Long time running

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/07/2016 (3721 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This much is certain: the Tragically Hip’s farewell to Winnipeg will be more significant, more memorable and more enthusiastically embraced than its initial “Hello” to this city nearly 30 years ago.

In the spring of 1988, I was still in the first year of my career at the Winnipeg Free Press. My job in the entertainment department was to cover the music beat, and on the morning of March 17 I had an interview scheduled with the lead singer of a new Canadian band that was touring the country in support of its introductory seven-song EP.

But when I met 24-year-old Gord Downie in the coffee shop of the Osborne Village Inn, the conversation wasn’t about the record or the local shows they were playing that week.

Instead, we talked about the shows they weren’t playing and the ones the band was scrambling to find to fill their suddenly wide-open schedule.

The previous night, the Tragically Hip had been fired from their gig at the Diamond Club (they were booked to split the week between that north Winnipeg nightspot and its Windsor Park sister club, Night Moves) after a single show because their straight-ahead style of rock ‘n’ roll didn’t meet with the manager’s approval.

Simply put — and this is the specific word I recall from Downie’s description of the event — the Hip weren’t “dance-y” enough for the Diamond Club crowd.

The lead of my story in the next day’s paper — and, oh, I can only imagine how proud my much-younger self must have been for coming up with this one — went like this: “It seems The Tragically Hip are, tragically, too hip for their own good.”

Downie, for his part, seemed kind of OK with the firing, as if perhaps it was a vindication of the Kingston, Ont., fivesome’s shared artistic impulse and a sign their music was headed in the right direction.

(In the expensively renovated, dance-focused club’s defence, one must remember that the top-five songs in the Billboard Hot 100 that week were Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, Belinda Carlisle’s I Get Weak, George Michael’s Father Figure, Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror and Richard Marx’s Endless Summer Nights).

“There was some concern before we came out that these clubs in Winnipeg might not be the right ones,” he said.

After a flurry of phone calls, the Hip’s road manager was able to get the band booked into a couple of one-nighters, at the then-popular south Osborne bar Corner Boys and the Portage Village Inn, and a pair of shows at the University of Manitoba.

“I would almost prefer to play a place just for beer or the door (money) as long as it’s a cool place,” was Downie’s perspective on the Diamond Club debacle.

“There’s nothing more tiring than playing a room full of people who would rather be listening to piped-in disco music”

-Gord Downie, 1988

“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.”

I don’t remember finding the Hip’s first self-titled EP — the blue-sleeved disc that included the songs Highway Girl and Small Town Bringdown — all that impressive; it felt like pretty good but pretty basic guitar-driven rock.

It wasn’t until the release of the group’s first full album, 1989’s Up to Here (which contained Blow at High Dough, New Orleans Is Sinking, 38 Years Old and perhaps my personal all-time favourite Hip song, Boots or Hearts), that it occurred to me — and millions of others who also quickly adopted the Hip as the very Canadian soundtrack of their very Canadian lives — that something special, and uniquely ours, had been unleashed.

Music-industry veteran Kevin Donnelly first crossed paths with the Hip on their second visit to Winnipeg, in support of Up to Here, and he remembers being impressed and thrilled by the way the band’s live shows were able to replicate the driving energy of its recorded work.

“The first time I heard Blow at High Dough, I thought it was a great song,” says Donnelly, who spent more than two decades in the concert-promotion business and is currently True North Sports & Entertainment’s senior vice-president of venues and entertainment.

“And then the first time I saw them live, it was clear that what you hoped you’d get (in a live show) was delivered in spades. They exceeded all expectations, and have always continued to do so.

“As a band, they’re just so solid — Gord (Downie) is a great frontman, but it’s the rhythm section — (drummer) Johnny Fay and (bassist) Gord Sinclair that drive the machine.”

And now, three decades, more than a dozen albums and at least two generations of maple-accented adoration later, it’s coming to an end.

Downie, now 52, faces an uncertain but certainly abbreviated future after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

The Hip’s current tour is much more than a cross-country jaunt in support of another album (in this case, the just-released Man Machine Poem); it’s a celebration and a tribute and a goodbye and a thank you and a furious, flailing punch at a thuggish disease and a not-nearly-long-enough lingering final musical hug for a band and a man that quite rightly felt, way back in the spring of 1988, that maybe they were finding a way to connect with Canada.

“The whole thing is snowballing,” the very-temporarily underemployed Downie said over his coffee cup that morning in 1988, “which is a great problem to have.”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald