“Bands would tell me, ‘Oh, we never put Canadian place names in our songs because they hurt our chances of success in the States.’ ” (Denise Donion, Host and Producer, MuchMusic)
Hold that thought while I explain how the period following Road Apples led to the transformative and highly consequential experience of Fully Completely. (Note: all quotes in this segment are from No Dress Rehearsal, Episode 2.)
After the release of Road Apples, the Hip hit the road, playing an estimated eighty-seven gigs in Canada, the United States, and Europe between February 1991 and July 1992. Due to a combination of piss-poor marketing and a schedule that largely consisted of small venues, the U.S. tour was hardly a smashing success. As Gord Sinclair noted, “But it was pretty quick in our first tour of the United States that we kinda realized, like, ‘Wow. We got a lot of work to do down here.’ It was literally like starting over again.”
A change of scenery worked wonders. “But then we go over to Europe, and it’s completely different. We had come over from North America with pretty honed live chops.” Paul Langlois remembered, “There were way more people in the clubs waiting to see us than we had expected. Give us a full room back then, and it just felt like we can’t lose.” Manager Jake Gold noted part of the reason the European crowds went wild for the Hip had to do with their origins: “There was definitely a predisposition to liking Canadians.” As a Canadian, Jake was too polite to add the implied “as opposed to Americans,” and it’s no accident that many Americans who travel to Europe try to pass themselves off as Canadians, as explained in this FMF Germany article. The Hip’s success in Europe led Gord Sinclair to remark,” That really established a great foundation for us, in the Netherlands in particular, and it made, somehow, it less important that what we’re doing successfully in the United States.”
Now, hold on to that thought, too. I trust that my readers are capable of multiple thought-holdings.
During the touring period, the band’s sole lyricist experienced an epiphany. “The last year or two, I’ve sort of found a need to, you know, hear Canadian voices.” When writing the lyrics to the songs that would appear on Fully Completely, Gord Downie chose to go a lot further than “sort of” and a few mentions of place names. His lyrics celebrated Canadian authors, the spiritual attachment to the Canadian landscape, and real-life Canadian stories from the past and present. In so doing, he had the full support of his bandmates. Rob Baker put it succinctly when he said, “There’s a huge, vast untapped reservoir of stories here. Tell those stories. Re-tell those stories.” Gord Sinclair: “We sometimes lose sight of the fact that, you know, we have to look for the things that bind us together. Kids across the country hear the musical stories of our fellow citizens in order to better understand who and what we are as a nation. I think nothing does that better than song.”
Put all that together with the two previous thoughts, and we can conclude that the Hip were more concerned with maintaining their authenticity than giving in to American ethnocentrism and making their music more palatable to the yanks. Denise Donion knew how much that shift meant to their core audience: “The Tragically Hip unabashedly singing about Canada just cleaved the fans ever closer to them.” It meant a lot to Canadian actor and filmmaker Jay Baruchel, who understood the downsides of American cultural dominance that had begun in the early days of the film industry and grew even stronger with the advent of television: “You know, we’re one of the only kinda wealthy countries in the world where you grow up seeing someone else’s culture on TV and in the movie theaters all the time, and the music as well, so here was someone talking about my world.” Better still, the world Gord Downie wrote about was the real Canada, blemishes and all. Media personality George Stroumboulopoulos grasped the impact of that approach: “Here’s what’s really important to know about the band. I never found them to be patriotic. They weren’t a rah-rah Canadian band. ‘Cause I think they know by telling stories to people who may not have paid attention in school, who knows what gems will land.” Or as Jay Baruchel put it, “There’s not a single moment of nationalism in any of it. It is just portrayal.”
The Hip had to know that grounding their music in Canadian history and culture would severely damage their chances of ever making it big in the States, but so what? They weren’t in it for the money; they frequently donated huge chunks of their tour earnings to various causes and charities, and wound up winning the 2021 Juno Humanitarian Award. What mattered was remaining true to themselves and making the music they wanted to make, Americans be damned.
*****
Having worked with Don Smith on their first two albums, management sensed that working with a different producer might help the Hip crack the lucrative American market. Bruce Dickerson suggested a few names, and the Hip chose Chris Tsangarides because they liked the sound of some of the records he had produced. Tsangarides was known for his production of English heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but had also worked with alternative rock bands like Concrete Blonde. After the Americans gave the Hip the cold shoulder and the Europeans welcomed them with open arms, the priorities shifted to creating a Euro-friendly sound, making Tsangarides the perfect choice—he was born in Cyprus and worked out of London, where the Hip was scheduled to complete their European tour. Rob Baker: “London seemed like the obvious choice because that was the scene that really inspired the band in the first place, the early London club scene. That was the grain in the oyster that made the pearl.”
The first two albums were produced with the intent of capturing the Hip’s live performances, but Tsangarides’ production techniques mirrored the more modern approach that had become the gold standard. Gord Sinclair: “Chris Tsangarides just had a very clear image of how he was gonna record. It was a completely different experience. You know, with Don Smith, we played together all the time. Chris tore the band apart and did bass and drums first, and then guitars, and then vocals last.” This approach proved to be a sometimes uncomfortable learning experience, but the finished product shows no signs of lingering discomfort. Steve McLean and Andrew McIntosh commented in The Canadian Encyclopedia that “Fully Completely showed a maturing band that had mastered its craft and was broadening its horizons.” All three key members of the management team loved the music and Gord Downie’s storytelling; MCA’s Bruce Dickinson felt that Fully Completely “was the album that I knew they could all make together.” As for the album’s commercial performance, Denise Donion said it best: “Fully Completely was a record, well, I remember it blowing the roof off everything.” Jake Gold: “We went from 300,000 on the other two records to all of a sudden half a million in a month. It was massive.” Johnny Fay: “Fully Completely kind of put us in a different stratosphere altogether. That record, out of the gate, was big for us.”
More importantly, Fully Completely cemented what would become a long and fruitful relationship between the Hip and their home crowd. As Sarah Harmer said in the Canadian Encyclopedia, “Culturally and emotionally, and as a sense of identity, the Hip have really sustained people in this country over the years and just given us new ideas about ourselves and about our history.”
*****
“Courage” (For Hugh MacLennan): The album opens with a knockout opening thrust guaranteed to lift fans out of their seats and into a state of ecstasy. The intro to “Courage” finds the Hip as tight as ever, with Paul opening each bar with a sustained power chord, Johnny supplying a nimble shuffle, and Rob nailing the catchy arpeggios, while the Tsangarides approach imbues Sinclair’s excellent bass runs with greater clarity. The sound rings with confidence, as if the Hip are telling us, “We’ve got this.” I start smiling and my hips start grinding in the nanosecond between Paul’s first shot and Johnny’s entrance, and I keep on trucking until the quiet closing verse demands my undivided attention.
The inspiration for the lyrics came from Hugh MacLennan’s novel The Watch That Ends the Night, which Gord devoured during the Road Apples tour. You can find a lengthy interpretation of the lyrics on the Hip Museum’s reference page, but as usual, I have a slightly different take. The introduction to the latest edition argues that “MacLennan shaped a novel of ideas that delved into the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual depths of his generation during the 1930s. Marked by the Depression, many members of his generation, like MacLennan, had expressed sympathy for or embraced Socialism or, at serious personal risk, joined the Communist Party. All of this was played out against the rising threat of German Fascism and the widely reported atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, a cause which rallied support in numerous countries, including Canada. To reinforce his sense of the purpose of the novel – exploring the fate of his generation – he had adopted the working title ‘Requiem’.” (MacLennan, Hugh (2010). The Watch that Ends the Night (Function). Kindle Edition.)
The chaos experienced by the members of that generation led writers of the era to question the purpose of human existence. The three main characters in the novel have their virtues and their flaws, while trying desperately to make sense of a world that makes no sense. MacLennan places them in situations that require them to make difficult choices, echoing Sartre’s fundamental tenet: “‘Existence precedes essence’ . . . meaning humans are born without a predetermined purpose, nature, or definition and must define themselves through their choices and actions. We are ‘thrown’ into the world first, then create our own meaning, bearing total responsibility for our identity.” The aspect of Sartre’s philosophy most relevant to “Courage” is “Inauthenticity – or ‘bad faith’, as Sartre calls it – is when we let our own existential freedom be inhibited through complacency or conformity, when we let other things or people dictate value or define us, when we fix ourselves to static roles or identities rather than recognize ourselves as ever-becoming beings.”
The novel made a deep impression on Gord Downie, and not surprisingly, he felt the need to express what he learned through poetry. In “Courage,” he engages in self-reflection about his life choices, specifically the choice to pursue a career in music. Once the Hip signed their first contract, they had to deal with an industry where dictating values and pushing musicians to conform to a proven formula is often common practice. Gord reflects on the early days of the Hip and how he sometimes found himself caught between the desire to do something different and the tendency to cling to the familiar:
Watch the band through a bunch of dancers
Quickly, follow the unknown with something more familiar.
Quickly something familiar
Courage, my word, it didn’t come, it doesn’t matter
The connection to MacLennan is noted in the Courage Reference Page: “In his seminal work, MacLennan criticized modern man for being untrue to himself by keeping his ‘distance in fear of the excessively unfamiliar’.” George Stewart, the protagonist of “The Watch,” who bears many similarities to the author himself, argued that musicians were among the few artists who still spoke with conviction. “Go to the musicians,” Stewart says, “In the work of a few musicians you can hear every aspect of this conflict between light and dark within the soul.” Above all, Gord Downie wanted to be one of those few musicians who spoke with conviction, and fortunately for us, he managed to realize his dream.
One of the pressures the Hip constantly faced was to “sound more American” to achieve success in the States. The second verse finds Gord on tour, struggling with that knotty problem:
Sleepwalk, so fast asleep in a motel
that has the lay of home and piss on all of your
background and piss on all your surroundings
Courage, my (your) word, it didn’t come, it doesn’t matter (3)
Courage, it couldn’t come at a worse time
The line “Courage, it couldn’t come at a worse time” may seem confusing at first because we tend to admire those who display courage. The truth is, courage is only necessary when you are facing an unexpected and unwanted challenge. Some people are wired to immediately respond courageously to life’s difficulties, but for most of us, the first reaction is “Oh, shit! Not now, for fuck’s sake!” There’s a reason why the phrase “work up the courage” exists, because that’s what most people have to do (hence the lines “It didn’t come, it didn’t matter).
Up to this point, the verses have received full band support while adding spot harmonies to the mix. The band backs off a bit while Gord sings the verse lines, with Sinclair maintaining the song’s heartbeat with steady bass notes. As Gord changes his tone and phrasing to express exhaustion on the phrase “a worse time,” the band lowers the volume and intensity in preparation for the closing verse, where Gord paraphrases the passage from the novel that likely carried the most meaning for him. The passage also serves to enlighten the audience that the pressures they face daily are a permanent feature of human existence:
So there’s no simple explanation
for anything important any of us do
And yea the human tragedy
consists in the necessity
of living with the consequences
under pressure, under pressure.
That passage actually ends with the words, “of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” Kudos to MacLennan for his brilliant insight, but unfortunately, transforming those words into song is a near impossibility. Even Frank Sinatra couldn’t have made those words sound melodious.
“Courage” is a fabulous piece of work that remains one of the Hip’s most popular songs to this day, and lo and behold, the single made it to the Top 20 on the U.S Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks (but not the Billboard 100). I suppose it helped that Gord did not mention that the novel was set in Montreal.
I forgot to mention that “Courage” is the first of two songs on Fully Completely celebrating the works of great Canadian authors.
“Looking for a Place to Happen”: The topic of this song is one that Gord Downie would devote his energies to later in life: the plight of the indigenous populations in Canada. Here he harks back to the early days of French exploration of North America to set the stage for the tragedy that followed.
The song opens with angry guitars that come close to metal, likely encouraged by producer Tsangarides. Gord’s tone and tenor reflect that roughness as he takes on the role of French explorer (later identified as Jacques Cartier), conveying the arrogance and racist attitudes of many a European visitor to these “unclaimed lands”:
I’ve got a job, I explore, I follow every little whiff
And I want my life to smell like this
To find a place, an ancient race
The kind you’d like to gamble with
Where they’d stamp on burning bags of shit.
Looking for a place to happen making stops along the way
To be fair, neither Cartier nor Champlain came close to duplicating the horrors wrought by the genocidal maniac Christopher Columbus, but the French claimed territory that belonged to the inhabitants, and most of the settlers would view them as savages for centuries to come (unless they needed their help to fight the Brits or other tribes).
The Reference Page to this song argues that the second verse presents the perspective of the native population, largely due to the “I’ll paint a scene” line: “Indigenous people across North America commonly painted their natural environment, often depicting historic events on cliff sides, rocks and cave interiors.” That is true, but the opening lines imply an ocean voyage, and Cartier did kidnap Chief Donnacona (and earlier, his two sons) and brought them to Paris, but there were no art galleries in Paris until the days of the French Revolution, and “garbage bag trees” didn’t become a thing until the 1980s. Interpretation: your guess is as good as mine.
Wayward ho! Away we go,
It’s a shame to leave this masterpiece
With its gallery gods and its garbage-bag trees
So I’ll paint a scene, from memory,
So I’d know who murdered me
It’s a vain pursuit, but it helps me to sleep
Looking for a place to happen making stops along the way (2)
There is no doubt about who is speaking in the closing verse—a representative of the people who have lived there for centuries:
Jacques Cartier, right this way,
I’ll put your coat up on the bed
Hey man you’ve got the real bum’s eye for clothes
And come on in, sit right down,
No you’re not the first to show
We’ve all been here since, God, who knows?
Looking for a place to happen making stops along the way.
Given Paris’s reputation as the world’s fashion capital, I had to laugh when I heard the allegedly uncivilized savage criticize the Frenchman’s fashion choices. What strikes me the most about this verse is that the indigenous fellow welcomes Cartier and treats him as an equal instead of viewing him as a threat—a reminder that the tribes were just as civilized as the Europeans.
