This
is the first of several playlists that can function as an unofficial soundtrack
to my book, The Never-Ending Present: The
Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, published by ECW Press in
April 2018. The first two playlists feature 40 Hip tracks each: one set of
greatest hits for newcomers (or a refresher for lapsed fans), one of
deep(er) cuts and less obvious selections. Later we’ll feature Gord Downie solo
tracks, influences, peers, and more.
The
Never-Ending Present Playlist #1: The biggest hits
Spotify link is here.
Tidal link is here.
1. “Blow at High Dough.” The first song on the
first album was many people’s first impression of the band. “They
shot a movie once in my hometown”: this is clearly a once-in-a-lifetime event
in the locale, long before Canada became a popular and economical place for
U.S. studios to shoot films. “Down at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing”:
Hollywood vs. the hayseeds; the big time and the small potatoes. And then,
before our ears, with a suspended stop and one ringing power chord—a moment
filled with the tension of a cliff diver right before he makes an impact—this
bar band from a tiny Ontario city transforms into stadium-worthy status
alongside AC/DC. Rob Baker once said that his favourite part of any Hip show
was during this song, when the whole band kicks in after the opening. He’s not
alone.
2.
“Small Town Bringdown.” The first Hip song I
ever heard (on Q107 in Toronto), the first song on the EP, the first single
released to radio. This is also the song Bruce Dickinson heard in his New York
City kitchen, when he played a sampler CD for an upcoming music conference and
decided he had to see this band and sign them to MCA Records.
3.
“Last American Exit.” How could we tell this
band was Canadian? “I’m on the last American exit to the north land … to my
homeland.”
4.
“38 Years Old.” An entirely fictional
story set during a very real event, the biggest prison break in Canadian
history, which took place 10 miles away from Downie’s childhood home in
Amherstview. “It was pretty exciting at the time,” he said, “the biggest thing
to ever happen where nothing ever happens.” It was 1972; he was eight years
old, with an older brother named Mike and two older sisters, but that’s where
the real-life parallels end. Though a fan favourite, this was left off set
lists for years.
5.
“New Orleans is Sinking.” The first of many Downie
songs about death in the water. Based on a guitar riff from Them’s version of
“Baby Please Don’t Go,” this was played at almost every Tragically Hip show
since it was written. Often, a jam in the middle would be a place to workshop
new material, including some of the band’s biggest hits, like “Ahead By a
Century.”
6.
“Boots or Hearts.” This longtime favourite
was the first song of the first show, in Victoria, of the Man Machine Poem tour
in 2016. “When things fall apart, man, they really fall apart.” Except they
didn’t.
7.
“Little Bones.” Written in New Orleans
while recording Road Apples, where it
was humid and “so sticky” that Downie needed to “butter [his] cue finger up” to
play billiards in the converted mansion where the band was recording. Upon
arriving in the city, a cab driver recommended a local eatery with advice, “Eat
that chicken slow, don’t worry about them little bones.” Downie was reading
Timothy Findley’s Last of the Crazy People
at the time, in which there is a cat named Little Bones. This wonderfully
surreal set of images culminates in a chorus that mutates on a different series
of puns each time, all set to one of the band’s greatest rock riffs.
8.
“Three Pistols.” This song was left off Up to Here; it wasn’t deemed strong
enough. Which seems shocking, though demos from the time validate the decision.
After another couple of years playing it on the road, it had morphed into
another one of the band’s barn-burners, with a lyric referencing Tom
Thomson—again, death in the water is a theme, as is a missing icon (see: Bill
Barilko).
9.
“Fiddler’s Green.” Written after the death
of Downie’s five-year-old nephew from a congenital heart condition, this was
left off set lists for years, despite being an acoustic campfire favourite
among Hip fans. It returned around 2006, and was on the set list at the last
show, where Downie dedicated it to his sister, who was in the audience.
10. “Fifty-Mission Cap.” The only non-novelty
hockey song to ever make the Top 40, this song about the mysterious
disappearance of Bill Barilko came out in the fall of 1992, when the Toronto
Maple Leafs were considered a Stanley Cup contender for the first time in
decades (spoiler: they didn’t make it). By sheer coincidence, the Leafs were
also retiring Barilko’s sweater that year; plans to do so in April ’92 were
delayed by a players strike, so it was bumped to October—11 days after Fully Completely was released.
11. “Locked in the Trunk of a
Car.”
This lyric sprung from a short film Downie worked on at Queen’s as well as a
narrative captured on a live version of “Highway Girl.” Mixed in with a bit of
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment,
Downie claimed it was actually a metaphor for a relationship. But it made a lot
of people—including Downie—feel queasy, despite being one of the band’s biggest
hits. It rarely made set lists in later years.
12. “Wheat Kings.” This song is ostensibly
about the wrongful conviction case of David Milgaard, but you wouldn’t know
that from the lyrics, which are characteristically opaque for Downie. Either
way, it’s full of some of his strongest images, and is the one Hip song you’re
most likely to hear at a Canadian campfire. Even the loons join in.
13. “Grace, Too.” A mid-tempo boom-bap
beat, a melodic bass riff, and layers of guitars that suggest they’re building
up to something, but never do—which is the point, in tune with the unresolved
narrative in the lyric about the plotting of a crime. Baker’s guitar never
takes the lead exactly, but it starts off like a mist and gets increasingly
dense with richer textures until he’s conjuring snow squalls. By the time the
song ends, he’s making whale music. Considering it’s one of the Hip’s most
popular and enduring songs, “Grace, Too” is remarkable for what it isn’t,
rather than what it is.
14. “Nautical Disaster.” Again, unlikely
hit-single material: an endlessly circular chord progression with linear lyrics
that never repeat, with neither a chorus nor even a single rhyme. So many lines
are bone-chilling, starting with the opening stanza, with the “screaming that
filled my head all day.” Downie thought the song was haunted: he found an early
notebook with “endless drafts of it—endless, but they don’t really change.” If
he ever got remotely distracted while performing it, “the song may as well
end.”
15. “So Hard Done By.” “Interesting and
sophisticated / refusing to be celebrated.” This song was recorded as a rote
rocker for Fully Completely, and
wisely rejected. By the time they got to New Orleans to record Day For Night, it became sultry and
slinky, an album highlight.
16. “Gift Shop.” Like “Grace, Too,” this
is ostensibly a song where nothing much happens—and again, that’s the point,
this time for an otherworldly, out-of-body lyric. Unlike “Grace, Too,” this
song has a catchy bap-ba-da-da chorus, and some haunting Hammond organ. Baker’s
guitar was recorded in a barn in -40° C. “That’s what really cold air sounds
like,” mixer Steven Drake told me.
17. “Springtime in Vienna.” In later years, Downie
said this was his favourite Tragically Hip song in the band’s entire
discography. It’s hard to imagine a more succinct single line than, “We live to
survive our paradoxes.”
18. “Ahead by a Century.” You may have heard this
one before. I hear it every week when it’s played in the hallways of my child’s
school, right before the Indigenous land acknowledgement and the national
anthem. Fitting.
19. “Bobcaygeon.” Just because Downie
drops the loaded term “Aryan” into the bridge of this song doesn’t mean it’s
about a 1933 Nazi riot in Toronto, as is widely assumed (Downie never talked
about the lyric in public): there were plenty of neo-Nazi incidents and police
riots in Toronto in the 1990s, from which the narrator of this song is escaping
when he heads to his lover’s place in cottage country. This is one of only a
handful of Hip songs Downie ever performed in a solo set. “It’s my song, I
wrote it,” he told one collaborator.
