It was Canada Day, 1992, Canada’s 125th birthday, three months before the release of the Tragically Hip’s third studio album, Fully Completely. Gord Downie was sweating under the weight of a thick khaki shirt, hair plastered to his forehead, breathing heavily into his microphone. Thousands of people had turned up to a field next to the Molson Brewery in Barrie, about an hour north of Toronto, for the first of two shows the Tragically Hip would headline in one day on opposite sides of the country. The young crowd was half-drunk and baking in the midsummer sun, and Maple Leaf Flags billowed lazily in Downie’s eyeline.
“Welcome to Molsonia! I’ve decided to change the name,” Downie said. He was trying to bait the crowd, but nobody was catching on. “Happy Stupid Day,” he added, a more manic edge creeping into his voice. The people he was trying to insult were cheering his every word; a few beers deep, they loved the idea of Stupid Day. He jammed another maggot onto the hook and hurled it back into the water: “We could have our own motto: ‘Who are we kidding?’” On the live MuchMusic broadcast beaming this out from coast to coast, a young girl perched on her friend’s shoulders stared back at the stage blankly.
Three albums in, Canada’s love affair with the Tragically Hip was already a complicated relationship.
Canada’s obsession with the Tragically Hip is unique in the English-speaking world. A recent four-part Amazon Prime documentary, No Dress Rehearsal, proposed that the Hip were to Canada as U2 were to Ireland or the Beatles were to Britain, but that’s not quite right. Everyone had U2 and the Beatles, regardless of where they were born or brought up. Only Canada truly loved the Tragically Hip. They sold over six million records in Canada alone—that’s one album for every six people in the country. All but four of the 13 albums they released went straight to the top of the Canadian album charts, and one of those that didn’t—their debut, Up to Here—ended up selling well over a million copies in Canada over the next decade. They were national icons unlike any other group or artist previously, the symbol of a country in the shadow of an economic and cultural superpower.
Formed in Kingston, Ontario, a university city on Lake Ontario, in 1984, the Tragically Hip struck a balance between plaid-shirted everyman relatability and shamanic rockstar mystique. Greg Barr of the Ottawa Citizen wrote in 1991 that the Hip’s connection with their audience was based in part on them looking like their fans. They were all people who “have this thing for raunchy music and watching hockey on Saturday night... guys with regular jobs or college students who do their own laundry too.” That may have been true of guitarists Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay, but Downie was, at least on stage, a different animal.
Critics at the time often compared him to one of his heroes, Jim Morrison, but there were myriad other descriptions that, taken together, paint the picture of a madman. A composite image generated from Canadian newspaper clippings of the time would show Jack Nicholson in The Shining singing with a “12 cup-of-coffee” intensity, a man who seemed “possessed by the kind of devils who were supposed to have created rock music in the first place” and was “reminiscent of the devil child Anthony, who could turn people into mutants just by staring at them, in a scary old Twilight Zone episode.” Downie was a magnetic presence on stage, dramatic and irrepressible, often devolving into stream-of-consciousness rants and dragging four-minute songs out into 10-minute jams.
Their first two full-lengths, 1989’s Up to Here and 1991’s Road Apples, had been recorded in Memphis and New Orleans, respectively, and a damp Southern air seeped into their sound. The guitars crunched, Downie’s lyrics hinted at a collective outsiderdom—“Hey north, you’re south/Shut your big mouth,” he sang through a humid drawl on “New Orleans Is Sinking”—and lines could be traced from his disjointed poetry back to Kingston. But his theatrics and cadence owed more to Morrison than any Canadian icon. Baker and Langlois borrowed consciously from blues and Southern rock, often dousing their guitar sounds in motor oil-thick distortion. It’s not that the Hip were pretending to be American; kids on college campuses in Canada could recognize the real-life Ontario jailbreak behind Up to Here’s “38 Years Old,” or the crisis in Quebec that animated Road Apples’ “Born in the Water.” But the Hip were a blues-rock band from Canada. This was not Canada’s answer to Bruce Springsteen.
Their die-hard following at home was built on different foundations. First, Canada is an enormous place—the world’s second biggest land mass, pockmarked by mountains and endless rolling plains. Driving from town to town basically takes forever. So most bands simply don’t. Smaller acts might stick to their hometowns and immediate surroundings, while major artists hit major cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, perhaps a couple of others with NHL teams and airports in between. The Hip hit small towns and out-of-the-way pockets, driving through the night or taking ferries where necessary to make it where others wouldn’t dare.
Crucially, while the Tragically Hip were connecting the dots on the map, their music was beamed from coast to coast in a way that few but the biggest American bands would dream of at home. Canadian Content regulations (usually shortened to CanCon) had first been implemented by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 1971, as a direct and centralized effort to protect Canadian cultural identity despite the enormous appeal of music from the U.S. and UK. The law required 30% of music played on AM radio to be identifiably Canadian, and it prompted a backlash from radio programmers at first, who insisted they would be forced to spin inferior records.
But by the mid-’80s, when video music stations like MuchMusic took off parallel with MTV in the States, Canadian artists were more visible than ever. CanCon effectively created its own ecosystem, in which young artists heard and saw Canadian music, made music of their own, and knew it would have a good chance of making it onto the radio. In 1991, the year before that show in Molsonia, FM radio’s CanCon quotas were raised to line up with the AM. Three out of every 10 songs on the Canadian airwaves were Canadian. And an increasing number of those were made by the Tragically Hip.
