[MUSIC] Two Toronto Star articles on Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip

[rfmcdonald]

Sports writer Brendan Kennedy remembered for readers a concert of the Tragically Hip he saw in 1996, when he was only 12.

The show was at Maple Leaf Gardens in December of ’96. (The Rheostatics, a band I would also come to love, opened.) Freshly graduated from their barroom beginnings, this was the Hip’s first arena tour. But Downie commanded the stage like a deranged general. His face contorted in some imagined anguish; body twisting and twirling in drunken pirouettes, he strutted up and down the stage, ranting maniacally.

I was mesmerized.

The band — drummer Johnny Fay, guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, and bassist Gord Sinclair, the same group of guys who have played together for more than 30 years now — seemed content to serve as Downie’s dependable foundation, the base from which he could safely leap.

He took full advantage of their support, undulating one minute — like a dolphin, he would later explain — and firing off rounds of an imaginary shotgun the next. He bobbed and weaved with the microphone stand — narrowly missing cracking himself in the skull on a few occasions — before mime-smoking a cigarette and glaring at the audience. He was fierce and beautiful and entirely unique.

I couldn’t look away. Who was this lunatic poet?

Pop music critic Ben Rayner really liked their concert here in Toronto.

“Thank you, Toronto. Thank you, Toronto. Thank you forever.”

Gord Downie didn’t say much to the crowd during the Tragically Hip’s Wednesday-night gig at the Air Canada Centre, but he didn’t have to. The elephant’s already loose in the room. We needed to forget about it for awhile. He and his bandmates of more than 30 years probably needed to forget about it for awhile.

So we forgot about it for awhile. This, the first of three sold-out Toronto dates on the Hip’s Man Machine Poem tour – the band is back at the ACC on Friday and Sunday – was no weepfest, despite the fact that after three more shows to come in Hamilton, Ottawa and hometown Kingston on Aug. 16, 18 and 20, respectively, the Tragically Hip looks very likely to be over for good. Downie, as most Canadians are by now well aware, is staring the most final of all final curtains in the face right now, valiantly fighting against terminal brain cancer by going out on the road with lifelong friends Paul Langlois, Johnny Fay, Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker for what could well be the last time. No doubt so everyone involved can forget about it for awhile.

So 20,000-plus Toronto fans tried not to think about that last night, and Downie and the Hip did their utmost in return to drive all the bad thoughts from our minds by delivering one of the most powerful and wholly uplifting sets they’ve played in this city for years for nearly two-and-a-half riveting hours.

True, the gnawing certainty amongst many attendees that this would indeed be the last time they’d ever get to see the Tragically Hip in action did lend an extra sense of urgency to a will-call lineup that still stretched across the width of the ACC lobby to the east doors half an hour after the show had started.