Never-ending Present , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Michael Barclay

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

370 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In the summer of 2016, more than a third of Canadians tuned in to watch what was likely the Tragically Hip's final performance, broadcast from their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Why? Because these five men were always more than just a band. They sold millions of records and defined a generation of Canadian rock music. But they were also a tabula rasa onto which fans could project their own ideas: of performance, of poetry, of history, of Canada itself. In the first print biography of the Tragically Hip, Michael Barclay talks to dozens of the band's peers and friends about not just the Hip's music but about the opening bands, the American albatross, the band's role in Canadian culture, and Gord Downie's role in reconciliation with Indigenous people. When Downie announced he had terminal cancer and decided to take the Hip on the road one more time, the tour became another Terry Fox moment; this time, Canadians got to witness an embattled hero reach the finish line.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	05 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773052069
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The NEVER-ENDING PRESENT
The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip
Michael Barclay
Copyright
Copyright © Michael Barclay, 2018
Published by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, ON M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Barclay, Michael, 1971–, author
The never-ending present : the story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip / Michael Barclay.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-436-5 (hardcover)
Also issued as: 978-1-77305-207-6 (PDF),
978-1-77305-206-9 (ePUB)
1. Tragically Hip (Musical group).
2. Downie, Gordon, 1964–2017.
3. Rock musicians—Canada—Biography.
I. Title.
ML421.T765B23 2018 782.42166092’2 C2017-906165-8 C2017-906166-6
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes
Cover design: David A. Gee
Cover images: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy
Author photo: Colin Medley
The publication of The Never-Ending Present has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,793 individual artists and 1,076 organizations in 232 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Contents Preface Chapter One In a Big Country Chapter Two I Can Only Give You Everything Chapter Three Everybody Knows the Words Chapter Four On the Verge Chapter Five Are You Billy Ray? Who Wants to Know? Chapter Six Something Familiar Chapter Seven Stolen from a Hockey Card Chapter Eight You Want It Darker Chapter Nine Let’s Debunk an American Myth Chapter Ten Super-Capacity Chapter Eleven Escape Is at Hand for the Travelling Man Chapter Twelve The Berlin Period Chapter Thirteen Is It Better for Us if You Don’t Understand? Chapter Fourteen Is the Actor Happy? Chapter Fifteen A Heart-Warming Moment for Literature Chapter Sixteen As Makeshift as We Are Chapter Seventeen The Dance and Its Disappearance Chapter Eighteen Rock It from the Crypt Chapter Nineteen Are We the Same? Chapter Twenty Oh Yeah, This Band Chapter Twenty-One The Inevitability of Death Chapter Twenty-Two Exit, Stage 5 Chapter Twenty-Three The Stranger Chapter Twenty-Four That Night in Kingston Chapter Twenty-Five The Luxury Photos Endnotes Index Acknowledgements About the Author
Dedicated to all the parents, spouses, siblings, children, teachers and loved ones who enable creative people to do the work they have to do. We are all richer for having you in our lives.
Half of this book is a chronological history of the Tragically Hip’s career, which ended in 2017 with the death of Gord Downie. Those chapters are written in the past tense.
The other half, appearing between the chronological chapters, extrapolates on various themes throughout the band’s 32-year career, quoting the band’s peers and other observers speaking in 2016–17. Those chapters are situated in the present tense.
The Secret Path chapter, about the work Gord Downie considered to be the most important of his life, spans the years 2012–17, overlapping with four other chapters set in that time frame.
All chapters are written in a way that they can be read in isolation: you are invited to dip into The Never-Ending Present in whatever order you like.
Preface
Overheard backstage at a Tragically Hip show in the 2000s: “Don’t you go write a book about us!”
In the 2012 film Bobcaygeon , an uberfan named Wesley gestures to an empty spot on his bookshelf—stacked mostly with tomes about the Rolling Stones—and says, “The Hip have to make a book. There is no book on the Tragically Hip, other than Gord Downie’s poetry. I need to put a book in that spot. That’s where it’s got to go.” Wesley, here is your book.