“At the Hundredth Meridian”: When I watched the video for the song, I suffered from an attack of befuddlement. I have been to the Great Plains in both the States and in Manitoba, and the setting in the film features shots of desert and ocean waves! I was stricken by a second attack when the Wikipedia page for the song claimed that the video was shot in Melbourne during the Hip’s tour of the ANZAC countries. What the fuck? Melbourne is Australia’s second-largest city! I guess that due to the Hip’s heavy touring schedule, they had to make do by traveling to a relatively barren spot, but geez, I was hoping to see a Great Plains dawn, where the sun looms larger than Jupiter. To their credit, the Hip did manage to find a corduroy road.
The music has an unusual urgency (that occasionally gets a bit sloppy in the call-and-response segments), as if Gord can’t wait to set the record straight. He opens the song by courting danger: “Me debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?” Americans believe that their Great Plains are THE GREATEST Plains, ignoring the fact that the Canadian Great Plains run through three provinces and the Canadian Prairie stretches all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Gord’s description of the area focuses on areas of relative isolation, where signs of civilization are few and far between, and the roads are rutty and problematic. To emphasize the haunting nature of the landscape, Gord adds a touch of Edgar Allan Poe :
Driving down a corduroy road,
weeds standing shoulder high.
Ferris wheel is rusting off in the distance.
At the hundredth meridian (3) where the great plains begin.Left alone to get gigantic;
Hard, huge and haunted
A generation so much dumber than its parents came crashing through the window.
A raven strains along the line of the road, carrying a muddy old skull.
The wires whistle their approval, off down the distance.
At the hundredth meridian (3) where the great plains begin.
After a bridge where Gord recalls problematic shows in Buffalo and Hengelo (Netherlands), he remarks, “It would seem to me I remember every single fuckin’ thing I know,” indicating that substandard performances weigh heavily on his mind. In the final verse, he moves from singing to rapping, expressing his desire to be buried far away from the corrupting environment of the big city if he dies of egomaniac perfectionism:
If I die of vanity, promise me, promise me,
They bury me someplace I don’t want to be,
You’ll dig me up and transport me, unceremoniously,
Away from the swollen city-breeze, the garbage-bag trees,
Whispers of disease and the acts of enormity
And lower me slowly, sadly and properly
Get Ry Cooder to sing my eulogy.
At the hundredth meridian where the great plains begin
I believe Ry Cooder would have been honored to grant Gord’s request. The live versions of the song I found on YouTube double down on the urgency, with the band playing at a faster tempo and adding extended jams. Needless to say, the crowd goes wild.
“Pigeon Camera”: Once again, I want to express my endless gratitude to The Hip Museum for preserving the Hip’s legacy and helping me make sense of lyrics that I fail to grasp at first. In this case, I did detect the incest theme, and I knew about pigeon cameras by watching Combat!, but I couldn’t figure out how the two fit together. The Museum provides:
Rob Bertrand and Oren Bick, two very early online decipherers of Gord’s work, wrote this of “Pigeon Camera” long ago: “Pigeon Camera developed out of a monologue Gord performed during the Hengelo show. The concert fell on road manager Dave Powell’s birthday. Gord sang an impromptu song about Dave’s childhood in Thunder Bay. Though none of the lyrics were retained, the themes of the impromptu song were spying and incest—two unlikely themes which would come back later in Pigeon Camera.” Those two themes are likely reflected in the lyrics above which are believed to have entered Gord’s consciousness after hearing Dave tell a story about seeing his sister naked.
I am relieved to learn that the incest only existed in Gord’s fertile imagination.
The mid-tempo music is set to the key of C# minor, evoking feelings of shame and regret. You never know when and where mutual attraction may occur (one of my affairs began when I locked eyes with a guy in an elevator), but for these siblings, the door to danger opened at an auction.
It was handsome at the auction,
Oh, but when we got it home,
It grew up into something we could
No longer contain
After consummating the illicit relationship, the pair immediately starts worrying about getting caught. Gord uses the pigeon camera—a spying technique used in WWII involving attaching a small camera to a pigeon’s torso to fly over Wehrmacht encampments to see what the Nazis were planning—as a metaphor for the ways parents always seem to discover what unacceptable behavior their kids were engaged in. That fear always leads children to expect the worst, and their anxiety triggers a flood of guilt expressed here in babbling, strengthened by a shift to call-and-response mode between Gord and Paul. These kids know in their hearts that a caring or overbearing parent can detect a guilty conscience a mile away:
Where’s our pigeon camera,
By now he could be anywhere
And after all that training.
