To read the introduction to the Tragically Hip Series, click here.

Having signed with MCA Canada, The Hip were thrilled when head honcho Bruce Dickinson suggested that they record their maiden album in Memphis, Tennessee. The members of the Hip had a deep knowledge of and respect for rock ‘n’ roll history, and to have the opportunity to make a record in one of the genre’s birthplaces was more than the icing on the cake. Gord Sinclair: “As music fans, we’re making our first record in Memphis, Tennessee, you know? And Jerry Lee Lewis is living across the river, and the King lived there.” Jake Gold: “You could tell that there was this real sense of like, ‘Holy fuck, man. We’re in Memphis?'” (from the documentary)

Even better, Dickinson chose a producer with a solid resume. Don Smith’s credits included engineering and production work with The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Traveling Wilburys, Iggy Pop, and Keith Richards, to name a few. In the documentary, Smith was asked, “How was it to work this year with established rock ‘n’ roll legends and then suddenly work with a young Canadian band?” “It’s refreshing, actually. I think this band can hold its own against all the people I worked with.” The Hip were relative newbies to the world of recording, and Smith’s confidence in the band made it easy for them to accept his feedback and build a solid collaborative environment.

Many of the songs on the album were songs they had performed live, but it would be a mistake to assume that the Hip arrived in Memphis with a fully ready-to-record set of songs. Smith worked with them on improving some of the arrangements, and after a full day’s work in the studio, the band would spend nights polishing and rewriting some songs and even writing a new one.

Their efforts paid off in the form of a Juno award for Most Promising Group and commercial success in their homeland. Released in September 1989, the album went gold in January, platinum in March, and ten years after it first appeared in Canadian record stores, Up to Here earned diamond status. Below the border, “New Orleans Is Sinking” landed at #30 on the Billboard singles chart, but that modest success would prove to be a false positive. I will use this phrase once and only once and trust my readers to remember that it applies to all thirteen albums: the album didn’t do dick in the States.

*****

All songs written by the Tragically Hip.

“Blow At High Dough”: The Hip couldn’t have picked a better song for the opener, a rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece with plenty of thrust, shifting dynamics that enhance the drama, and stunning displays of musicianship from every member in the band.

I’ll lay it all out for you shortly, but first I’ll explain what the hell it means to “blow at high dough.” Stacked among the many ludicrous interpretations of fans on songmeanings.com, I found the one answer that actually fit the narrative: “‘Don’t blow at high dough’ is an old wife’s saying. Literally speaking, it means you can’t blow on your rising bread dough to make it rise slower if you rush the process. You can’t unscramble eggs, and you can’t un-rise dough. Figuratively speaking, it means ‘don’t get ahead of yourself’, or ‘slow down there, kiddo.'” The song’s reference page on the Hip Museum notes that the phrase is of Scottish origin and that Gord Downie would have picked it up from his grandmother, likely jotting it down in his color-coded notebook of random phrases he heard in passing that he thought might become song material. The desire to blow at high dough can be triggered by many things: unreasonable expectations foisted on you by yourself or others, wanting to be in with the in-crowd, greed, bouts of impatience when things don’t go your way, and “well, this isn’t working, so fuck it, I’ll do this.”

The song opens with a teaser passage of four bars set to a B chord, with Rob Baker (listed as Bobby Baker in the credits) playing a single note on lead guitar while Gord Sinclair establishes the rhythm with a nice riff high up on the bass fretboard, supported by Johnny on the hi-hats. A second one-note pluck from Rob cues Downie to deliver the opening line: “They shot a movie once in my hometown.” Sinclair and Baker drop down to the A chord for the follow-up line, “Everybody was in it, from miles around,” where Rob plays a short slide-guitar riff with a touch of distortion while Paul Langlois makes it a fivesome with a bright strummed chord in the left channel. With Baker and Langlois continuing their back-and-forth to the steady beat, Downie delivers the lines “Out at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing/Well, I ain’t no movie star/But I can get behind everything,” then BOOM! The guitarists raise the roof with a crashing A chord, and over the fading reverberation, Downie adds extra punch to his voice in the closing line (“Yeah, I can get behind anything”), signaling the band to shift into rock ‘n’ roll overdrive. Orgasm time!

