Downie’s on-stage improvisations were a principal part of the band’s appeal from day one, though he was not yet a lyricist. In the band’s first three years, they played ’60s cover songs by the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison’s Them, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and the Monkees. Paul Langlois, the son of the school's gym teacher and football coach who Downie befriended in Grade 11, wouldn’t join until a year later by that time, Downie was studying film at Queen’s (“mostly, I learned how to drink,” he said of his time there). Four of those five young men played their first gig as the Tragically Hip in November 1984, in a small white room at the Kingston Artists Association. A young drummer in Grade 9, Johnny Fay, watched with interest. Downie could at least boast that he had a family connection to hockey royalty, in Sinden.ĭownie joined a punk band called the Slinks their friendly competitors at the school were a Grade 13 group called the Rodents, featuring bassist Gord Sinclair and guitarist Robbie Baker. The rest of the Tragically Hip were scions of the Kingston elite-sons of doctors, deans, judges and popular teachers. “I wouldn’t say it’s given me a stigma, but it’s something that’s always stayed with me, not actually being from Kingston.” His outsider status became part of his public identity: the poet in the bar band the rock star slumming it with indie kids while cozying up to intelligentsia the artist with a commercially successful cushion who thrived on continuing to challenge himself with new collaborators and varied disciplines like dance, painting, and acting. “I came from a rural area,” he once recalled. Macdonald, Robertson Davies, and Don Cherry. Related Gord Downie: A Life in Picturesĭownie attended Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute, a school that has also graduated the likes of John A. His godfather was Harry Sinden, who was then a real-estate developer with Edgar, and who would go on to become the Stanley Cup-winning coach of the Boston Bruins and lead Team Canada to victory in the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union. Gord played goalie for Amherstview’s hockey team, which won a provincial B-level championship. Gord was the fourth of five children: older siblings Mike, Charlyn and Paula, and younger brother Patrick. 6, 1964, in Amherstview, Ont., just slightly west of Kingston, to Lorna and Edgar, a travelling salesman turned real estate developer. It was a Terry Fox story with a twist: a story where the protagonist completes his goal before the disease gets the better of him.ĭownie was born on Feb. 20, 2016, six months after Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. That’s what even newcomers discovered during the CBC broadcast of the Tragically Hip’s final show on Aug. Video clips don’t do justice to the energy in the room generated by a performer who communicated more with a flick of the finger than anyone else’s high kicks. As could anyone who watched him command 40,000 people at any given outdoor appearance during the 1990s, singing songs that were summer soundtracks for an entire generation. Anyone who managed to catch him fronting the Tragically Hip in 1985, playing covers at a roadhouse in Renfrew, Ont., could tell you that. Gordon Edgar Downie was one of the most riveting and mystifying performers in rock’n’roll history. Then sit back and see what happens, because it’s not like you can control it. The poet whose metaphors had inspired generations of rock’n’roll fans had nothing more to say-with words, anyway.ĭo the work. He stoked the fire until sparks came out. Then he got up, silently, walked over to a pile of wood, picked up two logs, and returned to put them on the fire. And it seems like you get up there every single time and give it!” “Gord, I always wanted to ask you: how do you get the energy to make it so real every day? I think if I put myself out there like that, on the line, and make people emotionally connect with me, I feel like I couldn’t ever do it again, because I’d get bored or I just couldn’t summon the same amount of emotion. There were a few others there, though, most of whom knew enough to respect the privacy of the cancer-stricken man who had travelled hundreds of kilometres to disappear. Just a few close friends on a starry night in front of a campfire. It would turn out to be the last show of his band’s 30-year, multi-million-selling, award-winning career, a fate many suspected at the time.īut things were much quieter now. Where some go to get lost.ĭays earlier, this quiet man had held much of the entire nation rapt, millions watching as he summoned all his strength to tackle his terminal condition, to fend back-however briefly-the inevitability of death. In the remote north, in a land where the many not born there dare not go.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |