Thus began an “archaeological dig” to unearth old tapes and off-cuts from their 13 albums since 1989. “I texted Johnny and said: ‘We wouldn’t have had tapes in there?’ And Johnny said: ‘Yeah, there’s a very good chance we did.’ And that just kind of lit the fire under us to start looking.” “I read something in the New York Times about the big Universal fire in California,” says Baker, talking about the back-lot fire at Universal Studios in 2008, which destroyed over 100,000 Universal Music Group master tapes. Just a few years ago, however, it seemed as though any chance of hearing any had gone up in smoke. As arena-level superstars in Canada for much of the past three decades – even though they toured more modest venues elsewhere in the world – there has been much speculation about the band’s unheard material. Today, The Tragically Hip feel plucked from the fire. I’ve got some song ideas, I know you’ve got ideas, let’s get together and do this.’ He was thinking about what’s next, what can we do next…” “He ended the tour, and I was sitting in the dressing room with him after and he was saying: ‘You guys need to continue and find someone else and maybe we’ll do some more recording. “Gord got stronger every day,” Baker continues. I don’t know how I would’ve reacted in Gord’s situation, but I don’t think going on tour would’ve been on my list. He fed off crowd energy and the love that people were giving to him. As the tour went on, Gord got stronger and stronger. "And it wasn’t, it was this incredible celebration and there were a lot of tears, but a lot of them were really happy tears. My fear was that it was gonna be a mass funeral every night.
I had major trepidation about doing the whole thing. This is what he wants, and we’re gonna give him what he wants, but this isn’t actually possible. “We’re going through the motions for our friend. “Even the night before the tour, I was like: ‘I don’t think this is actually gonna happen’,” says fellow guitarist Rob Baker. Then the other guys would come and visit and see for themselves, it just seemed like such a far reach that he would ever be able to do it again. "I started calling the other guys, saying: ‘Gord’s asking me if we’re touring this record.’ He was so fucking determined. Yet Downie insisted the band should still tour their latest – and last – album, Man Machine Poem, despite his illness. “It didn’t sound like the same Gord,” he says. Langlois stayed with Downie in Toronto during his treatment, saw him losing much of his memory and get “beat up from the radiation and chemo”. So we didn’t think we were gonna handle it in any other way than to be friends and support.” He got diagnosed in early November, and by February he’d had two brain surgeries and we knew the diagnosis. It turned out to be something that, unfortunately, is quite common these days, glioblastoma. There were a lot of people talking with hope that it wasn’t anything terminal. “At first it was a rare form of a rare form.
“We were all shocked,” says guitarist Paul Langlois, recalling the diagnosis Gord received after collapsing at his father’s funeral in 2015. Gathering on Zoom today, the surviving members of The Tragically Hip are understandably muted when discussion turns to their late singer’s final months.
Silences were held at ice-hockey games, and a candlelit vigil gathered in the small town of Bobcaygeon, made famous as the archetypal Canadian village idyll by The Tragically Hip classic that borrowed its name. Radio stations played nothing but Tragically Hip songs or renamed themselves ‘Gord FM’ for 24 hours. Trudeau, weeping on TV, called Downie “our buddy Gord, who loved this country with everything he had”. As a national hero widely adored for distilling the Canadian psyche, celebrating the country’s history, championing its culture and encapsulating its nebulous identity in songs that were a mainstay of Canada’s rock radio for 32 years – earning the band nine No.1 albums and eight million sales – mourning was nationwide, tributes effusive. Fourteen months later, on October 17, 2017, Downie passed away from the terminal brain cancer he’d been battling for almost two years, aged 53.
0 kommentar(er)