Since I presented the opening verse in pieces, I may have left you struggling for meaning. “Out at the speedway” likely refers to that awful Elvis flick Speedway (not filmed in the now-defunct Kingston Speedway, but in North Carolina). Nearly every film Elvis made was an example of blowing at high dough, as his limited acting chops clearly indicated he was getting way, way ahead of himself. It’s also likely that some of the folks who headed out to the speedway were blowing on high dough, hoping beyond hope that a watchful director would discover them and launch their film careers.

The next two or so minutes are a trip to rock ‘n’ roll heaven, with Downie belting out the lyrics in high heat, Sinclair, Fay and Longlois driving the rhythm, and Rob Baker revealing that he is one helluva slide player. The lyrics do get a bit opaque here, but they fit the music like a glove, and Gord Downie’s powerful delivery imbues them with meaning beyond the words.

Get it out, get it all out
Yeah stretch that thing
Make it last, make it last
At least until the supper bell rings

Well, the taxi driver likes his rhythm
Never likes the stops
Throes of passion, throes of passion
When something just threw him off

It would appear that the taxi driver is a victim of his own expectations, blowing at high dough in response to a lack of pick-ups. Up to this point, the song’s entire chord pattern has consisted of two chords (A and B), so when the band finally makes the move to E and F# in the chorus, that simple change creates a titanic “Fuck yeah!” moment.

Well, sometimes the faster it gets
The less you need to know
But you gotta remember
The smarter it gets
The further it’s gonna go
When you blow at high dough
When you blow at high dough

I love Rob’s nasal-twanged counterpoints to the last two lines of the chorus, which sound like fate laughing at a predicament that could have been avoided with a little patience. Downie keeps the party going through the next verse, cleverly forcing a rhyme in the two opening lines before introducing another dough-blower:

Woo baby, I feel fine
I’m pretty sure it’s genuine
It makes no sense, no, it makes no sense
But I’ll take it free anytime
Whoever fits her usually gets her
It was the strangest thing
How she moved so fast, moved so fast
Into that wedding ring

Cultural expectations often lead to blowing at high dough, and this song was written in the days when some women still believed that if they hadn’t captured their hubby before they turned thirty, they would earn the sobriquet “Old maid.” I think she would have been much happier fucking anyone who came her way, but yeah, I would think that.

Another rousing rendition of the chorus keeps the song on high heat with Downie letting it all hang out while Baker rips out a series of slide riffs that twiddle my diddle. Things cool down when Gord sings the first of two repetitions of “when you blow at high dough,” and Sinclair and Fay reprise their roles in the teaser passage while Downie repeats the “out at the speedway” fragment, replacing “Well I ain’t no movie star with “Well, I can’t catch her,” but he can still “get behind anything.” A brief build leads to a return of the B-A rock passage, where Rob Baker delivers a searing slide solo that explores most of the melodic possibilities of the limited chord pattern while the rhythm section blasts away. Downie returns to deliver another rendition of the chorus, and the song closes with another reprise of the teaser passage before Downie tones it down on the full-circle line “Out on the speedway, same Elvis thing.”

I will happily admit that I used a lot of review space on this particular song, in part because I loved hearing it again and again. In my defense, I’m not the only one who felt that way. After the record hit the shelves, future Prime Minister Justin Trudeau snatched a copy and also fell in love with the opening track. “I remember spending an entire night with ‘Blow at High Dough’ on repeat. And for me, that just . . . you know . . . this is how it all started.” (from the documentary)

And there’s plenty more in store.

“I’ll Believe in You (Or I’ll Be Leaving You)“: The boys keep on rockin’ with a parable that demonstrates why some people should never get married and have children, no matter how well they connect in the sack.

