Rock and roll has always been in love with death. It’s the genre of the so-called Twenty-Seven Club, the genre of “I hope I die before I get old.” It’s Jimi Hendrix up late in London, Janis Joplin at a hotel with a needle, Keith Richards doing anything anywhere—the music is defined by its proximity to mortality. This summer, in Canada, one band is living that connection fully and completely. Gord Downie, the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, is suffering from glioblastoma, a terminal tumor in his left temporal lobe. But dying hasn’t stopped the tour. Downie is coming out on stage every night to burn out publicly. It has been glorious.
The Tragically Hip are one of the biggest bands in Canadian history. The band has had nine No. 1 albums here, and has spent as much time at the top of the charts as Bryan Adams. The band members have been on a stamp. Why they have never translated to the American audience is one of the great mysteries of Canadian popular culture. I have never heard or read a convincing explanation. Their songs are catchy, and every other act anywhere near their size in Canada has gone on to success elsewhere. But the Tragically Hip belong to the North alone, it seems.
The final tour sold out instantly. For the band’s final show, which takes place tonight in their home town of Kingston, Ontario, Stubhub has been selling tickets for as much as twenty-five thousand dollars. Cities have organized Tragically Hip Days, and spontaneous street parties have coincided with the band’s tour dates. In the fading steel town of Hamilton, on the day of their last concert there, the local rock radio station Y108 played nothing but the Tragically Hip. Tonight the national broadcaster CBC will air their final concert from Kingston live—a rock concert by way of a state funeral. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be in attendance.
I attended the band’s last show in Toronto, this past Sunday, at the Air Canada Centre. There was something entirely appropriate about having the concert at a hockey temple dedicated to the religion of watching the Maple Leafs lose. The crowd was pure Canadiana. The men looked like retired hockey players who had eased themselves into dad bods. The women looked like the daughters of the mothers in Alice Munro stories. Even the announcement that the show was about to begin had a self-parodying Canadian slant: “If you’re not in your seats in five minutes I will be very disappointed,” the voice declared.
Then Downie came out onstage to rapturous applause. He is fifty-two years old, and ragged. Who wouldn’t be, coming off a craniotomy and six weeks of chemo and radiation? His sparkly, baggy clothes and wildly befeathered hat covered what must be an utterly ravaged body. He wore a “Jaws” T-shirt, the one with the monster rising to eat the oblivious swimmers.
The Tragically Hip are, roughly speaking, Canada’s equivalent to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band—a proletarian group with an intellectual sensibility. The band evolved, during the nineteen-nineties, from a crude but effective bar band to a sophisticated purveyor of esoteric lyrics and clever melodies. Small-town hockey fans howl their biggest anthems in parking lots after games; assistant professors of Canadian literature listen to their later work while jogging.
The show kicked off with “Blow at High Dough,” from 1989’s “Up to Here,” and everybody forgot about death and Canada. The band played hard. They played unpretentiously. They knew that the crowd was there to hear the classics, and they wanted to give the fans what they wanted, so they played the early songs, and they played them as if they would never play them again. There was no time to waste on artistic vanity. They also played their new songs, from “Man Machine Poem,” just as they would have done if their lead singer weren’t dying. This was a rock band playing in the face of death, not some nostalgia act. Big difference.
The rapture of the crowd was total. They wanted to be with Downie until the end. This being Canada, though, nobody acknowledged what was really happening. Downie didn’t speak to us, though he is famous for his onstage rambles. Maybe he was silent because if he started talking, he would have to talk about death and everything else, or maybe it was because there really was nothing to say. During “Boots or Hearts,” one of the band’s biggest hits, Downie laughed and the crowd laughed with him. At times he looked dumbfounded by joy. He was transcendent and he knew it. The lyrics were perfect:
During the band’s first break, the Jumbotron played footage of a storm coming over Georgian Bay—an iconic Northern scene. The Tragically Hip has always sung about uniquely Canadian themes, often to the point of absurdity. Bill Barilko, who scored the winning goal for the Maple Leafs in the 1951 Stanley Cup Finals, disappeared on a fishing trip that summer, and his body was not found until 1962, the next time the Leafs won the Cup. That story may not sound like a natural subject for a rock song, but Downie got “Fifty-Mission Cap” out of it, and it was one of the Hip’s biggest hits. “Wheat Kings,” a ballad about David Milgaard, who served twenty-three years in prison in Manitoba for a murder he didn’t commit, contains the following lines, which have always been, to me at least, the perfect encapsulation of the Canadian prairie:
Canada’s heroes are consumed by their country: Atanarjuat, the fast runner of Inuit legend, who ran naked through the snow; Tom Thomson, the country’s greatest painter, drowned on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, in the middle of the landscapes he was trying to capture; the North-West Mounted Police, whose horses collapsed from exhaustion in the Great March West; John Franklin, who froze to death in the Northwest Passage. The great Canadian icon of my childhood was Terry Fox, who ran the length of a marathon a day, trying to cross Canada on a prosthetic leg while dying of osteosarcoma, in order to raise money for cancer research. Gord Downie has entered the iconography of the Northern survivor. He has proved his endurance by crossing an impossible country while dying.
More landscape footage appeared when the band returned to the stage: a video of Downie snowmobiling with Canada’s great Métis novelist Joseph Boyden, then the helm of a canoe coursing through a calm lake. Downie and his bandmates basked in the love of Toronto. As the show ended, after a triple encore, the screen played their name over the waving Maple Leaf. An enormous Canadian flag circulated through the crowd, as if it were an Olympic hockey game. Downie spent several minutes waving goodbye, and the crowd waved goodbye back, the way you would to a best friend moving to a different city. “I’ll see you down the road somewhere” was all he said. Then he mouthed, “I love you.” Everyone was crying.
It was another Canadian rock icon, Neil Young, who articulated one of rock and roll’s supposed principles: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Gord Downie is living that, but not by way of narcissistic self-destruction. He is burning out by working, and making art. He is achieving a beautiful death.
The band’s final shows in Toronto coincided with the Perseid meteor showers. You couldn’t see them in the city, but if you went into the quiet dark—and there is plenty of quiet dark in Canada—you could find them streaking across the sky. The Perseids burn as the atmosphere consumes them. This year was better than usual, astronomers said—one of the most glorious celestial spectacles visible with the naked eye.
