guitarist), Paul Langlois (rhythm guitarist), Gord Sinclair (bassist), and Johnny Fay (drummer). They played venues large and small in every corner of the country, released 14 studio albums and 2 live albums, and won many local awards and accolades.
Their Canadianness came at the expense of potential non-Canadian audiences. Most Americans are unfamiliar with the Tragically Hip’s music, which is a real shame. Try as it might, the band just couldn’t catch on south of the border. The Hip performed on Saturday Night Live in 1995 (thanks to an assist from Canadian-born former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd). They played in many U. S. venues, like New York’s Beacon Theater. They had songs that could have attracted American radio attention, including “New Orleans Is Sinking” (1989), which has a real country-rock feel. (The band started, Barclay says, as “small-town Canucks drawing from the American South.”) A gold-paved road to U. S. success seemed to be laid out in front of them.
Yet these “reluctant rock stars” who were notoriously “suspicious of celebrity” expressed very little interest in fame and fortune outside Canada. Downie said that he and his bandmates were often asked by interviewers “about our success or lack of success in the States, which I find absurd. . .. While that is a story of the band, there are so many other stories.”
The Hip often “met a wall of resistance when it came to American media—and, by extension, mainstream success,” notes Barclay. They were “still a joke to the American press” as late as 2011, seen as an “annoying musical backdrop that only surfaced in small-town Canada, a band whose only possible audience in America was expat Canadians.” The Hip was, he writes, “a Cornelius Krieghoff painting surrounded by Picassos and Pollocks.”
O ne reason the Hip achieved the status of Canada’s great house band—and one reason they never clicked with audiences outside their homeland—is that their discography is sprinkled with tales of Canadian lore.
The 1991 song “Three Pistols” mentions painter Tom Thomson, an associate of the Algonquin School (or Group of Seven) who drowned in a canoeing accident in 1917. Downie’s haunting lyrics—“Tom Thomson came paddling past / I’m pretty sure it was him / And he spoke so softly in accordance / With the growing of the dim”—are sung with growls against a backdrop of pounding guitars. The critic Northrop Frye described one of Thomson’s paintings as “an emblem of Canada itself, so long apologetic for being so big an obstacle on the way to somewhere more interesting, yet slowly becoming a visible object in its own right.” Barclay, who quotes that passage from Frye, compares “Thomson’s eye as a painter” with “Downie’s indirectness as a lyricist.”
The Hip’s “Fifty-Mission Cap” discusses Canada’s first love: hockey. This propulsive song, driven by the drums, describes the tragic story of Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Bill Barilko, who scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1951. He disappeared four months later: He and a friend were flying home from a fishing trip but their small plane never made it. (Canada, Downie once said, “seems to be very famous for its disappearances.”) Eleven years went by before the Leafs won another cup—and six weeks after that victory, Barilko’s long-lost crash site was found and his body recovered.
This story is recounted in Downie’s lyrics—which also note “I stole this from a hockey card.” Barclay reprints the text of the actual hockey card, which Downie had been “carrying around in his pocket, because he found the story compelling.” Apparently, Downie was so fascinated by the Barilko story that he dug around in libraries to learn more, but he “didn’t use any of his research beyond what he’d found on the hockey card,” Barclay writes. The “Fifty-Mission Cap” of the song title refers to the fact that special hats were given to pilots in World War II after 50 successful missions—something Downie learned during a visit to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D. C. In the lyrics, the narrator—whom Downie described in an interview as “a veteran pilot whose ultimate goal is to stay alive, to fly 50 missions”—is contrasted with Barilko and his “flashing moment—that ‘is it better to burn out than to fade away’ sort of thing.”
The 1992 album with “Fifty-Mission Cap” also had on it “Looking for a Place to Happen,” a song that mentions the 16th-century explorer Jacques Cartier, who discovered the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The song seems to allude, too, to the exploitation of Native Canadians (“So I’ll paint a scene from memory / So I’d know who murdered me”).
There are also songs about the beauty of Canadian towns, cities, and communities the Hip visited over three decades of touring. Saskatoon is discussed in “Wheat Kings,” which Barclay describes as a “campfire acoustic song about a wrongful conviction, with mention of the CBC and prime ministers of the past.” The Athabasca oil sands of Alberta are referenced in “The Depression Suite.” Speed River in Guelph, Ontario, has an entire ditty all to itself. A couple of tiny communities that most Canadians would have been unfamiliar with—Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, and Moonbeam, Ontario—make cameos in “Fly.”
Given all the stories and references, it is fair to say, as Barclay does, that Downie “elevated Canadian mythology and geography to the level of the mystical.” But, especially in his later years, Downie bridled at the suggestion that he might have been uncritically mythologizing his country. “That we’re this clean, pristine place, that we know [what’s] best for the world, that there’s nothing anyone can teach us—these types of things I want no part of, and I don’t know anybody who would,” he said in 2009.
