The Never-Ending Playlist 2: Deep(er) cuts

The Hip didn’t release many rarities, and frankly, they weren’t that good when they did. So there are no obscurities here, though it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever hear any of these album cuts on the radio. If you know the hits backwards and forwards, then start here.

Spotify link here.
Tidal link here.

1. “All-Canadian Surf Club.” “I got my guitar, Cadillac / Some chick and twenty-four cold beers.” To fully appreciate Gord Downie’s evolution as a lyricist, it’s important to learn that he started at the bottom like a bargain-basement Springsteen rip-off just like every rock’n’roller of his generation. There’s hope for all of us!

2. “Evelyn.” A Gord Sinclair song, supposedly based on the Clint Eastwood movie Play Misty For Me, about a radio DJ stalked by a woman named, yes, Evelyn. Word has it this was one of the band’s very first originals, the only one of the first crop to make it all the way to the EP.

3. “Trickle Down.” Can you tell they started out as essentially a Stones cover band? A great one, by the sounds of it. If their debut album only consisted of songs like this, they’d be off to a solid start. But there was so much more. “All the drinks are on the Crown” is sung by a guy who played more than a few dive bars where people spent their EI and welfare cheques on liquid therapy, bars where “skeletons come to dance.”

4. “I’ll Believe in You.” Spousal abuse was not a popular topic in rock songs of the 1980s—or ever. Along with “She Didn’t Know” and to a lesser degree “38 Years Old,” the Hip sang about vengeance for violence against women.

5. “Another Midnight.” Listen to the first eight bars of this song: is it the Skydiggers? Blue Rodeo? Crash Vegas? Weeping Tile? 54.40? I can’t tell. For all their unique qualities, the Hip most definitely fit into a time and place in Canadian music. Not that that’s a bad thing—at all.

6. “Opiated.” For all the fist-pumping glory that is most of Up To Here, darker tracks like this one pointed to a more diverse path in the future.

7. “The Luxury.” The jazziest this band sounded until “Tired as Fuck” on the final album. In 2016, the Toronto show I saw opened with this track: “So consumed with the shape I’m in / Can’t enjoy the luxury.”

8. “Long Time Running.” A 6/8 ballad with a guitar that owes a debt to Pops Staples, this not only provided the title to the excellent 2017 documentary, but it contains a line that sums up this bond between brothers: “You work me against my friends, and you’ll get left out in the cold.”

9. “The Last of the Unplucked Gems.” I always enjoyed this two-minute psychedelic drone, but considered it a bit of a trifle. Gord Downie told me he considered this a watershed moment in the evolution of the band’s songwriting, and possibly his favourite song on Road Apples. When I started going to see Hip cover bands while researching the book, I was pleasantly surprised to find out what a popular favourite this is. And Ian Blurton melted my face off when he performed it at the Toronto book launch.

 

10. “Pigeon Camera.” Based on a guitar riff by Johnny Fay, this is a natural extension from “Unplucked Gems.” The atmospheres conjured perfectly match the image of history’s original drone, soaring over enemy territory. It also features a weird Doppler effect at the end of the bridge; producer Chris Tsangarides explains it in detail in the book. What this song is actually about, however, some kind of dark family secret, has long been the source of speculation.

11. “The Wherewithal.” I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like the Hip’s most popular album, but the band themselves admit, in the liner notes to the deluxe reissue, that some of the songs suffered in the studio—including this one. Rob Baker wanted a do-over. The reissue includes a bonus live disc of a Horseshoe Tavern show recorded right before the album came out; this version is from that.

12. “Fully Completely.” I never liked this song until I saw it performed live, where the lockstep rhythm section blew me away, and the double-time guitar gear-shift toward the end launched the song into overdrive. The difference in tempo between the studio version and any live version ever is remarkable.

13. “Fire in the Hole.” This was the first song from Day For Night I heard on the airwaves, and I couldn’t believe that this is what they released to radio. It sounded raw, unhinged, with snarling guitars, and a sinister Downie screaming in ways I’d never heard before on a studio recording. I didn’t know Hazel Dickens at the time, but I certainly got the Riefenstahl reference, and it all adds up to one of the most harrowing songs in the entire discography.