20. “Poets.” This tongue-in-cheek
send-up of popular perceptions of poetry also happens to be perhaps the most
ridiculous set of lyrics Downie ever wrote—as anyone who’s ever covered it or
sang it at karaoke can tell you. It’s also the grooviest rock song they wrote
post-Road Apples, one in which their
Stones influence came right to the forefront.
21. “Fireworks.” This is one of the
Hip’s greatest rock songs in a pop format, as opposed to blues-based numbers
that defined their work up to this point. There’s a classic riff with a
boogaloo push, with hints of the Romantics’ new wave hit “What I Like About
You” and the Who’s “I Can’t Explain.” Contrary to popular belief, and from what you
would infer from the opening line, this is not a song about hockey, but about
marriage.
22. “My Music at Work.” This title was borrowed
from an ad campaign at a Toronto easy-listening station, EZ Rock. The station’s general manager, Marc Paris, told
journalist Marc Weisblott, “We figured it would be a good idea to promote the
station as something to listen to from nine-to-five. As a way of life.” Talking
about a song with the lyric about avoiding trends and clichés, Paris went on to
admit, with no apparent sense of irony, “We thought about having some fun with
[the song ‘My Music at Work’] during our morning show. Then we decided against
it. There is a phobia that our audience will tune out any fads. [“Avoid trends
and cliché,” sings Downie.] We wouldn't want to compel them to go away and
start listening somewhere else, and [playing the song] would mean introducing
something to the audience they don't know. We don't want to do that. Weird we
are not.”
23. “Putting Down.” “There’s reasons for the
road, I guess / to document the Indigenous.” Huh.
24. “Lake Fever.” One of the Hip’s rare
forays into smooth adult pop, this song has aged considerably better than its
initial reception would suggest.
25. “It’s a Good Life If You
Don’t Weaken.” This was a band who always led with a rocker. That this was chosen as
the first single from In Violet Light
was an unusual move at the time: it’s a ballad, it’s moody, it’s weird, the
title is extremely long. But it was not only the catchiest song on the album,
it was also one of the band’s greatest lyrical and musical triumphs, and a song
many returned to during the fateful summer of 2016.
26. “The Darkest One.” This song got more
attention that it might have from radio thanks to a video featuring Don Cherry
and the Trailer Park Boys.
27. “Silver Jet.” A man with many Gords
and Cheryls in his audience penned this priceless gem: “There's a still in the
night, a tuneless moonlight /
Just the I-need-you-and-here's-whys of snoring
Gords and Cheryls.”
28. “At the Hundredth Meridian”
(live).
Confession: I’ve always hated the Fully
Completely version of this song, which sounded like tuneless, flaccid funk
best left in the ashes of the ’90s. But live, it was always a jam. By 2004,
when the Hip recorded That Night in
Toronto, it was monstrous. (Another confession: I don’t think anything from
2004’s In Between Evolution is worth
including on this playlist. Fight me.)
29. “Yer Not the Ocean.” Yes, Bob Rock polished
this band, bringing out their melodic side and more musical complexity. But
with results like this, why argue?
30. “The Lonely End of the
Rink.” A
crushing riff, a reggae lilt to the verses and a ska bridge, a soaring lead
guitar, and an incredibly personal lyric from Downie—written about his father,
Edgar—adds up to one of the most underrated singles in the Hip’s canon, and
certainly the most musically diverse inside a single song. The story behind
this song is one of the most beautiful in the book, bringing tears to the eyes
of this non-hockey-playing writer every time.
31. “In View.” Hip purists hated this
perfect pop song—what’s with that plinky toy piano and synth riff?—but it gave
the Hip one of only three No. 1 singles of their career. “That song keeps
giving you more and more,” one of their peers told me. “It has four choruses.
I’ve listened to that song with musicians while in a van on tour, and I’d say,
‘No, wait! There are two more more choruses that are going to hit.’ It doesn’t
stop, it’s so good.”
32. “Love is a First.” A bass line from Talking
Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” A Johnny Marr guitar riff. A solo that sounds like Tom
Morello from Rage Against the Machine. What’s going on here? Who cares? It
totally works. It also gave the Hip one of their last radio hits.
