A few tips for Americans headed for the Great White North: Don’t fuck with moose. They’re majestic creatures and punch below the belt. Never order pizza in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I made this mistake once, and I swear what I got was a circle of thin cardboard slathered with Ragu tomato sauce. But most importantly, never, ever, say a contrary thing about The Tragically Hip. The locals will take you ice fishing in the summer, if you catch my drift.
Because the Tragically Hip were more than a band—they were a beloved national institution, the likes of which has no American counterpart. Theirs was a nationwide love affair, as proved by the fact that the band’s 2016 farewell show—this after front man Gord Downie had recovered enough from the terminal brain cancer that would tragically take his life the following year to perform, although he looked heartbreakingly frail—was broadcast globally by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a cross-platform television, radio, and internet streaming special.
Thousands upon thousands gathered in public spaces across Canada to watch the show, which ended with “Ahead by a Century.” People wept openly, cheered, smiled, and sang along. One-third of Canada’s citizens watched the event. That’s a Great Lake’s worth of tears there, and legend has it there wasn’t a dry-eyed moose in the country.
That’s some Beatles-level adulation there, and no one could have seen it coming when the Tragically Hip were born in Kingston, Ontario in 1984. The Tragically Hip weren’t particularly hip, and that was part of their charm. What they were was a top-notch rock band that wrote a whole shitload of top-notch rock songs taken to a higher level by the charisma of Downie, who had a commanding voice and wrote great lyrics, many of them on Canadian subjects. And over the course of thirteen studio albums and a pair of EPs, recorded between 1987 and 2016, the Tragically Hip did something very few bands ever do—won an entire nation’s heart.
The Tragically Hip never achieved American success, which is America’s loss, but it in a sense it made them even more a Canadian love story—it was as if Canada didn’t want to share them with us because they BELONGED to Canada and besides, we were too stupid to deserve them. A 1995 SNL appearance—the band was introduced by Dan Ackroyd, a fellow Kingston native—aside, the band failed to make inroads in their neighbor to the South, and it didn’t help that when the band played shows in the States, it was Canadians who snatched up all the tickets. Americans couldn’t hear them even if they wanted, although I was lucky enough to catch them at Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club in 2012. Six songs in, and I was officially Canadian.
The only way to properly understand why Canada wrapped its big arms around The Tragically Hip is to buy the 2005 double LP compilation Yer Favorites. Aptly enough, its thirty-seven tracks were chosen by the band’s fans on its website, and they did an ace job—I’m not going to say I love every song on the comp, but every song I love is there. And I fall in love with another one or two every time I give it a spin.
Do I wish they’d released a less sprawling greatest hits compilation? Yes. And as an honorary Canadian—an honor bestowed upon me after my pal Alan Smith and I drove around the Great Lakes in three non-stop days, sleep deprived to the extent that we began to see visions, levitating moose, rains of hockey pucks and the like—who would move there in a Canuck minute if I didn’t break out in frostbite the second the temperature drops below the sixty-degree mark, what I think I’m eminently qualified to do is give you MY more compact but carefully curated greatest hits compilation, both to guide you to their VERY BEST and in hopes that some savvy record label type will read this and immortalize my expert picks on vinyl. To any Canadian readers outraged by my choices, please don’t hurt me. I mean well, I really do.
Twelve tracks, all of them amazing, follow, starting with:
1. “The Darkest One”
Aided and abetted by one of the greatest music videos I’ve ever seen (it features the Trailer Park Boys, Canadian hockey legend Don Cherry, and a cast of fried chicken-thieving cats) “The Darkest One” is a hard-driving, no-frills rocker on which Downie’s voice bobs and dances, and features a great chorus which ends with him singing “And you’re the darkest one.” “Come in, come in, come in, come in” he sings, “From thin and wicked prairie winds come in,” but the promised warmth and safety don’t materialize—you’re left chilled, alone, and menaced.
2. “Fifty-Mission Cap”
This hard rocker tells the story of Bill Barilko, a Maple Leafs player who scored the goal that won them the Stanley Cup in 1951, only to disappear later that summer in a small plane while returning from a fishing trip with his dentist. Against a propulsive drum beat and some driving guitar, Downie sings:
“They didn’t win another until 1962,
the year he was discovered.
I stole this from a hockey card,
I keep tucked up under
my fifty mission cap.”
A tribute to hockey’s equivalent of Amelia Earhart? Only in Canada. And it’s such a great tribute that it’s become a staple on the Leafs’ warm-up playlist at every Hogtown home game, and the Leafs have a framed, handwritten copy of Gord Downie’s lyrics to the song in their private players’ lounge.