The song opens with a searing guitar riff that will eventually morph into aggressive interplay between the two guitarists that keeps the fires lit throughout the song. With Gord Sinclair pumping away on the bass and Johnny beating the crap out of his drums, Gord Downie follows suit with a vocal reeking with intensity. In the first verse, he introduces us to the two lovers with palpable concern about the goings-on in their most unhappy home:

Well, it’s 7 A.M. and she woke by the radio
Yeah, she rolled on over said, “Where did my man go?”
She’s been a gunslinger’s wife all her life
Now she fights when she’s able
For the sake of the kids
When the knife’s at their necks in the cradle
She screams

“I’ll believe in you or I’ll be leaving you tonight
I will believe in you or I’ll be leaving you tonight”

At this point, we’re not sure whether “gunslinger” is the epithet for a guy who beds several women or a man with an impressive weapon collection, but he is clearly an asshole on many levels. Her threats to leave him seem hollow, just one part of a game that plays out night after night.

Well she’s got all the kids and she’s got all their uses
But she loves them the same for neglect and abuses
Well, she got a warm spot where they fought
When they made up last evenin’
He said, “don’t read too much into the fact that I’m leaving”

After repeating her threat, Downie shifts to spoken word to reveal the idiot’s inner thoughts:

How do I explain this? I mean, how do I put it into words?
One thing or another, but it’s neither this or that
Actually, it’s a collection of things
She said, “that’s it, that’s it, get out”

Yeah, that may be how you feel, lady, but you ain’t got the guts to dump his sorry ass. The arrangement shifts to semi-stop time as we arrive at a turning point that moves her out of her muddled thinking, courtesy of good old Mom.

Her mother said, “kill him slow, at your leisure”
Ah, but desperate times call for desperate measures
So she went to the closet and she pulled the old gun down
“I’ll put a bullet through his heart if he ain’t home by sundown”

Yeah, right. And what about the kids, stupid? Fortunately for the tots, Mr. Big Dick foils her plan by coming home early to rub a little more pain into her fractured psyche: “Yeah, 5:55 he comes walking in the front door smiling/He said, ‘don’t read too much into what I ain’t denying’.”

In the end, her shaky façade crumbles as she tries to talk herself into believing in the prick because she’s addicted to the power of his prick:

Well, I believe in you
Well, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe
I believe in you, alright, yeah, oh
Mm, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

To quote one of my favorite songs by Admiral Fallow, I hope the kids have “the courage to turn your back on the way you were raised.”

“New Orleans Is Sinking”: In his guitar tutorial on the song featured on YouTube, Rob Baker explains that the song emerged while the band was jamming to Johnny Kidd’s hit “Shakin’ All Over” (though they may have been more familiar with the version by Chad Allan and the Expressions, who later became the Guess Who). Rob described the song as a basic blues-rock number that morphed into something different every time they played it, allowing the irrepressible Mr. Downie to come up with fresh dance routines. He also noted that the song’s lyrics were based on a trip Downie took to New Orleans in his college years—a critical piece of information that Downie does not specifically mention in the song, but is essential to understanding the lyrics.

Gord’s narrative faithfully depicts the experience of a young man on his first trip to the Big Easy as he takes in the anything-goes environment of a hot night on Bourbon Street.

Bourbon blues on the street, loose and complete
Under skies, so smoky blue-green
I can’t forsake a Dixie dead-shake
So we danced the sidewalk clean

With the bars dishing out Jello shots like candy, the kid immediately gets drunk and complains that “My memory is muddy, what’s this river that I’m in/New Orleans is sinking, man, and I don’t wanna swim.” Suffering from a severe case of inebriation, our green Northern boy accidentally makes a cultural faux pas:

Colonel Tom, what’s wrong, what’s going on?
Can’t tie yourself up for a deal
He said, “Hey north, you’re south, shut your big mouth
You gotta do what you feel is real”

I doubt very much that he ran into Colonel Parker himself, so consider Tom a stand-in for the traditional Southern male who gets his dander up when hearing a drawl-free voice trying to tell him how to live his life.

The lyrics get a bit muddled from here, but appear to indicate that Gord is relating his experience to his honey after returning to the safety of Kingston:

Ain’t got no picture postcards, ain’t got no souvenirs
My baby, she don’t know me when I’m thinking bout those years

Pale as a light bulb hanging on a wire
Sucking up to someone just to stoke the fire
Picking out the highlights of the scenery
Saw a little cloud that looked a little like me

I had my hands in the river, my feet back up on the banks
Looked up to the Lord above and said, “Hey, man, thanks.”
Sometimes I feel so good, I gotta scream
She said, “Gordie baby, I know exactly what you mean.”

