The Tragically Hip | 06.13.09

Words by: Dennis Cook | Images by: Josh Miller

The Tragically Hip :: 06.13.09 :: The Fillmore :: San Francisco, CA

The Tragically Hip :: 06.13 :: The Fillmore, SF

As I was flattened with a rare quickness – taken much more than willingly opened up – just a few songs into The Tragically Hip‘s set, I pondered aloud, “How does a band this FANTASTIC elude my attention for 16 years?” Like many music-obsessed dorks, I pride myself on having my ear to the ground, knowing the finest rumbles – past, present and future – by their slightest reverberation. My hubris was left swiftly shattered by this Canadian institution’s Fillmore onslaught. Some play the room with awe and others set out to awe, and the Hip were powerfully the latter sort, storming the room like men who’ve learned much in their time together and refined their craft in a way that begs comparisons to fighting peak Black Crowes and R.E.M. – bands with voluminous talent, flexible, exciting material and an intense dedication to making a concert a live experience.

Opener “The Depression Suite” from the new We Are The Same (released April 7 on Zoe Records) began with the lilt of a solid Dave Matthews number, asking, almost generically, “Are you going through something?” But, lead singer/band architect Gordon Downie soon curved things, saying, “Just bring on the requisite strangeness.” While intended as a comment about emotional or other distance, it serves as a decent opening into why I (and many others) stateside aren’t, well, hip to the Hip. While they’ve blipped up on the U.S. charts a few times, there’s something just plain odd (wonderfully so) in their ground water, some quirk or black laughter in the mix that keeps them from fully becoming something akin to the Matthews Band. A cult suits them, and as rootsy and rowdy as things got they never fully surrendered some portion of their strangeness. Oh, they’re plenty flowery in places – almost overwhelmingly perfumed on some of the newer slow numbers – but I found myself most attracted to their barbs, the places where blood flows and the world is punctured in a way that lays bare the whole mess of knotted internal plumbing. And when his wild, dark eyes fix upon a subject it’s clear Downie is a superb eviscerator.

G. Downie – The Tragically Hip :: 06.13

It’s impossible not to stare at their frontman. Sure, I pulled my gaze away regularly to drink in the hefty chops of lead guitarist Rob Baker and rhythm guitar foil Paul Langlois, but it wasn’t long before I was fixated again on the handkerchief waving/throwing frontman (he’d wipe his shaved dome with them, lob the moistened memento into the eager crowd and then reach out his hand for a balled replacement supplied endlessly from the wings). His personal energy sets the bar for all of them, and they entered playing with the intensity and togetherness most bands only achieve mid-show, and they simply never let up until the house lights came up. The sauna atmosphere, bodies jostling enthusiastically as the booze sweated from our pores, had everyone dripping along with Downie, which just added to the feeling that the collective “we” was in this together.

Often long-lived acts like The Tragically Hip feel like a clubhouse one isn’t invited to if they’re just now knocking, but these guys emanate an empathetic tractor beam that bunches one into their bosom. They get struggle and they know how to channel understanding and hope into shapes that make one dance. It’s the sort of vibe These United States and Big Light are on their way towards, except this is the fruition of such humanizing tactics. The only other group with this sort of melodic rock bent, exposed emotional core, high minded global perspective and peculiar humor that readily comes to mind is Marillion, another industry survivor with a rabid following and oodles of lessons to teach up and coming talent.

Prior to this gig my familiarity with their music was the latest album, a handful of singles and the clips on their MySpace page. Based on that sampling, I was hot and cold for their work. Some of it struck me as slick, too consciously molded for today’s charts, while other parts hummed with interesting nuances and cloudy perspectives that immediately ensnared me. Live, it’s all good. Even the thinner VH1-esque cuts from We Are The Same picked up rough edges and fascinating pockmarks in concert. In a way, I wish they’d show more of this side of themselves in the studio but recent efforts with producer Bob Rock (Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Metallica) show them moving in the opposite direction. Thankfully, put them on a stage and their rock animal natures take over and even the pretty pieces contain a touch of menace or danger, as they often do in the real world.