And after all that training, (And after all that training)
With something we could no longer contain. (We could no longer contain)It’s boring, (Boring)
I’m embarrassed, (Embarassed)
I don’t endorse that, (Slammed in my face)
I didn’t want this
In the next verse, the narrator notes that “This house has its politics.” We often hear politics described as incestuous, which tells me that the kids are in deep shit because their parents don’t trust them (and they don’t trust their parents). Following a repetition of the senseless babble, Gord closes the narrative with the line, “It’s like we burned our boots with no contingency plan.” One might have expected that Gord would have employed the cliché phrase “burned our boats,” but if the kids decided to become runaways, they would have done so in boots, especially during a Canadian winter.
What I admire most about Gord’s presentation is that he never comes close to judging or condemning the kids for breaking the ultimate taboo. For Gord, it was all part of “the human tragedy . . . of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” The song closes with a sensitive, melancholic guitar solo from Rob that I would rate as one of his best—a sad ending to a very, very sad story.
“Lionized”: The mood change from “Pigeon Camera” to “Lionized” feels like a driver slowly coming to a stop, then suddenly turning around in the opposite direction with his foot to the floor while shifting into overdrive. Consisting of nothing but power chords, one insignificant key change in the bridge, and sweetened by three-part vocal harmonies, “Lionized” is driving, kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll at its best.
The opening verse immediately grabs your attention, because whether you’re naughty or prudish, sex always sells:
Cold wind blowing over your private parts
I know a lack you’ve got
and it makes a strong case for art.
Billboard breasts, they don’t have a face,
I know that fact you’ve got,
No girl could ever trace.
Lionized (Lionized)
It appears we’re dealing with a model or a budding actress trying to make a name for herself by agreeing to share pictures of her tits to passing drivers, likely hoping that her lovely bosom will spark interest from magazine editors or filmmakers. The “cold wind blowing over your private parts” may refer to a photo shoot involving a photographer who wants those nipples to get nice and hard before he snaps the picture, or the image on the billboard as it blows in the wind. Gord leaves us a clue to interpretation in the bridge, where he sings the phrases “tableaux vivant” and “roman à clef.” The first is French for “living picture,” a silent, motionless scene created by actors or models to mimic a painting, sculpture, or historical event (it’s a stretch, but tits on a billboard may qualify). “Roman à clef,” literally means a “novel with a key,” a genre of fiction and film where real people, places, or events are depicted under thinly veiled aliases, allowing authors and filmmakers to explore controversial, personal, or actual occurrences under the guise of fiction. Both art forms involve pretense and sleight of hand, but that’s how many wannabes earn fame and lionization.
In the second, Gord resorts to a compare-and-contrast, comparing his realization that he’s “smoking a little too violently” to her “stupid, stoned cause and effect,” hinting that she may lack the ability to know when to stop.
Smoking just a little too violently
I know that fact I’ve got
and I know it single-mindedly
Stupid, stoned cause and effect
I know a lack you’ve got
and you don’t even lack it yet.
In the final verse, Gord expands on the comparison to try to convince the woman that what she’s doing might earn her a spot on one of those “sexiest people” lists, but lionization is a superficial honor when compared to authenticity expressed through art.
I can’t draw, but I can trace
I know a lack I’ve got,
An abundance of extra space
Cold wind blowing over your private parts
I know a lack you’ve got is to make a strong case for art
In other words, “Get real, babe!”
“Locked in the Trunk of a Car”: From the Hip Museum Reference Page:
Downie was inspired to write this song after reading The Killer Inside Me by American author Jim Thompson. Michael Barclay’s excellent book The Never-Ending Present contains this quote from Gord: “It was probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever read.” Like most of Downie’s work, this song is about a collection of things. The song, Gord said, “was never about one historical incident. It was about trying to evoke the claustrophobic atmosphere around guilt and shame.”
Downie is further quoted in Barclay’s book: “Downie says the narrator was deliberately modelled on Crime and Punishment‘s Raskolnikov. He “appears first as an ageless shark moving through the centuries; then as an Everyman at the gas station, getting the tank topped off. In the end, his mind is a forest of voices – he’s howling in the third person, ‘It’d be better for us if you don’t understand.’ I wrote and sang this in the first-person, the monster ‘s-eye view. It is probably for this reason that this one has always made me vaguely uneasy. It’s just so . . . graphic. I don’t always feel like I can be near it, let alone own it.”
Me being me, I connected Gord’s description of the evil that never dies to the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold.”
Mr. Scott (“Scotty”) is introduced to Kara, a dancer at the club, and leaves with her. As Kirk and McCoy make their way through an evening fog to another private club, they hear a scream, and find the dancer dead on the ground with Scotty standing against a nearby wall, clutching a bloody knife.