14. “Scared.” Always loved this song, but loved it even more when Kate Fenner and Chris Brown covered it at the 2001 book launch for Have Not Been the Same. This was a devastating one to hear on the 2016 tour: “Do I make you scared? That’s kinda what I do.”

15. “Titanic Terrarium.” Downie told me that this was one of his favourite of his own lyrics. Who am I to disagree? Obviously influenced by the environmental activism he witnessed after touring with Midnight Oil, this is about as explicitly political as Downie would ever get—which is to say, still poetically vague. I always thought there was some kind of detuned banjo on this track; co-producer Mark Howard said it’s a guitar pedal effect. This and “Nautical Disaster” were two Day For Night tracks plucked from the original demos recorded in their Kingston rehearsal space. Julie Doiron did a great version of this for Strombo’s Hip 30.

16. “Flamenco.” Is there a single Downie lyric as disarming as, “Maybe a prostitute could teach you how to take a compliment”? This is also a stunning melody, which has since been blessed by the gifts of (at least that I know of) Kate Fenner, Leslie Feist and Michelle McAdorey.

17. “Don’t Wake Daddy.” I used to hate this song. I kept waiting for something to happen. I wanted Johnny Fay to do something interesting. I thought the chorus was deadly dull. I didn’t love the lyric, and the Kurt Cobain reference seemed cheap and distracting. Over time, however, I grew to appreciate the droning, bluesy trance that underscores the lyric about what you can get away with while careful not to disrupt the sleeping patriarch. The last line is also exquisite: “Sing to end all songs.”

18. “Put It Off.” “Words cannot touch beauty.” That’s the kind of thing you would expect a new parent to write “on the day that you were born.” The rest of the song, however, finds said parent doing a lot of strange things (“I made degenerate art for the religious right”) as a way to self-sabotage the most beautiful day of his life.

19. “Thompson Girl.” Phantom Power is the last Tragically Hip album that everyone could agree on (it’s also the only one the band featured on every night of the final tour), and songs like this are the reason why. Producer Steve Berlin helped rip apart what might have been just an average rock song and turned it into a stomping acoustic number with mandolin and fuzzy bass. Downie, under the influence of Sarah Harmer and Ron Sexsmith, delivers one of his greatest melodies, and the chorus sums up the challenge of staying on his game a decade into his recording career: “Grunt work somewhere between dream and duty / Poking through with all them shoots of beauty.”

20. “Escape is at Hand for the Travelling Man.” This is perfection. The rhythm section echoes the German kosmische musik of Neu’s “Hallo Gallo,” intentionally or not. The guitar interplay is sublime, as is Paul Langlois’s harmony with Downie. The lyric strikes a chord with every touring musician. Like “Grace, Too,” it doesn’t necessarily build up to anything; it’s not supposed to. It just is. It exists in the never-ending present.

21. “Emperor Penguin.” One of the most wonderfully weird songs about co-parenting ever written. Wait, are there any other weird songs about co-parenting? David Bowie’s “Kooks”?

22. “Tiger the Lion.” One of the most divisive Hip songs, in which Downie riffs on John Cage theories while the band grinds over a loping Black Sabbath riff and Chris Brown literally crawls inside a piano. At first I loved the lyric but hated the music; over time I grew to love the friction between the two. But if this track drives you up the wall, you are most definitely not alone. Sequencing it immediately after album opener “My Music At Work”—perhaps their poppiest rock song ever—won it even more enemies, and foreshadowed the fact that the rest of that album was not going to go the way you thought it might.

23. “Stay.” On the flip side of “Tiger the Lion,” we have this gem of a pop song. I have some theories about its subject. I’ll tell you off the record.

24. “As I Wind Down the Pines.” What I’d give to have heard this band make an all-acoustic album, because what Baker and Langlois do together on tracks like this is magical. Hearing how Chris Brown’s piano and Julie Doiron’s harmonies add even more beautiful colours here makes one wonder why this band was so musically conservative most of the time. It also provides a direct line to what Downie would do on Coke Machine Glow.

