Highway girl

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2016 (3509 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s 1993, and Veronica Gagnon is at the Winnipeg Stadium for Another Roadside Attraction, the Tragically Hip’s travelling music festival. She’s 15, and this is the first concert she’s attending on her own, no parents.

It’s not her first concert, though. Like many girls her age, her first concert was New Kids On the Block. But this concert — this concert is different. People are smoking pot; women are taking off their tops. She’s in the front row, sweating in the punishing heat. When the Hip finally takes the stage, she’s immediately enraptured by Gord Downie. She feels that buzz a music fan feels when they discover their favourite band.

“I was mesmerized,” she recalls. “It felt real, it felt like summer, it felt Canadian. It was the most perfect day. There was no show, you know? Like with U2 or the Stones, there’s a SHOW. This was just music. This was when Gord used to do his ranting. It wasn’t staged, it wasn’t a production. It felt really raw. I was like, ‘Wow, this is intense — and I want to do it again.’”

Now 39, Gagnon has seen the Tragically Hip about 40 times. Since 1993, she’s never missed a Winnipeg show, and she’s always been in the first three rows. And she will be in the third row for Friday night’s concert at the MTS Centre, a show that could very well be the band’s last in the city. In May, Downie disclosed he has been fighting terminal brain cancer since December. The band is taking its latest album, Man Machine Poem, for what many have said is a final victory lap. The reviews from the tour’s first several dates out west haven’t been reviews so much as they’ve been tear-stained, objectivity-out-the-window love letters to a band that means so much to so many.

Gagnon won’t hear that this is it, though. She was devastated when she heard the news, but she firmly believes the Hip will tour again. “I really hate that people keep calling it the last tour — it’s not the last tour until Gord tells me so.” (She’s not wrong; the band actually has not said definitively this tour is its last.)

Gagnon is spending a lot of money to be there Friday night — she had to fork out $1,500 to get a pair of Row 3 tickets — but she’s used to people not “getting it” when it comes to the Hip. “I’ve endured 25 years of being teased for my love of this band,” she says.

She’s active on fan forums online, where she’s met lifelong friends. She’s a collector, too, with more than 300 pieces of memorabilia in a collection that’s now well-known and respected within the fandom. Of course, people are capitalizing on the news of Downie and selling their rare merch. “It’s the perfect time to sell because they know there are suckers like me who are totally going to buy that stuff up. I’ve spent so much money. I was supposed to buy a condo this year, and that’s not happening.”

In 2009, she even backpacked through the U.S. by herself, following the band. “What’s amazing about seeing them in the States is they play the tiniest venues, these little bars, packed with Canadians, and you can see them for, like, $20,” she says. On that trip, she scored a free Tragically Hip ticket along with a hockey ticket to see the L.A. Kings play the Vancouver Canucks — which has to be one of the most hilariously Canadian promotions ever. The venue wouldn’t let her take her backpack into the venue, though, so she left it in the custody of strangers she met in a Los Angeles Wolfgang Puck eatery. “I prayed to the Hip gods and said, ‘Can you watch my backpack while I go to this concert?’ And they did.” From there, it was off to see the band play the House of Blues in Las Vegas. “Dan Aykroyd came out for Locked in the Trunk of a Car and played the meanest harmonica I’d ever seen.” She saw the Hip nine times that year.

If you’re not a really big fan of a band, it can be tough to understand this level of devotion. I do happen to understand it. When I was 19, I got the Pearl Jam stick-man logo tattooed on my lower back. What can be tougher still is explaining what it is about a band that drives people to do things such as get the Pearl Jam stick-man logo tattooed on their lower backs. (No regrets!)

For Gagnon, her love of the Hip has a lot to do with Downie. “He’s an incredibly gifted and genuine individual who holds tremendous passion for music — and, I’ve come to realize, passion for his family, his country, his environment. I love his authenticity. He’s an incredible poet.”

Gagnon got to meet the man himself in 2009, when the band had a night off in Winnipeg. A girlfriend texted her from the former Lo Pub: “I think that guy who’s in all your pictures in your living room is here right now.” Gagnon asked her if he had a red hanky dangling from his pocket. Affirmative. So Gagnon and her boyfriend raced downtown, while her friend stalled Downie.

Meeting your heroes can be dicey, but it was a perfect interaction — except for the fact Gagnon’s boyfriend was wearing a Buffalo Sabres hat. “I was mortified because Gord’s a huge Bruins fan, and the Bruins and the Sabres have this rivalry,” Gagnon says, because, of course, she knows that. She’s still with this boyfriend, whose last name is Downey, by the way. No relation, pure coincidence.

Gagnon is fiercely protective of her devotion to the Hip. It’s personal for her, which is why she usually goes to the band’s concerts alone. “I took my boyfriend to his first Hip show, and I watched with trepidation — is he going to want to be a part of this?” It’s a love-her, love-her-band kind of deal.

She’s felt a kinship with other Hip fans who she says are the best fans in music. “The connection is so intense. We’re so passionate, we’re so loyal and we’re totally weird.”

If Friday is indeed Gagnon’s last Tragically Hip concert, she’s thankful for the time she got.

“I’m just so grateful,” she says. “I’m so honoured to have been such a fan of such an amazing band.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @JenZoratti