CanCon also gave Canadian bands a degree of breathing room. Though the Hip toured America and played clubs with the same relentlessness as they did in Canada, Road Apples and Up to Here had done little commercially in the United States. That would have put most artists under immense pressure to succeed on a third album. But the Hip had the high floor of Canadian success. Not only did they not feel pressure to engineer their songs for radio play, they could even experiment and expand their sound with the knowledge that they’d be played by the CBC either way.
Not that the band didn’t want success elsewhere. “We were still holding out for the equivalent American success,” Sinclair told Michael Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider in Have Not Been the Same: The Can-Rock Renaissance 1985–1995. Their label, MCA, was convinced the breakthrough was imminent as well. At their behest, Chris Tsangarides, better known for his work in mainstream metal and hard rock, was drafted to produce their album and generate a punchier, more radio-friendly sound. It worked. Where their first two albums retained the jagged edges of their live show, Fully Completely was tighter, slicker, and more dynamic.
Above all, Downie’s lyrics had changed. They were weird, a disorienting journey through Canadian history—real and imagined—that led somewhere chaotic and disquieting. Fully Completely’s first song was dedicated to Hugh MacLennan and borrowed lyrics from his novel The Watch That Ends the Night—heralded as a classic in Canada but little known elsewhere. “At the Hundredth Meridian” placed itself on the literal dividing line between Western Canada and the Atlantic and Central regions, asking awkward and rhetorical questions: “Me debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?” This was all within the first eight minutes. It was, Kirk Makin wrote at the Globe & Mail, “swirling, quavery, complex, challenging and so profoundly Canadian.”
Everywhere on Fully Completely, Downie seemed intent on confronting Canada’s foundational myths. “Fifty-Mission Cap” is structurally and musically one of the Tragically Hip’s most straightforward songs, a 4/4 rock track that opens up into a two-chord chorus. It’s the sort of thing that would (and did) play as well at a bowling alley as a packed-out basketball arena. But Downie’s lyrics are peculiar: “Bill Barilko disappeared/That summer/He was on a fishing trip.” It is on its face a curious slice of niche Canadiana, mysterious and mostly forgotten: Bill Barilko, the Cup-winning defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who vanished into the untamed Ontario nowhere.
Downie had become obsessed with the story, spending evenings in the library researching it. “There was one night, it was close to closing time and I was right up to the point where they were about to discover his body,” he told the Toronto Star. “It was dark and in my mind I was in a bush plane somewhere over Northern Ontario. A librarian tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped right out of my skin.” He interviewed his bandmates’ fathers, who told him about the conspiracy theories around Barilko—some thought he had been a Soviet spy, others that he was embroiled in a gold scandal and had been busted by the RCMP. Those were only put to bed when his body was discovered, 11 years later, in 1962, the same year the Leafs won their next Stanley Cup.
The chorus is even more complicated. Downie sings that he “stole” the story “from a hockey card/I keep tucked up under/My fifty-mission cap.” The fifty-mission cap itself was a staple of the elite Allied bomber squadrons during the Second World War. Pilots would remove the stiffening inner ring from their service cap to make wearing a headset in the cockpit more comfortable. Over time, the cap would sag and wear down, accumulating more sweat and dirt after every raid. If surviving even a handful of missions over the skies of Europe was unlikely, living through 50 was a sign of immense courage, impeccable skill, divine provenance, or a combination of all three. A fifty-mission cap told that story.
Unless, of course, you faked it. In the chorus, Downie admits that it isn’t really a fifty-mission cap in his hands, with Barilko’s hockey card tucked into the lining. “I worked it in to look like that,” he sings, as though it’s a baseball glove or too-clean pair of jeans. In an interview with Steve Newton around the release of Fully Completely, Downie was clearly charmed by the idea. “Of course, you’d work it in to look like a fifty-mission cap so as to appear that you had more experience than you really did,” he said.
Maybe Downie was just drawing a parallel between the inexperienced Henry Hudson, who piloted the ill-fated flight that went down with Barilko, and the neophyte pilots of the Allied Air Forces. But it’s difficult to ignore the imperfections in this image of elite military pilots, these dashing and supposedly unquestionable heroes. Some of them were just kids. Some of them weren’t heroes at all—at least not yet. They were working it in. And if that image of Canadian history could be complicated so quickly, as a chaser to a story about a vanished hockey player, everything was questionable.
Elsewhere the lyrics were more directly adversarial. “Wheat Kings” was torn straight from the headlines, an acoustic track about David Milgaard, a 17-year-old wrongly convicted of a brutal rape and murder in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Milgaard served 23 years in prison before being released earlier that summer of 1992, and eventually fully exonerated. The song begins in a watercolor image of rural Canada, Downie singing of “sundown in the Paris of the Prairies,” but the veil is quickly pulled back to reveal the nightmare in Milgaard’s mind, “where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister/Hung with pictures of our parents' prime ministers.” Five of them had served in the time it took Milgaard to be convicted, suffer behind bars, and find freedom.
Most urgent of all was “Looking for a Place to Happen,” which told the bloody and bitter story of European annexation of Native land from two perspectives. First, Downie gave voice to French explorer Jacques Cartier, who callously wanted “To find a place, an ancient race/The kind you'd like to gamble with,” before shifting the focus to an indigenous person fleeing for their life: “I’ll paint a scene, from memory/So I’d know who murdered me.” The Hip were not telling the story of a harmonious country. Everywhere on Fully Completely, there seemed to be injustice and death, a beautiful-seeming facade melting away to reveal something grotesque and disturbing.