25. “Throwing Off Glass.” I have too much to say about this song. But let’s just say that as someone who didn’t really give In Violet Light the time of day when it came out, I was ignorant of this track’s infinite charms until I started writing the book. Every single member of the Hip is at the top of their game here. It’s now one of my favourite songs of all time, by anyone.

26. “A Beautiful Thing.” This was a haunting one to hear in 2016, with the line about getting a middle-of-the-night phone call. “ ‘You better be dying’—and you were … It’d be a beautiful thing to see that beautiful thing continuing.”

27. “The Dire Wolf.” Downie has a lot of death-by-water songs. This one is inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem and, some believe, based on the tale of a Newfoundland woman who rescued shipwreck survivors.

28. “As Makeshift As We Are.” Honestly, In Between Evolution is my least favourite Hip album, to the point of being unlistenable. But I’ll nod to it here, only through the follow-up live album.

29. “Family Band.” I fucking love this song, and cannot believe that it was not a huge late-career hit. Yes, it sounds like Broken Social Scene covering the Ramones, but goddam it’s a great riff, and perhaps Downie’s best-ever self-reflexive song about being in a rock band. Can’t help but feel there’s a Constantines influence here as well. TURN IT UP.

30. “Fly.” Who’s been taking vocal lessons? The guy who references Freddie Mercury in the lyric here.

31. “Luv (sic).” This is why you hire Bob Rock. Guitars, bass, drums all sound huge, though not, as many feared, in a Metallica way. For whatever reason, the Rock records also find Baker sounding more like the Edge than he had before or since. As a copy editor, I also thoroughly appreciate this song’s punny title.

32. “The Last Recluse.” It’s the song that opens and closes with what sounds like a pipe organ, has some lovely accordion work in the middle, and prominently features what sounds like a choir of male opera singers. No wonder so many Hip fans hated this record. I love it.

33. “The Depression Suite.” Three great songs for the price of one! What if this song does nothing? In fact, it does a hell of a lot. Don’t you want to see how it ends? Full points for the non-sappy string section, arranged by the guy who did the incredibly sappy early ’80s CanCon hit “Letting Go” by Straight Lines (which I also like, so question my judgment if you will). 

34. “Speed River.” I used to live in Guelph, so I have a soft spot for this song, even though Downie recycled much of the melody for 2010’s superior “The East Wind.” This is a solid mid-tempo, Tom Petty-ish rock song that, if you heard it in 1991, sounds exactly like you thought this band might grow up to be. Thankfully, they also became much more.

35. “About This Map.” The most majestic song about a midlife marital crisis. “There’s got to be more than just to despair.”

36. “Man Machine Poem.” I wrote off Now For Plan A when it came out. Being a huge fan of the 2016 album that borrowed this song’s title, I can see now that the 2012 album was a logical bridge between the Bob Rock years and the ways in which Kevin Drew and Dave Hamelin busted open the band’s sound for what would be their final record. Perhaps not coincidentally, this song makes it most evident.

37. “We Want to Be It.” When Downie went public with news of his wife’s breast cancer, people thought this song’s chorus (“drip, drip, drip”) was about chemotherapy. In fact, it was written before her diagnosis—which only makes the image all that more enigmatic. It doesn’t have anything to do with the title, which Downie lifted from Alan Arkin’s excellent memoir (I tell this story in the book).

38. “Man.” This is not the Tragically Hip you thought you were getting. Their final album opened with a studio experiment, an extended jam coming out of the track they placed at the end of the record, “Machine.” It’s big, bold, beautiful and sparse, indicating that just about anything could happen. That explosion you here at the end is the detonation of any expectations.

39. “What Blue.” Written and recorded in one day, after Kevin Drew asked Paul Langlois about a guitar riff he was noodling with. For a band whose work of at least the last decade sounded a bit belaboured, this was a good sign.

40. “Ocean Next.” A lilting 6/8 ballad, the first time they’d written a song remotely like this since “Long Time Running”—and this one is a lot weirder, starting with the fact that the verses are in the more unconventional 8/8 and Downie sounds like he’s singing underwater. “You think, you stink,” sings Downie, quoting the philosophy of spontaneity that drove Neil Young’s producer, David Briggs. This album was the first time since Day For Night that the Tragically Hip felt confident enough in their weirdest impluses to indulge happy accidents. No wonder it turned out to be one of their best albums, leaving a big “what if?” attached to the tragedy that befell them as soon as they finished it.