The Tragically Hip :: 06.13 :: The Fillmore, SF

Every aspect of this two-set show had it dialed in – the exciting, tuned-in light show, the sequencing, their general stage presence, the enormous back-and-forth with the audience. It is truly a pleasure to watch pros work. I honestly never tire of catching a band that starts on time and delivers bang for your buck, honoring the money and energy audiences contribute to the experience. One knows quickly when they’re being respected, and the Hip offered up great love and devotion to match the waves coming at them from the floor. While I’ve since delved deeper into their catalog – learned the words to a few faves already – on this night I was an interloper, but my visible excitement about what was unfolding made total strangers embrace me in multiple ways. Tragically Hip fans are primo, some of the best I’ve met and comparable to the core followings for ALO and Railroad Earth, who they match in both bubbling enthusiasm for and encyclopedic knowledge of their chosen passion.

There is much to sweep one up with the Hip, and their extremely talented rhythm team – Gord Sinclair (bass) and Johnny Fay (drums) – deserves props. This is a lock-tight pair on par with the Truckers’ Shonna Tucker and Brad Morgan, seemingly invisible but moving and marbled in every aspect of the music. Still, it always comes back to Downie, who, without hyperbole, is one of the best bandleader/singers in the world. One knows fast when they’ve encountered a master frontman and Downie can go toe-to-toe with anyone out there. His voice sits in a warbling valley between Chris Robinson’s steely, commanding bark and the playful filigree of Marillion’s Steve Hogarth. More obscurely, toss in a dash of Pere Ubu‘s David Thomas and Miracle Legion‘s Mark Mulcahy and one gets the broad swath of his pipes. Again, it’s something I never picked up on with their studio work but he’s a bloody dynamo on stage. And he’s a superb crowd manipulator, too, taunting and courting with equal skill, taking time to joke, as he did early in the night as he sang a few bars of Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” and then turned it on its head, saying, “Not my homonym girl but my synonym girl.” This is a singer for crossword champions, and intelligence of that order is sexy.

The Tragically Hip :: 06.13 :: The Fillmore, SF

While the Pink Floyd-y encore, “Now The Struggle Has A Name,” got us metaphorically locking arms, the high point for this newbie was second set closer “New Orleans Is Sinking,” a four-alarm barnburner packed with impolite guitars and a cry to the heavens that one feels in their very fiber. Off 1989’s Up To Here, it’s creepy prescience given Katrina, Bush and the rest is startling enough but this is also the sort of gutbucket, unvarnished rock ‘n’ roll simply outside the grasp of many contemporary bands. Close your eyes and you can very easily imagine JB tearing this up at a Panic show:

Bourbon blues on the street/ loose and complete
Under skies all smoky blue-green
I can forsake the Dixie dead shake
So we dance the sidewalk clean
My memory is muddy/ what’s this river I’m in
New Orleans is sinking and I don’t want to swim

By tune’s end one felt part of some happy cataclysm, blown asunder by peaceniks with balls, eco-logical ruffians who aren’t nearly as hemp soft as one might suspect. My natural inclination towards their rough side made this and the other rockers a good fit for my tastes, but the true mark of their talents is how they kept me rapt during the weepies and journal-writer introspective tunes. It’s not often one comes away a fan from a first encounter but The Tragically Hip aren’t most bands.

The Tragically Hip :: 06.13.09 :: The Fillmore :: San Francisco, CA
Set I: The Depression Suite, Yer Not The Ocean, Fully Complete, Morning Moon, Ahead By A Century, The Dire Wolf, Honey Please, At The Hundredth Meridian, Coffee Girl, In View, Love Is A First
Set II: Thompson Girl, Courage, Scared, Don’t Wake Daddy, Poets, The Last of the Unplucked Gems, Thugs, Bobcaygeon, Grace Too, Frozen In My Tracks, Fireworks, New Orleans Is Sinking
E: Now The Struggle Has A Name, Blow At High Dough