Thanks for the memories, Gord

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This article was published 20/10/2017 (3234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We lost Gord Downie this week.

The Tragically Hip frontman meant so much to so many, as evidenced by the outpouring of raw grief and emotion since the news broke Wednesday morning that Downie had died. Many tears have been shed, and many tributes have been written. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Canadian who doesn’t have a memory of a Hip show, or a favourite song, or a lyric that changed their life.

Here are a few remembrances from those who work in the Free Press Arts & Life department. We love you, Gord.

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I was still in my first year in the Free Press’s entertainment department, covering the music beat, when I sat down with Gord Downie in the coffee shop of the Osborne Village Inn on March 17, 1988.

The interview was supposed to focus on the seven-song EP the band was touring to promote, but the conversation quickly turned to the fact The Tragically Hip had been fired the previous night from their gig at the Diamond Club on McPhillips Street, because — and this is the word Downie used — they weren’t “dance-y” enough. A week’s worth of scheduled performances — split between the north-Winnipeg nightspot and its sister club in Windsor Park, Night Moves — had evaporated after one show.

Fortunately, the Hip’s road manager was able to work the phones and patch together a series of one-nighters at less dance-beat-obsessed venues, including the University of Manitoba, Corner Boys and the Portage Village Inn.

“There was some concern before we came out that these clubs in Winnipeg might not be the right ones,” Downie said that briefly unemployed morning. “I would almost prefer to play a place just for beer or for the door (money) as long as it’s a cool place. There’s nothing more tiring than playing a room full of people who would rather be listening to piped-in disco music — the kind of place where they get down on you because you don’t have a crease in your pants. I’m much more comfortable with the Corner Boys and the university because we’ll definitely be touching the people that are interested.”

— Brad Oswald

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I never shy away from admitting I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a die-hard Tragically Hip fan.

Of course, I can appreciate their appeal and the deep connection others have developed with their music and what they — and Gord Downie especially — represent, but for whatever reason, the Hip just didn’t resonate with me the way people have always made me feel they are supposed to.

Because of that indifference, the first time I ever saw Gord Downie and the Hip live was last year, during their 2016 farewell tour, a show I had to review for the Free Press. There’s an immense amount of pressure knowing you have to pass judgement on a situation so teeming with emotion as likely the only person there because they have to be, not because they want to.

But, as corny as it sounds, something changed when I saw Downie up on stage in his sparkling suit, throwing his hands in the air wildly as he triumphantly made his way through a 25-song set with little signs of struggle despite his cancer diagnosis just a few months earlier. He was electric, passionate, emotional and said the words “I love you,” more times than I could count, each time feeling even more genuine than the last.

And as everyone wept into their $10 beers, wiping their eyes with the sleeves of tour T-shirts past, it suddenly made me feel very glad that I was forced into participating in this particular moment of Canadian music history. Love the band or not, it was impossible to resist Downie and the warmth and kindness that radiated from his soul on that night, and every night, of his final tour with the Tragically Hip.

— Erin Lebar

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I interviewed Gord Downie only once during my time as a music journalist.

It was in 2010, and I was the music editor of Uptown, back when it was still an alt weekly. Downie was touring in support of his 2010 solo album, The Grand Bounce, and I was to interview him over the phone.

Even though I’d interviewed hundreds of musicians by that point in my career — 114 that year alone — I’ll confess, I was nervous, mostly about sounding stupid. I mean, Gord Downie was a legit genius and I was a 25-year-old music writer who ate cereal for dinner.

On the day of the call, I was expecting it to be a boilerplate affair: publicist calls and connects you, you get 15 minutes to talk about the record, and it’s done — efficient but impersonal. So, you can imagine my surprise when I picked up the phone: “Hi, Jen. This is Gord Downie.”

We spoke for almost an hour. He thanked me for the thoughtful questions, and was generous with both his time and his answers. Interviewing Gord Downie was like talking to the nicest, smartest person at a party — high-level and philosophical one moment, folksy and colloquial the next, without one iota of pretension. At the end of the conversation, before we hung up, he told me to, “take care, eh?” Like someone’s kindly Canadian uncle.

I’ll never again answer the phone and hear Gord’s voice at the other end of it. But I’m thankful I had the experience.

— Jen Zoratti

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One of the thing Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip were known for was championing other Canadian acts. They showed this overtly, taking fledgling artists under their wing and inviting a plethora of this country’s bands — from Winnipeg’s the Watchmen to Halifax’s Joel Plaskett — to open for them on cross-country tours in huge venues. They also showed it in sneakier ways, with Downie sneaking in lyrical winks to his favourite musicians in live performances.

Toronto’s the Rheostatics were one the bands who benefited from the Hip’s largesse, although it’s clear the admiration was a two-way street. The art-rock band opened for the Hip on the Trouble in the Henhouse tour; Live Between Us, the live album documenting that tour, opens with Downie introducing the song Grace, Too, by saying “This is for the Rheostatics – we are all richer for having seen them tonight.”

In 1997, I was lucky enough to be among maybe 30 people in a studio in Toronto when the Rheostatics recorded an episode of RealTime, a CBC radio show that ran from 1994-97, airing on Saturday nights. The band played about seven songs, as I recall, and partway through, Gord Downie stepped to the mic to perform a cover of To Cry About.

“This next one’s a song by Mary Margaret O’Hara, and everyone knows who she is,” he said, and even though that was and is patently untrue, he made it clear with his raw, gorgeous rendition why everybody should.

I still have a cassette of that mini-concert, recorded from the radio on my old boombox when RealTime aired a week later. The stretched, worn-out tape wobbles and wows, but somehow that only adds to the effect, giving it the nostalgic cast of a sepia-tone photograph.

The song, a track from O’Hara’s Miss America album, is a heartbreaker at the best of times, but to listen to this version now is almost unbearable. Over piano and a melancholy trumpet, Downie’s inimitable voice quavers over the lyrics that now seem like a premonition, “You take a walk / I’m by your side / Take my life, I’ll give you mine / You, you give me something / To cry about.”

You can hear it here: wfp.to/cryabout

— Jill Wilson

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I’d never seen a Winnipeg crowd like it. I haven’t seen a Winnipeg crowd like it since.

On Sat., Sept. 16, 2000, The Tragically Hip played a massive benefit show for War Child Canada at The Forks.

On the day, concert organizers estimated that up 80,000 people were in attendance. That claim has since been logically refuted, so let’s just say there were a lot of freakin’ bodies there, gathered shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, cheek-to-cheek on a warm sunny mid-September afternoon.

The crowd was attentive and polite to Maestro, Angelique Kidjo and Chantal Kreviazuk, who were also on the bill, but the fans were clearly biding their time.

When The Hip hit the stage, The Forks concert area exploded into a roiling, seething mass of humanity, especially right at stage-front, which was almost obscured by a cloud of dust.

In other words, it was typical Hip show of that era.

Frontman Gord Downie was his usual, hyperkinetic self but he seemed especially wound up on that afternoon, and, as he often did, he found a way to elevate the show and honour the occasion.

After each of the first six songs (which, for the record, were Grace, Too, My Music at Work, Gift Shop, Putting Down, Ahead by a Century and Fully Completely), he read a line from something he’d written earlier in the day.

And this is what emerged:

“Perhaps we can’t stop war / War is the death of imagination / Imagination has no enemies / Children have no enemies / Children are the birth of imagination / So maybe we have something here…”

He may be gone now but we still have that something.

— John Kendle