The Never-Ending Playlist 4: Influences

The Band w/ Ronnie Hawkins

There are six playlists in this series. This is number #4, though I’m annotating it second (just because I’m posting this before a summer long weekend). These are songs and artists covered by the Tragically Hip in their infancy, and people who influenced them otherwise. The Hip always tried to avoid obvious choices in their cover songs; I tried to do the same when putting this list together. I certainly didn’t want this to merely sound like classic rock radio on any given day. Some are choices based on stories in the book; some are entirely conjecture on my part. Hopefully it’s illuminating for both long-time fans as well as those new to this band and their music.

Spotify link here. 
Tidal link here. 

1. Stompin’ Tom Connors, “The Singer (Voice of the People).” Okay, right out of the gate, I have no idea if the Tragically Hip have any affection for the man most dedicated to capturing Canada in song, or if they think he’s a rube. (They did, of course, cover “Sudbury Saturday Night” when they played Sudbury once.) But I love Stompin’ Tom, and this is a song that has haunted me ever since I first heard it used in the Bruce McDonald film Roadkill. I quoted it in its entirety as the epilogue to Have Not Been the Same. It’s the first song I wanted to hear when I learned of Tom’s death a few years back; it’s the first song I wanted to hear the day Gord Downie died.

2. Lord Creator, “Kingston Town.” Again, I have no evidence the Tragically Hip are even aware this song exists. But it’s an underrated reggae classic, and I contemplated titling one of the first chapters with the chorus lyric: “There is magic in Kingston town.”

3. Velvet Underground, “Sweet Jane.” The first song of the first set when Gord Downie first performed in public with the Slinks, his first high school band, at a KCVI school dance. Downie loved Lou Reed. If you’ve never seen him sing “How Does It Feel” with Kevin Hearn and Reed’s band, check this out link.

4. Rolling Stones, “Dance Little Sister.” This band is the single biggest influence on early Hip; I could populate an entire playlist of the Hip’s favourite Stones tracks. Picked this one because Rob Baker has said that it’s Mick Taylor’s guitar solo here, which he first heard when he was just learning how to play guitar, that he feels sums up his own approach to lead work.

5. Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightnin’.” Although I cringe every time someone describes early Hip as “blues rock,” there’s no denying the band’s deep love for the genre. Howlin’ Wolf in particular was a favourite of Downie’s, both for his vocal approach and his longevity. He marveled at stories of Wolf’s performances, like this one, from Robert Palmer’s book Deep Blues: “Where was Wolf?  Suddenly he sprang out onto the stage from the wings.  He was a huge hulk of a man, but he advanced across the stage in sudden burst of speed, his head pivoting from side to side, eyes huge and white, eyeballs rotating wildly. He seemed to be having an epileptic seizure, but no, he suddenly lunged for the microphone, blew a chorus of raw, heavily rhythmic harmonica, and began moaning.  He had the hugest voice I had ever heard — it seemed to fill the hall and get right inside your ears, and when he hummed and moaned in falsetto, every hair on your neck crackled with electricity. …  He was the Mighty Wolf, no doubt about it.  Finally, an impatient signal from the wings let him know his portion of the show was over.  Defiantly, Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the thick curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight.  Then he loosened his grip and, in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening.  He was then fifty-five years old.”

6. Junior Wells, “Messin’ With the Kid.” Several early covers the Hip did were lifted from the Blues Brothers, the band that featured, of course, fellow Kingstonian Dan Aykroyd. But because I think the Blues Brothers are hot garbage, I’m going to include the original artists’ versions here instead. (BTW, did you know there are Blues Brothers tribute acts making the circuit? What’s the point of that?!)

7. Don Covay, “Mercy Mercy.” I do not think the Stones are hot garbage, but my tolerance for them is limited. So, again, this playlist contains the original tracks that the Stones covered; the Hip learned their versions from the Stones, and then sped them up.