33. “Coffee Girl.” Another much-maligned
single, primarily because it doesn’t sound like anything most people expect the
Hip to do, with its hip-hop drum beat, its Herb Alpert-esque trumpet solo and
the surprisingly non-creepy image of a middle-aged man observing a young
barista. Belongs on a mix tape with “Cat Power and classic Beck.”
34. “Morning Moon.” Another outlier: a
somewhat straightforward country song, perhaps the only time Gord Sinclair
played a root-fifth bass pattern in the Hip. The lyric deals with both a
partner’s anxiety and the economics of environmental destruction (“When
something’s too cheap, someone’s paying something”). Seek out the version Sarah
Harmer performed on CBC Radio’s Q.
35. “Now For Plan A.”
Speaking of Harmer, she appears in the video and sings harmony on this gorgeous
ballad, the Hip’s greatest since “It’s a Good Life.” That it took the old
friends this long to collaborate on a Hip album is kind of shocking.
36. “At Transformation.” When it was revealed
that Downie’s wife had struggled with and beat breast cancer, it was assumed
this was one of the songs that addressed it: “I want to help you lift enormous
things.” In fact, this debuted at the Bobcaygeon show two months before she was
diagnosed.
37. “Streets Ahead.” For all their musical
progression, the Hip were still capable of bashing out a quick rocker reminiscent
of their earliest days.
38. “In a World Possessed By
the Human Mind.” “Just give me the news.” That was the first lyric of the first single
released after fans found out about Downie’s diagnosis. Thankfully, the
strength of this song signalled that this band wasn’t going out with a whimper.
It was a good omen: Man Machine Poem
was their best-reviewed album in almost 20 years.
39. “Tired as Fuck.” Rob Baker’s jazz
influence rarely came to the fore in the Hip, other than some early,
never-recorded songs and some later B-sides—and here, the most unlikely single
the Hip ever released to radio.
40. “Machine.” The last song on the
last Hip album (to date) is epic and soaring, and should have become a live
staple had fate not intervened.
1. “Vancouver
Divorce.” This song opened most shows by Downie’s Country of Miracles. It’s
an unlikely favourite, but between Dave Clark’s somewhat martial beat, Dale
Morningstar’s all-over-the-map guitar playing, and José Contreras’s John
Cale-esque organ, it’s a delight. It’s not the end of the world, of course.
5. “Into the
Night.” Yet another beautiful parenting song. Unless the narrator has a
rather controlling relationship with a much younger lover. Then it’s creepy.
8. “The East
Wind.” Perhaps the only Downie solo song that sounds like it should have
been a huge pop hit. And yet it sank like a stone. Do the drums not come in
soon enough? What is wrong with radio programmers? Also, the difference in
Downie’s voice after working with Bob Rock on two Hip records is incredibly
apparent here. Compare this with the tentativeness heard on Coke Machine Glow, and it’s night and
day. 
12. “It
Didn’t Start to Break My Heart Until This Afternoon.” The first time Downie
played with the Sadies, for a CBC Radio show, they covered Iggy and the
Stooges. On their first full-length collaboration (there’s another one in the
vault, waiting to come out), it’s easy to see why. 
16. “Introduce
Yerself.” A love song for Dave “Billy Ray” Koster, this is one of Downie’s
greatest songs: the chords, the melody, the vocal performance. Did you see
Sarah Harmer sing it at the 2018 Juno tribute, with Kevin Hearn on piano?
Crushing. 
20. “Here,
Here and Here.” In October 2016, Downie performed songs from Secret Path at Massey Hall for Hayden’s
Dream Serenade. Less than a month after Downie died in October 2017, his
brother Patrick appeared on the same stage, for the same event, to sing this Secret Path song with Kevin Drew on
piano. “I feel … I heard … I live … I die … here, here and here.”