Scott is detained and interrogated by Mr. Hengist, an administrator from Rigel IV and head of Argelius’s police operations. Jaris, the Prefect of the planet, appears and bids his wife, Sybo, employ the Argelian empathic contact to determine the truth. While she prepares for the ritual, Lieutenant Karen Tracy, an Enterprise medical specialist, beams down with a psycho-tricorder, interviews Scott, and is murdered. The evidence again points to Scott.
Sybo proceeds with the empathic contact ritual. The participants hold hands as in a seance, and Sybo begins to speak of a “monstrous, terrible evil”, “a hunger that never dies”, which has been named “Kesla”, “Beratis”, “Redjac.” The altar fire goes out, and Sybo screams. When the lights come on, Scott is holding Sybo’s dead body.
The Prefect, over Hengist’s objections, agrees to continue the investigation aboard the Enterprise. Both Scott and Kara’s fiancé Morla are questioned under “accuracy scan” by the computer, which confirms the testimony of both. Scott also speaks of a cold, evil presence during Sybo’s ceremony, and the computer again verifies the accuracy of the statement.
Kirk queries the computer on the names spoken by Sybo, including “Redjac”. The computer responds with “Red Jack”, a name given to the serial killer better known as Jack the Ripper. That, and Sybo’s mention of a “hunger that never dies”, suggests to Kirk that an immortal, non-corporeal entity might be involved. (Wikipedia)
Huh. Maybe that explains what happened to the Americans—in 2024, they were invaded by an immortal, monstrous, terrible evil whose thirst for hate never dies. If that’s the case, then some genius better hurry up and invent the transporter, because that’s what Canadian William Shatner did to get rid of the prick—he knocked out the prick, carried him to the transporter, and beamed him out into space where he dissolved into nothingness. Hey! A girl can dream, can’t she?
The only thing I can add to the Reference Page explanation is that it should come as no surprise that Gord would make use of the terrible evil responsible for the deaths of millions of indigenous inhabitants of the Americas to make his opening argument about the existence of evil that never dies:
They don’t know how old I am,
They found armour in my belly
From the 16th century, Conquistador, I think.
The music is rough and tough, and though Gord felt uncomfortable in the role of serial murderer, he manages to crawl into the guy’s skin and vent the sicko’s endless hatred through his vocals.
“We’ll Go Too”: What I love most about this song is the guitar arrangement, a powered-up nod to the jangly guitars of the 60s with Rob and Paul playing contrasting arpeggios throughout. The lyrics are relatively simple compared to most of the other songs on the album, a perfect fit for a song about a couple locked into following the crowd and trying to avoid separation from the pack. I also like the way Gord renders the word “what” in the chorus, “What can you do, they’ve all gone, and we’ll go too.” He modifies the syllablization to “wuut” with a noticeable drawl, as in “Welp, ain’t nothin’ we can do about it now, honey,” confirming the pair’s status as lazy conformists.
“Fully Completely”: I can’t remember an album where the title track is the runt in the litter, but this is clearly the weakest track on the album. It’s so . . . un-Hip.
“Fifty-Mission Cap”: As promised, this is the second song celebrating the works of great Canadian authors. “Huh?” I hear you say. “Is this broad out of her mind?” No, I am not. The second author is none other than The Guy Who Wrote The Story of Bill Barilko’s Goal On the Back Of A Hockey Card! The backstory of the song’s composition is beautifully captured in No Dress Rehearsal:
Sinclair: We didn’t know anything about Bill Barilko until we were literally rehearsing one day in Johnny’s mom and dad’s garage.
Baker: And Gord Downie’s sitting back, trying to figure out what he’s going to do, and he opens up a pack of hockey cards, and he pulls out this one, and it’s the Bill Barilko goal. I remember Gord lookin’ at the card and then he stepped up to the mic and started singing the lyrics to “Fifty-Mission Cap.” (laughter)
Rob then reads from the back of the card, noting that “With a couple of minor changes, the song wrote itself!” Here are the complete lyrics (verse and chorus repeated once), where Gord admits his thievery and gives full credit to the unnamed author:
Bill Barilko disappeared that summer (Nineteen Fifty-One)
He was on a fishing trip
The last goal he ever scored won the Leafs the cup
They didn’t win another til Nineteen Sixty Two
The year he was discovered
I stole this from a hockey card
I keep tucked up under . . .My fifty mission cap
I worked it in
I worked it in to look like that
It’s my fifty mission cap
It says: fifty mission cap
And I worked it in
I worked it in
And I worked it in
To look like that
And I worked it in to look like that
The 1951 Stanley Cup Finals between the Leafs and les Canadiens have to rank among the most exciting series in any sport: all five games went into overtime. Bill Barilko was the unlikely hero; he was not known for his offensive skills, but scored the winning goal in a pressure-filled environment. Sadly, he didn’t have long to savor his heroic moment. From the Hip Museum:
During the summer following Barilko’s April 21, 1951 Stanley Cup winning goal against les Canadiens, the 24-year-old’s plane crashed near Cochrane, Ontario. His body could not be immediately located in the dense Northern Ontario brush. After his disappearance in death, the World Champion Leafs experienced an 11 year losing streak in a six team league. Some suspected that the mighty Leafs were cursed against the Cup until Bill’s body could be found. However, if any curse existed, it was actually the reverse of that popular interpretation: Bill was cursed to remain undiscovered until his Leafs could win again. On April 22nd 1962, the Leafs finally did win another Stanley Cup. Roughly seven weeks later, Barilko’s remains were discovered by a pilot flying over an area about 100km north of Cochrane.