I hope that means that she finally gets to see another side of her lover and embraces the new-and-improved fun-loving version.

I have to confess that I wasn’t knocked out by the studio version that appears on the album. The band is as tight as always, but there’s a slight lack of oomph that tells me they may have felt confined by the studio environment and the absence of an audience. Taking a hint from Rob, I searched for a live version on YouTube . . . and holy fuck! Quelle difference! This is a GREAT live song! The band is on fire, remaining sensitive to the cues telling them when to take it down a few notches and when to let it rip. Gord Downie’s unique ability to connect with his audience is on full display, and you can see that the fans are willing to follow him wherever he goes, even when he makes up lyrics the crowd has never heard before. The core rhythm section of Fay and Sinclair delivers a muscular performance ten times more powerful than the studio version, and the two guitarists give it everything they’ve got. The live version I chose was shot during a performance in Halifax in 1990, and like any great live band nearing exhaustion when it’s time to do the closing number, the Hip reach into the reserve tank and deliver a thrilling performance that those fans will talk about for years on end.

“38 Years Old”: Gord Sinclair heard that Rob and Paul were providing guitar tutorials on YouTube, and decided it was time for him to make his contribution to musical knowledge by sharing how the chord patterns of “38 Years Old” were inspired by a happy accident. Gord explains how he picked up an acoustic guitar with the B and high E strings erroneously tuned down a full step, proceeded to play a chord in the D position and “it sounded pretty cool.” He then messes around with the C position and finally finds something to his liking. For the chorus, Gord opens with the C position chord, dropping down a fret on the fifth string before playing an A position chord on the second fret, then slides up to the seventh fret and voilá, you have the basic chord pattern to “38 Years Old.” You can approximate the chord patterns by playing Am-C-G in the verses and C-D-Am in the chorus, but the sound loses the added brightness and interesting harmonics of the accidental chords.

In a marvelous display of group cohesion and collective creativity, “38 Years Old” was written during the recording sessions in Memphis. The most notable parts of the arrangement involve Sinclair’s chord patterns played on acoustic guitar on the left channel and Rob providing counterpoints and solos on slide guitar on the right, beginning with the third line of the first verse. The subject matter involves an incident that took place near Kingston in July 1972, when the boys were just kids: fourteen inmates escaped from the prison known as the Millhaven Institution (the song says twelve, but the number of escapees hardly matters). As Gord Sinclair recalled in the documentary, “There was a real bad man called Donald Oag who was among those guys who got out. He had it in for Robbie’s dad, who was a Provincial Court judge, and they actually moved Robbie and his family to a hotel downtown.” Rob noted that it was front page news for over a year; Gord Downie opined that “it made the summer kind of exciting.” Yikes!

The incident inspired the song, but Gord Downie took full advantage of artistic license to transform a news story into a fictional account of a family in despair in response to the lengthy absence of the older brother. Downie relates the tale in the role of the younger sibling:

12 men broke loose in 73
From Millhaven Maximum Security
And 12 pictures lined up across the front page
Seems the Mounties had a summertime war to wage

Well, the chief told the people they had nothing to fear
Said, “The last thing they want to do is hang around here”
They mostly came from towns with long French names
But one of the dozen was a hometown shame

Downie wisely withholds the identity of the “hometown shame” at this point to extend the suspense, but the younger brother’s empathy for the “one of the dozen” hints that it’s someone close to him.

Same pattern on the table, same clock on the wall
Been one seat empty 18 years in all
Freezing slow time, away from the world
He’s 38 years old, never kissed a girl
He’s 38 years old, never kissed a girl

In the next verse, Downie confirms the identity of the escapee as the older brother. We learn that he was convicted of killing a man attempting to rape his sister, and his attorney was likely unable to convince the jury that deadly force was necessary.  Some families would have disowned the son in a vain attempt to avoid shame and embarrassment, but not this family. After his escape, the older brother somehow avoids the roadblocks and makes his way home, where he is more than welcome:

We were sitting round the table, heard the telephone ring
Father said he’d tell them if he saw anything
Heard the tap on my window in the middle of the night
Held back the curtain for my older brother Mike

See my sister got raped so a man got killed
Local boy went to prison, man’s buried on the hill
Folks went back to normal when they closed the case
They still stare at their shoes when they pass our place

My mother cried, “The horror has finally ceased”
He whispered, “Yeah, for the time being at least”

Alas, it turns out to be a very brief reunion.