8. Monkees, “I’m a Believer.” Other than the Stones, the Hip’s other big early influence seems to be… the Monkees? Yes, there was a lot more to this cartoonish TV band than meets the eye, as generations of hardcore music nerds will tell you ad nauseum. The Hip were those guys. Downie would often introduce this song as “a song by Neil Diamond”—which is true, and the kind of little-known fact music nerds like to wield. The Hip even took their name from a TV skit on a show that Monkee Mike Nesmith created in the early ’80s, Elephant Parts.

9. Dale Hawkins, “Susie-Q.” This is the original; the Hip could have learned this set staple from the source or any number of cover versions, including the epic jam by CCR.

10. Roy Head, “Treat Her Right.” The kind of ’60s R&B obscurity the early Hip specialized in—and they got to it before George Thorogood covered it in 1988, and before it was featured in the 1991 film The Commitments.

11. Them, “I Can Only Give You Everything.” Van Morrison’s ’60s R&B band is, to these ears, far superior to the Rolling Stones’ earliest days. This is a song Downie did with Baker in the Filters, and carried over to early Hip sets. It’s also the title of the book’s second chapter. After the book was published, I heard Jake Gold tell an interviewer that this song opened the set the Hip played the night they auditioned for Gold and Allan Gregg. They signed a deal that night. Both parties gave the relationship everything they had. 

12. Pretty Things, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Confession: I know next to nothing about this band, other than by reputation. The Hip were obsessed with ’60s British garage bands who drew from the blues, and this group usually ranked right beside the Stones and the Yardbirds as the Holy Trinity of original influences for the Hip. It’s why, along with Them, each gets more than one track on this playlist.

13. Rock Roll, “Bedrock Twitch.” Yes, this is from an episode of The Flintstones. How the Hip managed to learn this song is a mystery: if I had to guess, I’d say someone’s family was an early adopter of the VCR and recorded the episode (the ’60s show was still in wide after-school syndication in the ’80s). This was a popular live favourite. Almost everyone I talked to about the Hip’s earliest days would mention this song in particular. It’s safe to say no one else covered it.

14. Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, “Wooly Bully.” I don’t doubt the Hip played a lot of frat parties at Queen’s and Western. This would have been a set necessity.

15. Monkees, “Mary, Mary.” It was years before I knew from where Run-DMC sampled the chorus of their 1988 hit; the Hip were covering this song well before that. It’s definitely the funkiest Monkees.

16. Marvin Gaye, “Hitch Hike.” Another soul classic plundered by the Stones, and later the Hip. The riff also inspired the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again.”

17. Them, “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” This is the direct inspiration for “New Orleans is Sinking,” in terms of the guitar riff, the structure, and the lyrical reference. There are plenty of versions of this blues classic, but you can bet the Hip learned it from Them.

18. Yardbirds, “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” Everybody covered this song, including the Stones. And the Hip.

19. Pretty Things, “Come See Me.” See above, track 12.

20. Doors, “Roadhouse Blues.” Perhaps the most obvious song in the Hip’s early repertoire, and a guaranteed crowd-pleaser at any beer bash. Because audiences didn’t know what to make of Downie’s stage presence, he was often compared to Jim Morrison—because, you know, weirdness. It is true that Downie was asked to join the Slinks because he knew all the words to “The End” (or it could have been “When the Music’s Over”—Downie gave varying accounts of this story), and that the band was once offered steady work as a Doors cover band in London, Ont.—an offer they laughed off because, as Baker said, “We didn’t even have a keyboard player!”

21. The Band w/ Ronnie Hawkins, “Who Do You Love?” A Bo Diddley jam that ticks several boxes for this list: it’s a song the Hip covered, it’s done here by Canadian icons The Band (“Robbie Robertson was like God to me,” Baker said), sung by Ronnie Hawkins, who ruled the roost at some of the same century-old Ontario hotels the Hip would play 25 years after he did—Downie would even swing from exposed pipes above the stage, something my parents told me they saw Hawkins do at the Embassy Hotel in London in the early ’60s. This version, of course, comes from The Last Waltz—which is now, post-2016, the second-most-important farewell concert to be filmed.

