It’s been 35 years since The Tragically Hip’s debut album Up to Here signaled the arrival of what would become Canada’s most beloved rock band. Singles like “Blow at High Dough” and “New Orleans Is Sinking” made their mark, the latter hitting No. 30 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock radio tracks. The album itself is certified Diamond in Canada for sales over a million units, and it won the band a Juno Award for Most Promising Artist, a title they soon surpassed as they went on to become “the Beatles of Canada.”
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A deluxe remastered edition of Up to Here was released on Friday (November 8), and it includes live cuts, album demos, and four unheard studio tracks. One of them is “Get Back Again,” a ballad meshing acoustic and electric guitars. Bassist/songwriter Gord Sinclair tells American Songwriter, “It was one of my songs, riffing on the lyrical idea that going about things the right way is often harder than just giving into temptations or the quick reward.” The group demoed the song in Canada in 1988 before the Up to Here recording sessions at Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.
“Get Back Again”
“That wasn’t always the easy song for us to perform, and we were still learning our studio chops,” Sinclair recalls. “This was all of us playing together at the same time, including Gord [Downie] singing in an ISO booth. We’d get the kind of live vibe of what the band had, and the first time we played it it was just a magical version of the song. I remember we were all looking at each other [thinking] ‘Yeah, we nailed it.’ Then the engineer was literally like, ‘That was great, fellas. One more just like that we’ll hit record.’” He adds, laughing, “We never played it that well ever again.”
The bassist stated the band thought the song was a slam dunk for their debut, but as they were recording the album in Memphis, more inspiration struck them.
“We were so charged up being down in Memphis, we actually wrote a better acoustic song called ‘38 Years Old,’” he says. “Literally, start to finish. And it bumped the other song off the record. That’s when we really began to realize that, ‘Wow, together we are stronger and more efficient as songwriters.’”
“He Regretted It Right Away”
They couldn’t play “38 Years Old” live after a certain point because people thought it was autobiographical on frontman/lyricist Gord Downie’s part. It wasn’t—it was inspired by a prison break from the infamous Millhaven Institution in Kingston, Ontario. The song’s narrator is the brother of a man incarcerated for murdering the man who raped his sister. The inmate’s name is Mike, and as Downie’s real-life brother had the same name, people erroneously assumed there was a connection to his own life.
“When it first came out, he sold it so well that people were like, ‘Is your brother still in the can? And did your sister really …?’” Sinclair recollects. “That was his biggest problem, that he had that one line where your sister got raped and a man got killed. He regretted, from the moment that went down on tape, that he had written it that way. It told the story really well, very effectively. But it’s such an ugly lyric, that idea of rape and murder. He regretted it right away. We rarely played it live, and that was principally why.”
The Tragically Hip always moved forward and learned from their experiences. A great example of that is when they opened four stadium shows for The Rolling Stones in 1995, including playing before 85,000 people in Dusseldorf, Germany.
“It actually made us a better band in a lot of ways,” Sinclair remarks. “It was a big audience who you know are not there to see you. We were doing general admission shows with them in soccer stadiums in Europe. It’s like your first day of high school where you go and your object is not to get beaten up. You’re in completely new surroundings, and all you can do is be true to yourself. We stood up there and played and and came off the stage and felt good. Literally not getting booed off the stage was kind of the object of the exercise. We walked off the stage and there was Mick Jagger in the hallway. He said, ‘Great show, guys.’ The 16 year-old in you is like, ‘Oh my God, I’m having a conversation with Mick Jagger about my band, who he’s just complimented.‘ It really was inspiring in a lot of ways, and it forced us to rise to the occasion.”
“Man, They Made Us a Better Band”
Sinclair says they had a parallel experience when Midnight Oil opened for them on their Canadian tour in 1993. “Man, they made us a better band,” the bassist exclaims. “We had to learn how to play better than we’d already done because they were incredible to perform with. We’re music fans, first and foremost, and it means something, that power of performance and musicianship and the ability of a band to rock and roll with each other.”
Even more inspiring for the guys in The Tragically Hip was Midnight Oil’s activism. They taught them how they could use their platform as successful artists for a good cause.
“They had come to tour Canada with us, and their first act [was] they got on a private plane, a little puddle jumper, and went up to Clayoquot Sound where they [loggers] were clear-cutting old growth forest,” Sinclair says. “They went up there in our own country just to play for the [environmental] protesters that were there, and they literally schooled us on that. You have this platform, fellas, to help promote social change—not necessarily picking sides, but certainly picking sides in terms of right and wrong. [Singer] Peter Garrett and [drummer] Rob Hirst, we had some fantastic hangs with them. Again, it changed our trajectory in a lot of ways.”
In the final years of his life, frontman Gord Downie committed himself to being an Indigineous activist in Canada.
Another profound touring experience for the Hip was when they opened for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in 1995. The Canadian band had recently released their album Day for Night and were touring to support it.
“It was fun to play live,” Sinclair says of that release. “And here we are supporting half of Led Zeppelin. You never know how these things come together. But Robert was a real fan of the band, and we were still writing, working all the time, so we would set up a little drum kit and amps in our dressing room. We were gigging all the time, and Robert got into the habit of coming and playing with us every day, just hanging out and playing music. It was just inspiring. The 16 year-old me would have never believed that we were going to be hanging and playing music with the Golden God of Rock. It was really great, these opportunities that we had. But he’s a music fan, we’re music fans. It’s about the tunes, and playing and having fun.”
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