And over her shoulder on the squad car megaphone
Said, “Let’s go, Michael, son, we’re taking you home”

The song ends with a repetition of the chorus with the key line “never kissed a girl” repeated three times for effect. Allen Gregg took the words right out of my mouth in the documentary when he said, “‘Thirty-eight years old and never kissed a girl.’ That’s how he describes a prisoner who’s been in prison his whole life. That’s storytelling!”

The only downside to this remarkable song is that it quickly disappeared from their live performances because Gord Downie named the older brother “Mike.” From The Hip Museum: “If a song ever hit a little too close to home, it was this one. Gord Downie does have a brother named Mike . . . He is certainly not in prison, nor has a tragedy such as the one explained in ’38 Years Old’ ever befallen the Downie family. Some folks took the song seriously, however, and began leaving things on the porch of the Downie family home in Kingston. The Downies kept experiencing unwarranted and unwanted attention from literal believers of the song. As a result, ’38 Years Old’ was very rarely played live for many years.”

That sucks, but I think “38 Years Old” will continue to attract serious music listeners for decades to come. In the context of the debut album, “38 Years Old” proved that the Hip proved were much more than a pure blues-rock band, and were willing and able to explore the vast diversity of the genre—and in Gord Downie, they had not only a captivating frontman but a lyricist with unlimited potential.

“She Didn’t Know”: This upbeat rocker features outstanding guitar work from Rob, a muscular drum performance from Johnny, and a vocal duet featuring Gord Downie on lead while Paul Langlois harmonizes and supplies the response in the call-and-response segments. While the music is first-rate, the lyrics leave a lot to be desired. The central character is a girl born to wealth who decides to go slumming, but beyond that, I haven’t found any interpretations that solve the riddle in the chorus: “She didn’t know the barrel was loaded.” Some have opined that she shot her unidentified abuser, but that makes no sense if she didn’t know the piece was loaded with ammo. The other alternative is suicide, but there’s little evidence that the girl was suffering from depression. The Hip Museum has no reference page for the song, which tells me that fans gave up trying to make sense of it all.

“Boots Or Hearts”: If you’ve spent your entire life living in Florida, Aruba, or somewhere in the Sahara, you’ll probably find the connection between boots and hearts a real brain teaser. “Boots Or Hearts” was released as a single and did particularly well in Vancouver—so well that the song was memorialized on Vancouver Signature Sounds, where I found a comprehensive dive into the song’s meaning:

“Boots Or Hearts” is a song based on a simile. A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two things that are seen to resemble one another. In this case a relationship has fallen apart. One person has returned home and the person they’ve been going out with won’t even return their phone call. The singer thinks of how quickly things can fall apart once they begin to unravel. Boots can lose their tread, and if not properly glued at the factory the boots can literally fall apart just sitting in a closet as the glue dries out. It seems that when it comes to boots, consumers don’t save money by purchasing cheaply made products. As a band from Kingston, Ontario, where the winters can last four months or more, The Tragically Hip knew the importance of reliable boots. What is not so easy to see from the outside is that the same applies to human hearts. In the song things have deteriorated to the point that neither one of them cares about each other, or the relationship.

“Deteriorated” is an understatement:

See when it starts to fall apart, man
It really falls apart
Like boots or hearts, oh when they start
They really fall apart

Fingers and toes, fingers and toes
Forty things we share
Forty-one if you include
The fact that we don’t care

Word to the wise: if all you have in common with your lover are your digits, it’s time to move the fuck on. If I had known about “Boots Or Hearts” a year or so ago, I would have happily carved out a place for it in my Song Series on bitter breakup songs. The acoustic blues feel of the music and Downie’s noticeable snarky delivery combine to present a thoroughly miserable and sneakily humorous narrative.