3. “My Music at Work”
The Tragically Hip could and did get arty on occasion, as proved by the could-be-mistaken-for R.E.M. (Downie sounds a lot like Michael Stipe) Anthemic, pounding but with unmistakable pop bounce, this is the “Hip” at their hippest. Downie sings,
“Everything is bleak
It’s the middle of the night
You’re all alone
And the dummies might be right
Outside the darkness lurks
My music at work
My music at work.”
It’s one of their least characteristic but best songs, a nod towards the new from a band that generally made no attempt to follow current trends. They went their own way.
4. “Fireworks”
Speaking of hockey, the chipper and poppy “Fireworks” proceeds at a breakneck pace with Downie singing in a dead rush,
“You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey
And I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand, and we walked home the long way
You were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr.”
Doesn’t give a fuck about the sport that combines sticks and boxing? What kind of Canadian woman are we dealing with here? Downie tosses out the year 1972, when the Maple Leafs fell to the Boston Bruins and Orr won the Conn Smythe Trophy, and keeps coming back to the line, “Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish?” This one’s a rush and always makes me happy.
5. “Ahead by a Century”
The last song The Tragically Hip would ever play live, and there’s a reason for that—it’s a mostly acoustic song with a beguiling melody on which Downie sings about childhood, and movingly repeats the lines, “No dress rehearsal/This is our life.” As it goes on, the electric guitar kicks in, Downie sounds more urgent, and while I have no idea what that “you are ahead by a century” means, it adds a sense of mystery to the proceedings. It’s as powerful a song as the Tragically Hip would ever write, and it’s a damn shame that most Americans have never heard it.
6. “At the Hundredth Meridian”
Like “Ahead by a Century,” this is one of the band’s signature songs. It’s a hard rocker with kick, and establishes the Tragically Hip at a very specific place—at the beginning of the Great Plains. Downie sings with conviction, and for once, he’s not singing about Canada but America, and it obviously makes him nervous—he opens the song by singing, “Me debunk an American myth?/And take my life in my hands?” “At the Hundredth Meridian/Where the Great Plains begin,” he sings over and over again, that is when he isn’t evoking a world of corduroy roads, rusting Ferris wheels, whistling wires, and muddy old skulls, and I love the verse where he sings,
“I remember, I remember Buffalo
And I remember Hengelo
It would seem to me I remember every
Single fucking thing I know.”
It’s no “American Woman,” that’s for sure, and I can detect no explicit putdowns of our benighted nation, although the lines “If I die of vanity, promise me, promise me/They bury me some place I don’t want to be” make me think the Hundredth Meridian isn’t where he wants to spend eternity. He does specifically request, however, that Ry Cooder sing his eulogy.
7. “Poets”
Another one that brings R.E.M. to mind. I have no fucking idea what’s going on—over a stripped-down and funky beat and an insinuating guitar Downie takes a dig at Big Ag (“Lava flowing in Superfarmer’s direction/He’s been getting reprieve from the heat in the frozen food section, yeah”) and makes reference to a law that allows women to go topless, but what he keeps returning to, in a varying (and very fetching) chorus, is poets, who seem to irk him, which is understandable, because most of ‘em are as irritating as mimes:
“Don’t tell me what the poets are doing
Don’t tell me that they’re talking tough
Don’t tell me that they’re anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, all right.”
In an eviscerating review of the band’s 2000 LP Music @ Work, Robert Christgau would disparagingly note that the Tragically Hip was “imbued” with “the natural sense of rhythm for which Canadians are renowned,” but this one proves him wrong. As does, oddly enough, “My Music at Work.”
8. “Bobcaygeon”
What would you call this? Canadiana? It’s a simple, country-flavored number and impossibly catchy, and it grows in intensity as it goes along. It’s a love song with benefits, with Downie leaving a lover in Bobcaygeon (“I left your house this mornin’/About a quarter after nine/Could have been the Willie Nelson/Could have been the wine”) before suddenly segueing to memories of seeing a band in Toronto:
“Til the men, they couldn’t hang
Stepped to the mic and sang
And their voices rang
With that Aryan twang.”
And the lovely ending is downright transcendental:
“So I’m at your house this mornin’
Just a little after nine
‘Cause it was in Bobcaygeon where I saw the constellations
Reveal themselves one star at a time.”
It’s simple, it seems positively effortless, and it’s magic, right down to the Garth Hudson-school organ that comes in during the instrumental takeout. Nice.
9. “Wheat Kings”
Musically, it’s relaxed, all acoustic guitars and friendly percussion, and Downie sounds calm and comfortable in his skin. But the lyrics are a different matter, because Downie is telling the story of David Milgaard, who spent twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The lyrics are dense with detail, but the key verse goes
“In his Zippo lighter, he sees the killer’s face
Maybe it’s someone standing in a killer’s place
Twenty years for nothing, well that’s nothing new,
Besides, no one’s interested in something you didn’t do.”