The main reason why there has been no book about the Tragically Hip is because the band didn’t want one. A book ossifies its subject matter, providing a punctuation mark—namely a period—that implies whatever comes after its publication is less important than what preceded it. The Hip never viewed their career this way. They were always about the next album, the next tour. Don’t look back, Bob Dylan would say. Do your impression of the never-ending present, Gord Downie would say.
“It is probably a good thing that little is written about writers and artists in Canada while they are alive,” wrote novelist Hugh MacLennan in 1954, eulogizing his late wife, Dorothy Duncan, a writer. “This peculiar Canadian attitude is fundamentally healthy, for it leaves them free to do their work and to tell and paint the truth as they see it. But it is a bad thing for the country that they are almost never written about at all, not even after they are dead, for it is only through its creative ones that a nation acquires a personality and the right to stand in history.”
The members of the Tragically Hip are intensely private people who prefer to control their own narrative. They always hated talking to the press. They did not like most things written about them, or even covers of their songs. Downie in particular didn’t like revealing what was behind the curtain, or even taking a peek for himself; during a 2012 CBC Radio interview, he dismissed the wildly popular autobiography of one of his rock’n’roll heroes, Keith Richards, for blowing the mystique. They read their reviews; they held some grudges. They were invited to participate in this project; they declined. Understandable: 2017 was an intensely emotional time for everyone in the Hip camp, although guitarist Rob Baker did give several interviews during that calendar year. “Anyone can write whatever they want to write,” he told the Toronto Sun on October 17, 2017. “That’s fine with me. It’s just not our story as we would tell it. I have no interest in a chronological history of the band or talking about who influenced us and what our influence on others might be. It’s irrelevant . . . Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Two months later, the band declined a request to review a fact-checking document for this book.
The few times the Hip allowed themselves to be documented in film—1992’s Full Fledged Vanity , 1993’s Heksenketel , 2012’s Bobcaygeon —featured precious little live footage and next to no valuable interviews. Heksenketel spent more time talking to the band’s bus driver and the stage crew than it did the band members themselves. Bobcaygeon was primarily a documentary about some of the Hip’s biggest fans, not the story of the Hip. Thankfully, 2005’s That Night in Toronto was a valuable live document, and 2017’s brilliant Long Time Running showed the band members at their most forthcoming and vulnerable. None of those films told the story fully and completely.
The story of the Tragically Hip does not belong only to the band. As was abundantly evident in the summer of 2016, the story of the Tragically Hip is the story of Canadian music: the people who make it, the people who make it happen, and the fans who celebrate it every day. Maybe it’s even the story of Canadian culture itself, from Northrop Frye to Drake, from Jacques Cartier to Justin Trudeau, and everything in between.
The story of the Tragically Hip does not belong to one person, either. Despite the prominence of Gord Downie’s name in the subtitle, this is a book about the Tragically Hip. They never once billed themselves as Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, even if that’s the way they were consistently portrayed in the media, even if fans have tattoos of Downie’s face but not Gord Sinclair’s. Celebrity culture always focuses on the singer. To the chagrin of most musicians who don’t front a band, that will never change. Some singers replace their entire band, keep the name and have few fans notice. This was not a group of sidemen, however. This was a democratic band who made all decisions together—granted, some of those decisions were driven by Downie, who possessed the strong will and stubbornness found in all leaders. It was that charisma and strength that defined the final two years of his life, when Downie decided to shine a light on a dark corner of Canadian history with his Secret Path project. In doing so, he prompted a reckoning among white Canadians about their country’s shameful treatment of Indigenous people. For that and for his courage in battling brain cancer in a very public way, Downie became more famous than he’d ever been; even Canadians who never even cared for the Tragically Hip were now very aware of who the singer was and what he stood for. But why did we care about this man in the first place? The story of Gord Downie is by no means confined to 2016–17, even if that’s how he will now be remembered.
In Long Time Running , Rob Baker says, of the band’s historical relationship with their singer, “We always knew there was a big danger that the focus would become Gord, Gord, Gord. In a weird way, it came to pass with this [final] tour because it was unavoidable. Because of the situation, the focus was very much on Gord. That trumps the democracy.” In both 2016 and 2017, it w