“Everytime You Go”: Though the narrative isn’t as cohesive as in “38 Years Old,” there are enough hints in the lyrics to tell the story. To borrow a phrase from John Lennon, it’s time “to see how the other half lives.” Allow me to introduce you to Dave and his seriously hot chick:

Like anyone, I knew a Dave
Drove a Plymouth, shallow grave
Said, “my girl don’t just walk, she unfurls”

If a guy told me that I just don’t walk, but I unfurl, I would fuck him in a New York minute. His lady friend also shows appreciation for his admiration of her undisguised sexuality by following him to the altar.

With motorcycle language
He stumbled through his slang pledge
Then he dragged the mud for wedding pearls

He closed both his eyes and sort of gave her a kiss
Said, “don’t worry baby about what you’re gonna miss
There will always be, oh, much, much more than this”

Every time you go
You are all I see
Holding out for you and me

So, Dave is probably a high school dropout, and his inability to secure a proper wedding ring suggests that his bank account is meager at best. As humans generally mate with someone from the same social stratum, we can assume that his lady is similarly uneducated and broke. Regardless of their limited prospects, they are madly in love with each other and firmly believe that their future is brighter than it seems.

Unfortunately, reality rears its ugly head:

Pulled down his birthday suitcase
Brown with dust from no place
Said, “I think its time we made a start”
Danced the waltz of charity
No car garage, two kids for free
They were pissing bliss and playing parts

Since Dave had never used the suitcase, we can also assume that the couple spent their lives in their hometown and had no idea what may await them in their attempt to split and make a start somewhere else. Alas, either he ran out of condoms, or she forgot to take the Pill, so they wind up two more mouths to feed while on the dole (“the waltz of charity”). As they start to show signs of succumbing to misery, the missus steps in and confirms her faith in Dave and in the relationship:

She closed both her eyes, sorta gave him a kiss
Said, “don’t worry baby about what you’re gonna miss
There’ll always be, oh, much, much more than this”

The hard times trigger a surprising confidence in themselves, as displayed in their ability to laugh their way through their troubles:

And the big snake pit
And we dance to the edge of it
And we laugh and we laugh
‘Cause we ain’t seen the half of it

In short, “Everytime You Go” is about the lasting power of unconditional love combined with an underlying critique of an economic system that leaves too many people behind. Shaming people at the lower reaches of the financial ladder is all too common in capitalist countries, as demonstrated by the enduring question, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

While scanning fan comments, I learned that a sizeable part of the fanbase considers the song one of the Hip’s weaker efforts. “Everytime You Go” may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in addition to the empathetic lyrics, the music confirms their mastery of many forms of rock. With its mix of guitar arpeggios, forceful drumming, and a non-bluesy opening chord progression of Bm-A-G-D, “Everytime You Go” is a solid power pop tune with a heartfelt vocal from Gord Downie, spiced with strong call-and-response vocals from the two Gords.

“When the Weight Comes Down”: I love the music and the vocals, but I have a hard time deciphering the lyrics and grasping the relevance of the biblical references—Jesus on the cross with rubies instead of thorns, “Adam never could do right by Eve,” and the burning bush (god in disguise) telling a girl (not Moses) to “open wide, wide, wide,” which could be a reference to the immaculate conception. Part of me thinks the song is intended to expose biblical myths as utter nonsense, but as a confirmed atheist, I am obviously biased and therefore unable to defend that interpretation (though I do believe that Gord Downie was more of a spiritualist-humanist than a church-goer). Even if it was his intent, I have no idea how “when the weight comes down” fits the narrative, and the closing verse veers away from religion as he sings of “a candy-coated train comes to my door/With a little girl I can’t have any more.” I’m open to suggestions from readers, but it shouldn’t be surprising that a lyricist with obvious potential but limited experience would show signs of inconsistency now and then.