22. Neil Young, “Tonight’s the Night.” This is a song Downie’s Country of Miracles covered live; there’s a great story in the book about doing it at the Edmonton Folk Festival in 2001, going on after Baaba Maal. It’s also a song Downie references in the 2002 song “All Tore Up”: “Play your tonight’s the nights right / and don’t clear the place.” This album is a “difficult” one in Young’s discography (along with dozens others, mind you) in that it was decidedly ragged and rough, and its release was delayed for several years after the mainstream success of Harvest. It’s a total don’t-give-a-fuck triumph, and it’s the Neil Young album that the most hardcore Neilheads adore. Confession: I had never listened to this album all the way through, until I read Jimmy McDonough’s bio Shakey (which I did on the recommendation of Steve Jordan when I started writing this book).

23. Patti Smith, “Dancing Barefoot.” Not aware of the Hip ever covering this song—though their friends Crash Vegas often did. This song is structurally very similar to several Hip songs, and I’d be shocked if Downie didn’t take some cues from Smith’s writing and performance. Because men are never compared to women, nobody really talks about the direct line between Patti Smith and Gord Downie. Nobody, that is, except the Constantines’ Bry Webb, who first suggested it to me.

24. The Clash, “Brand New Cadillac.” If you were a teenager in a rock band in the early ’80s, you probably covered this song. The Slinks, the Rodents, and the Filters all did.

25. The Stooges, “Down on the Street.” Jason Schneider, co-author of Have Not Been the Same, is convinced that “Locked in the Trunk of a Car” was inspired by this guitar riff. I don’t think he’s wrong.

26. David Bowie, “Watch That Man.” The Hip were huge Bowie fans; Man Machine Poem was originally going to be called “Dougie Stardust,” for some reason. Downie sings a bit of “China Girl” on Live Between Us. They covered “Queen Bitch”—a song Arcade Fire once did with Bowie himself—on the 2006 tour. This song, from Aladdin Sane, is a less obvious choice, but it was one covered by the Slinks.

Teenage Head

27. Teenage Head, “Picture My Face.” Confession: I never got the appeal of this iconic Canadian band, but I think that’s because I never saw them live with Frankie Venom. Geoff Pevere’s recent biography, Gods of the Hammer, was an entertaining read; he argues, convincingly, that Venom was the greatest frontman of his time around these parts, and inspired countless performers—including Downie and Hugh Dillon. This song was on the Slinks’ set list. I’ve also heard the Sadies do a great version live.

28. Rush, “In the Mood.” From the very first album, with John Rutsey on drums. Apparently Rob Baker saw them on that tour; he would have been 12 years old.

29. The Clash, “I’m So Bored with the USA.” It’s very funny to me: the idea of teenage Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker playing this in the Baker basement and then going on to form a band where they’d constantly be asked about American success or lack thereof.

30. Go-Gos, “We Got the Beat.” I read somewhere that this was covered by either the Slinks, Filters or Hip. Don’t know if that’s true, but it’s fun to imagine. It does have a beat that rides the floor tom, which Downie once told Johnny Fay is something guaranteed to make him move. Imagine the "Little Bones" riff played over this beat. 

31. Talking Heads, “Pulled Up.” Downie once cited Byrne as an influence, though I’m not aware of him or the Hip ever covering Talking Heads. If they did, this is what I imagine they’d pick.

32. Rick James, “Super Freak.” According to the Slinks’ Joe Pater, this was in the band’s repertoire. Who wouldn’t want to hear Downie do this one?!

33. Doug and the Slugs, “Making It Work.” I don’t know if the Hip liked this band or not, but I can guarantee they saw them at the Lakeview Manor. I imagine the two bands likely shared a love of the Monkees. Singer Doug Bennett was one of the most entertaining frontmen in Canadian music in the early ’80s. Keyboardist Simon Kendall would play with Baker in Strippers Union years later.

34. David Wilcox, “Downtown Came Uptown.” Another frequent flier at the Lakeview Manor.

35. Payola$, “Eyes of a Stranger.” Featuring guitarist Bob Rock, who later produced World Container and We Are the Same—though perhaps he’s most famous for his supporting role in the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster. Singer Paul Hyde is/was a great storyteller in song. This band, much like the Hip later on, spent most of their career explaining to the Canadian press why they didn’t break in America. As if that matters.