So what’s the deal with the fifty mission cap? From the Museum:
Fifty mission caps were given to elite bomber pilots of the allied airforces who safely completed 50 bombing missions during the Second World War. Of course, the caps served more as morale-boosting status symbols than reward. Pilots with fifty mission caps were revered. The caps they wore while bombing would of course have become worn down, sweat through and pressed repeatedly by communications earphones into inelegant shapes. When these pilots received their fifty mission caps, they were allowed to shun military protocol and work-them-in or dirty the caps up in order to add to their mystique.
Gord Downie explained to Steve Newton in 1992 that he liked a different angle on that story: “In World War Two, when you were a new pilot, you’d be given a new hat. Of course, you’d work it in to look like a fifty mission cap so as to appear that you had more experience than you really did.” Perhaps it was this idea, of an inexperienced and perhaps doomed pilot, which linked the wartime bombers to Barilko’s ill fated flight in Gord’s imagination.
The song is a passionate, powerful retelling of Barilko’s story—a story that deserved to be told. Though I am obviously not a Canadian, and my exposure to hockey was limited to the years I lived in Seattle and occasionally tuned into Hockey Night in Canada, I get choked up every time I hear this song. Ron MacLean, the studio host for Hockey Night, recalled the song’s impact on viewers when “Fifty Mission Cap” became one of the theme songs on the program: “Ninth cut on the disk is the one that became the Hockey Night in Canada second theme song—‘Fifty Mission Cap.’ And just the power with which it blew through the speakers . . .”
I realize how much this song means to Canadians, but I also think it should mean something to anyone with a heart. Though many of Gord’s stories are set in Canada, they are stories about the human condition that possess universal meaning.
“Wheat Kings”: Continuing with that thread, if you can’t feel genuine sorrow for the guy in this story, fuck you, I don’t want to know you.
The song opens with the iconic cry of the loon with its “distinct, haunting quality that has enchanted humans for centuries. In popular culture, these calls have become a symbol of the wilderness.” The music for the song came from Paul Langlois, modified to a simpler composition thanks to a suggestion by Chris Tsangarides: G-C in the verses, and D-G-C in the chorus. Those chords are played on acoustic guitars at a slow tempo, creating a mood of sadness and regret.
Gord enters after the guitars play a few toned-down bars, setting the story in one of the Western Canadian cities that adopted the nickname “Paris of the Prairies,” in the hope of luring people to their underpopulated area (either Saskatoon, where the main event in the story takes place, or Winnipeg, the hometown of the man at the center of the story). The area is also known as “the breadbasket to the world,” where wheat is the dominant crop.
Sundown in the Paris of the Prairies
Wheat Kings have all their treasures buried
And all you hear are the rusty breezes
Pushing around the weather vane Jesus
The relative quiet of the prairie is broken in the second verse when the body of Gail Miller, a twenty-year-old nursing student, is found in a snowbank in Saskatoon after having been raped and murdered. Seventeen-year-old David Millgaard and a couple of his friends (one girl and one boy) happened to be visiting another friend who lived near the crime scene. Desperate to solve the crime, the cops focused on Milgaard as the likely suspect after they coerced his friends to change their story to place him at the scene around the time of the murder. David Milgaard would spend twenty-three years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, during which time he was raped and attempted suicide. Gord rightly blames the Canadian justice system, correctly divining that “The Milgaard story is unfortunately one in a too-long list of wrongful convictions in Canada.” (Hip Museum)
In his Zippo lighter, he sees the killer’s face
Maybe it’s someone standing in a killer’s place
Twenty years for nothing, well that’s nothing new, besides
No one’s interested in something you didn’t do
The Hip Museum notes that “While David’s life wasted away as a convicted murderer, five Prime Ministers of Canada held office and oversaw more than a dozen ministers of justice. Joyce Milgaard, David’s mother and this story’s heroic figure outside the prison walls, lobbied all of them. She personally pleaded her son’s case with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Justice Minister, future Prime Minister, Kim Campbell.” The government was indifferent to her plight.