“Trickle Down”: I am a firm believer in democracy, but all democracies are subject to two major flaws: voters who react solely to the here and now without considering long-term consequences, and political parties that offer us choices between two unappealing candidates. In the 1980s, conservative parties exploited dissatisfaction with the status quo in Canada, the U.K., and the United States, electing leaders who were firm believers in a flawed economic theory known as trickle-down economics. The basic idea was that by making the rich richer, a rising tide would lift all boats and the lower and middle classes would reap the benefits. Even the frequently wrong Google AI managed to figure out that the concept was complete crapola: “Trickle-down economics, the theory that tax cuts for the wealthy spur broad economic growth, has not consistently worked, with studies showing it often exacerbates inequality by primarily benefiting the rich, failing to significantly boost overall growth or job creation for the middle and lower classes, and sometimes even slowing economic growth, with evidence from studies on 18 countries over 50 years indicating no meaningful effect on unemployment or GDP, while increasing wealth concentration.”

The song opens with stereo guitars and a solid beat that makes you want to hit the dance floor. Downie makes his entrance after a few bars, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he sings the opening lines: “Old lion’s dying, got left behind/Cut your teeth, lose your meat/And man it’s just a matter of time.” The “lion” is likely “the British lion,” the symbol of Great Britain and, by extension, all members of the Commonwealth; while the reference to losing meat tells us that people have had to cut back on the grocery bill due to the delay of the promised trickle-down. The most pungent lines appear in the anthemic chorus, repeated four times for the benefit of those who are feeling the pinch and want to vent their frustration by singing at the top of their lungs:

Lining up, waiting on the trickle down
Something’s up, taking time to get around
Belly up, all the drinks are on the crown
It’s just a matter of a trickle down

I think most American PBS watchers will understand the reference to the crown, but for those who may find the line confusing, The Hip Museum provides: “The Crown is also the term reserved for the federal government and its holdings, ‘Crown Land,’ etc. The Crown being symbolic of the Government of Canada since we are a Constitutional Monarchy. Canada has an elected legislature and Prime Minister, but a largely symbolic and ceremonial appointed Head of State. “The Crown” is used colloquially to refer to all of it. Needless to say, whatever the circumstance, the above lyric is essentially saying ‘the drinks are on the government,’ or as we used to say around Parliament Hill whenever free drinks arose, ‘the Queen provides’.”

Gord Downie would continue to champion the middle and lower classes in the recorded lyrics and in spontaneous additions in live performances. When performing “New Orleans Is Sinking” on the 2004 arena tour, he would shout “NAFTA” after the line “Can’t tie yourself up for this deal.” Trade agreements (except those forced on countries by the megalomaniac king of the USA) may strengthen ties between countries and prevent conflict, but governments rarely do a damned thing to help those who lose their jobs or livelihoods in the process, leaving them bitter and resentful (and more likely to turn to right-wing populism in response).

“Another Midnight”: I fell in love with this song in about ten seconds with its mix of bright acoustic guitar and electric guitar arpeggios. Had they continued in that vein, I would have pegged the song as “pseudo-British-Invasion” but Rob cranks up the distortion to give the song more heft. The melody, harmonies, and chord pattern filled with D chord variations like Dsus4 and Dsus2 also give the song a Hollies touch, confirming once again the band’s admirable flexibility. The music turns out to be somewhat ironic, given the storyline.

As in “Everytime You Go,” this tune is centered around a couple, but these lovers are not the tightly-knit pair we met in that song. Frankly, I don’t know how in the hell these two people found each other, but it makes for a great story. I can see the headline on the National Enquirer: “HEIRESS GOES SLUMMING WITH A COAL MINER!”

He was a coal miner in the spring
Blinded with its dusty resolutions
Broke his back for higher contributions
Now he’d take anything

Well, she was nineteen seventy
Burning like a cigarette-long season
Heir to all her family’s old treasons
She makes love hard like an enemy

“Free love” might have been a thing in the 60s, but it wasn’t until the 70s when women began to seriously assert themselves in the realm of sexual encounters. That fabulous line “Burning like a cigarette-long season” reflects that shift in erotic adventuring, but it also hit home for me, because that’s how I lived my life from my late teens and into my thirties, fucking my brains out while I moved through a series of different lovers. I couldn’t figure out how the miner and the girl would have consummated the relationship if he suffered from a bad back, but then I remembered that “broke his back” could be a metaphor for overwork instead of a medical diagnosis. If he did have a bad back, they probably consummated the deed with him on the bottom, hopefully with a hard mattress to support his aching spine.