36. Red Rider, “Human Race.” Tom Cochrane’s first band is much more interesting than one would expect if you only knew “Life is a Highway.” Guitarist Ken Greer is a wizard. He also produced the Hip’s debut EP.

37. The Police, “Synchronicity II.” Johnny Fay wore out several copies of this cassette when he was 12 years old, and collected enough Police bootlegs to spot subtle changes in Stewart Copeland’s drum fills through the years. Years later, he’d hire producer Hugh Padgham for In Violet Light. Interviewing the legendary Padgham was one of the greatest joys of writing this book.

38. Replacements, “Bastards of Young.” Contemporaries of the Hip, this band recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis just before the Hip arrived to make Up to Here. The Hip covered this song on their 2006 tour.

39. Keith Richards, “Talk is Cheap.” Engineered by Don Smith, and released right before he got the gig producing Up to Here.

40. Steve Earle, “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied.” A new Americana movement in the late ’80s, spearheaded by Earle, Lucinda Williams and others, undoubtedly influenced the sound of the EP and Up to Here.

41. R.E.M., “Pretty Persuasion.” The Hip were often touted as “R.E.M. meets the Rolling Stones” in their early years. It became a cliché, but it’s not inaccurate. Downie shares many similarities with Michael Stipe: both are unusual, enigmatic, poetic frontmen at a time when that was in short supply in rock’n’roll. Musically, both bands shared many influences: ’60s garage rock, Americana country, punk and new wave. Pretty sure R.E.M. were never into Rush, though.

42. Yardbirds, “Heart Full of Soul.” This playlist stops being chronological here, as we wind down the pines, so to speak. But this seminal Hip influence flows nicely out of R.E.M., no?

43. Gordon Lightfoot, “Sundown.” From Gord to Gord: the elder was an enormous influence on the younger. “As a ten-year-old kid listening to ‘Sundown,’ it sounded like a secret, from you to me,” Downie told Lightfoot in an on-stage conversation between the two of them and Laurie Brown. “It blew my mind to know that a song could be so mysterious and sound so dangerous—it’s a dangerous song. I think about your austerity and economy every time I put pen to paper.”

44. Bruce Cockburn, “Tokyo.” In the mid-’90s, the Hip were asked in an online chat what songs they might like to cover. Gord Sinclair picked Sons of Freedom’s “Circle Circle.” Gord Downie picked this song. The guitar shapes played over a pulsing root-note bass in the verses are not unlike those heard in "50 Mission Cap."

45. John Martyn, “Don’t Want to Know.” A ’70s psych-folk song later covered by Dr. John and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, this was slipped into the middle of “New Orleans is Sinking” by Downie at Halifax’s Misty Moon, at a show taped for broadcast by MuchMusic. Yet another example of Downie’s delight in diving deep into his record crate for references.

46. Cowboy Junkies, “Misguided Angel.” Contemporaries of the Hip, they seemed to have little in common other than a love of Americana. But at the very least, Downie was a huge fan of The Trinity Session (who isn’t?), and borrowed the band’s accordionist, Jaro Czerwinec, to play on Coke Machine Glow.

47. Led Zeppelin, “Black Mountain Side.” As children of the ’70s, of course everyone in the Hip loved Zeppelin, and it was the thrill of a lifetime to tour and hang out with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in 1994. I don’t hear a lot of Page’s electric work in Rob Baker, but I do hear a similar approach to acoustic guitar, as this track shows: think of the intro to "Wild Mountain Honey" or the open-tuning intro he was playing to "Ahead by a Century" on the final tour. 

48. Rolling Stones, “2000 Light Years From Home.” When the Hip covered the Stones early on, they mostly covered the covers, not Jagger/Richards originals. This is an exception.

49. Jimi Hendrix, “Third Stone from the Sun.” Rob Baker would usually segue into this song in the middle of “2000 Light Years from Home.”

50. Neu, “Hallogallo.” I have no idea if the Hip ever listened to this German art-rock band of the early ’70s, but Johnny Fay conjures this “motorik” beat often, particularly on “Escape is at Hand for the Travelling Man,” especially with Baker and Langlois’s interwoven guitars there sounding specifically like this track.