There’s a dream he dreams where the high school is dead and stark
It’s a museum and we’re all locked up in it after dark
Where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister
Hung with pictures of our parents’ prime ministers
While Joyce kept up her efforts, “The CBC, which is Canada’s publicly funded national broadcaster, not only gave heavy coverage to the Milgaard story on its newscasts, but also exposed the flaws and unanswered questions of David’s initial conviction during special editions of their ‘Fifth Estate’ and ‘The Journal’ programs.” (Hip Museum) Milgaard was finally released in 1992 and completely exonerated by DNA evidence in 1997. The real killer had already served twenty-three years for rapes in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but had not been considered a suspect.
Late-breaking story on the CBC,
A nation whispers, “we always knew that he’d go free”
They add, “You can’t be fond of living in the past,
Cause if you are then there’s no way that you’re gonna last”
Gord met with Millgaard on several occasions after his release, and invited him to attend a concert where the Hip played “Wheat Kings.” Gord nearly always introduced the song with a disclaimer: “I won’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be in jail for 20 years, nor will I pretend to understand what it feels like, especially if you’re innocent.” Milgaard makes an appearance in No Dress Rehearsal, where he is given credit for the loon cry and expresses his gratitude for Gord’s song: “I really truly love this song. Sometimes, when, I don’t know, I just need to find a good space, need to feel a little bit better about myself, about my life, I listen to ‘Wheat Kings.'”
He never would have taken on such a role (and I hope he wouldn’t), but it’s nice to dream of a world where our leaders are more like Gord Downie—you know, leaders who actually care about people . . .
By the way, you can find the full story of the loon sound in No Dress Rehearsal, but to keep things short and to the point, I’ll turn it over to the Museum: “Rob Baker told Ottawa radio station Chez 106 (and perhaps other affiliated stations) in 2016 that the famous loon call at the beginning of Wheat Kings was the source of some controversy. It seems the man who originally recorded that call recognized his work and sent the band a legal threat. “We had to cut a substantial cheque in his name to Ducks Unlimited,” recalled Rob.
“The Wherewithal”: Gord famously introduced the song thusly: “This song is about Richard Nixon or Richard Dawson, take your pick.” I have no idea why he would have written a song about either one, and you can find lyrics that fit either of the two. Identity problems aside, the song is a fabulous piece of rock ‘n’ roll with plenty of hot guitar licks and a boffo performance by the rhythm section of Fay and Sinclair. I particularly love the key change from B to C in the chorus and the catchy melody of that passage.
“Eldorado”: Christoper MacKinnon wrote an article on Medium titled, “The Hidden History Behind The Tragically Hip Song ‘Eldorado’,” where he describes the lyrics as “Fragmented sentences. Disconnected images. Inscrutable lines.” He then comes up with a new theory: “I contend that the songwriting history behind ‘Eldorado’ traces back to a certain mountain in British Columbia: Downie Peak.” Others say it’s about alcoholism; some say it’s about the Cadillac Eldorado. In the live version on the Deluxe Edition, Gord claims, “This song is about a man who uses Cheez Whiz in his hair, to great effect.”
I think we can safely throw most of these guesses into the blender and set it to puree . . . except the only one for which there is evidence in the lyrics: the alcoholism angle. Before I share the evidence, I want to assure you that there isn’t a single typo in my reproduction of the lyrics from the album’s booklet:
Just the mention of Berlin makes me sexy
and tired of thinkingaboutdrinking
ofthinkingaboudrinkingandthinkingaboutdrinking
Tired of lovingrecoveringlovingreccoveringlovingreocovering
Well, at least we know someone is drunk. For me, the real value of the song lies in its Latin rhythm and use of diminished minor chords—a hint that the Hip might have been hankering to explore possibilities beyond the limits of basic rock ‘n roll.
*****
One might think that the smashing success of Fully Completely would lead the Hip to use it as a template for the follow-up album. NOT! When Johnny was asked, “Would you say this is the high watermark for the band so far?” his reply revealed something very important about the Hip and their core values: “Oh, yeah. Definitely, definitely. And right now I think it’s very important that we take some time off, you know, and sort of regroup, and get ideas for the next record—the next thing that we’re gonna do that’s different. We wanna do something different. So . . .”
Commercially-oriented artists shoot for the money and the fame and do the same old shit. True artists are compelled to create something unique, regardless of the risks to the bottom line. Needless to say, the Hip belongs in the latter category.
Oh, shit! It’s 2 a.m! Fuck it, I can get some sleep on the plane. Let’s see what’s coming up . . . well, I’ll be darned . . . the boys are back in town.