And it’s followed by the chorus “Wheat kings and pretty things,” which is easy to take at face value but actually refers to two things: the Brandon Wheat Kings, Milgaard’s favorite hockey team, and the band the Pretty Things, who the Tragically Hip loved and covered occasionally in their early years. From its opening line, which references Milgaard’s hometown, Saskatoon (“Sundown in the Paris of the prairies”), the song is quintessentially Canadian.
10. “Grace, Too”
The song opens with a simple drum beat and a sinuous bass, then Downie comes in, his voice urgent, and before you know it the band also sounds pretty damn urgent—they sound a lot like R.E.M. too. All tension and menace, this one, with Downie, who comes across as a kind of contract killer, but seems to be more the kind of guy who, when he wants a woman, gets her, tossing off lines like:
“I come from downtown, born ready for you
Armed with will and determination, and grace, too.”
He sings about rules of engagement and conflict, and when he comes for his woman:
“I can guarantee, there’ll be no knock on the door
I’m total pro, that’s what I’m here for.”
And I love the way the song goes out with him barking out words as the band, sinuous bass and guitar really pushing things along, cuts loose.
11. “Locked in the Trunk of a Car”
This one may be based on the 1970 murder of Deputy Premier of Quebec Pierre Laporte by the Front de libération du Québec, or a fictional serial killer or busted relationship, even, but one thing that’s undeniable is that Downie himself was so disturbed by the song he avoided playing it live. Nothing fancy is going on musically in the song, which opens at a medium tempo before the drums and guitars really kick in. But the lyrics are haunting from the opening lines, which may be about a traveling shark exhibition and an artifact found in a great white’s stomach:
“They don’t know how old I am, they found armour in my belly
From the sixteenth century
Conquistador, I think.”
It’s a nice way to open the song because it establishes that we’re dealing with a shark of the human variety here, one who seems to have found his prey:
“Morning broke out the backside of a truck-stop
the end of a line a real, rainbow-likening, luck stop
where you could say I became chronologically fucked up.”
Downie promptly follows that with:
“Then, I found a place it’s dark and it’s rotted.
It’s a cool, sweet kinda-place
where the copters won’t spot it.”
Before singing “every day I dump the body.” And the song ends with two plaintive cries of “Let me out!” Includes a kick-ass guitar solo too.
12. “Scared”
“Scared” is as scary as “Locked in the Trunk of a Car,” what with Downie opening the song with the words
“I could make you scared, if you want me to
I’m not prepared, but if I have to
He said, I can make you scared, it’s kinda what I do
If you’re prepared, here’s what I propose to do.”
But it turns out to be a song—and a simple song it is, featuring as it does a couple of guitars, a bass, and some barely there drumming playing a doleful melody—about the power dynamics in a relationship. Downie takes things to weird new heights with lines like, “Now there’s a focus group that can prove/This is all nothing but cold calculation” and “Tests have shown that suspicious or hostile,” then flips the script:
“Okay, you made me scared, you did what you set out to do
I’m not prepared, you really had me going there for a minute or two
He said, you made me scared too, I wasn’t sure I was getting through
I got to go, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
Toss in a stanza about Nazis, Russia, and art theft, and some other cryptic lyrics, and what you’re left with is a song that leaves you feeling distinctly uneasy, not an easy thing to do. Especially given the lovely melody, which feels deliberately incongruous. It’s a brilliant little number.
It’s important to note that my list of contenders and honorable mentions is a long one. Especially excellent are the clamorous “Little Bones,” the dolorous and sublime “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken,” the hard-driving and all but metallic “Looking for a Place to Happen,” the very rhythmic and syncopated “Lake Fever,” and the haunting tale that is “Nautical Disaster.” I also passed on such early greats as “Blow at High Dough” and “New Orleans Is Sinking.” I have no trouble understanding why, when it came to putting together a compilation, the Tragically Hip chose to go big.
Look, 38.8 million Canadians—and that’s not counting the band’s fan base among the moose, polar bear, elk, walrus, beaver, caribou, and lynx populations—can’t be wrong, especially considering the water up there is cleaner and you won’t see any idiots walking around in MAGA caps. And Canadian infants aren’t reared on a steady diet of lead-based paint, which appears to be the case here, so when it comes to the Tragically Hip, I can only conclude that we dumb southerners (and that goes for the rest of the world) continue to miss out on something mighty fine.
Your average Canadian may not know the difference between pizza dough and cardboard, but when it comes to music, she’s drinking the good stuff. But I see a solution: I hereby propose that America declare the Tragically Hip its 51st state. Of course, we’d have to go to war first.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