After introducing the couple to the listening audience, this dark comedy turns into a tragedy:

“Oh ma, he’s dying.”

And the river don’t sleep
When the water runs cold
And the calendar burns
As the story unfolds
And the valley spans miles
When the mountain stands high
Can’t they let us run wild
For another midnight
For just another midnight

The couple compares their plight to “an election day,” when there “Ain’t no time for shadowed doubts or maybes,” then adds a more thematic comparison that syncs with their desire to run wild:

Or we’re a stolen Cadillac
Racing for a roadblock in the distance
Flashing by a lifetime in an instance
Can we take it back?
Oh ma, he’s dying
Oh ma, he’s dying

It would seem that the upbeat music is incompatible with impending death, but Gord makes it work by adopting a tone that reflects a burning desire for “just another midnight.” The sadness is there, but hope springs eternal.

Goddamn, these guys are fucking awesome!

“Opiated”: The title might understandably lead listeners to assume that this is a song about opioid addiction, an interpretation mistakenly based on the more recent opioid/fentanyl crisis that took thousands of lives in Canada and the States. The first and third verses bring that assumption into question:

He bought two fifths of lead-free gasoline
Said, “the bottle is dusty, but my engine is clean”
He bought a nice blue suit with the money he could find
If his bride didn’t like it, St. Peter wouldn’t mind

Well the medicine man started seeing red
You’d think the snake just dreams up the poison in his head
While addicted to approval, addicted to the air
It was see if you like it or see you up there

Thanks again to the Hip Museum for clearing up the matter:

Hip Head Mark has this to add: “I think I have some info for your website. You mention the history of the term ‘medicine man’ under Opiated, but I think there’s more to it in the song.

I think the whole song is about huffing gas. “Two fifths of lead-free gasoline” is about 1.5 L, which isn’t going to do much for your car. But fifths are usually used for measuring alcohol, so it makes sense for measuring gas as an intoxicant. I think the fact that it’s “lead-free” and the “engine is clean” might be a little tongue in cheek: the engine here is a human body, which can’t get rid of lead. I haven’t tried it (no plans either), but if the point is to breathe in the gas, then I expect the feeling it leaves you with is “out of breath and over-opiated”.

As I understand it, huffing gas has been a problem in particular for Indigenous communities, hence the community doctor, the medicine man, seeing red about the situation. This made headlines 4 years after the song came out when 6 kids were filmed huffing gas and shouting that they wanted to die.

Several years later, Gord Downie would become an advocate for Indigenous people, urging Canadians to confront uncomfortable truths about Canada’s past and present, learn more about Indigenous history, and actively work towards reconciliation. Gord relates the stories in “Opioid” in a tone of anger and disgust regarding the lives wasted and the social dysfunction that encourages the hopeless to contemplate suicide. The music is equally rough, with distorted guitars leading the way in the key of E minor. It’s not your typical closing number, but there is an advantage in the placement: the last song on an album often “rings in one’s ears,” so perhaps “Opiated” moved a few listeners to learn more about the problem and perhaps do something about it. 

*****

Debut albums are not reliable predictors of future success. Some receive raves because they’re the shiny new thing, but the follow-up turns out to be a rehash. Some are exceptionally strong but wind up becoming the only album in an artist’s discography that’s worth a damn. Changes in musical taste lead music consumers to ignore great debut albums, leaving promising artists floundering in a sea of indifference. My gut tells me that the albums most likely to predict future success are those with enough solid songs and performances to build a recognizable fan base but are not all-time classics that raise unreasonable expectations. The best debut albums combine enough achievement and promise to encourage listeners to place their bets on the follow-up album.

Up to Here is clearly one of the better debut albums I’ve heard, and the Hip’s cohesion, talent, artistic integrity, and fervent desire to build a career in the field of music made it a safe bet that they would only get better and better.

Next week, I will brave the shitty weather and spend some time in and around the lake. My review of the Hip’s follow-up album Road Apples will appear in six weeks.

Take care, stay safe, and don’t believe a fucking word from anyone connected to the White House.