Page 86 - Sharp Summer 2021

Welco
In 1990, the Tragically Hip found them- selves in New Orleans to work on the fol- low-up to their platinum-selling debut album Up To Here. After heavily touring Canada and the U.S., the Kingston, Ontario, rock band — singer Gord Downie, guitarists Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay — were a well-oiled machine, and had a wealth of material to choose from. Working with pro- ducer Don Smith and engineer Bruce Barris, the band recorded 1991’s Road Apples, which cemented the Hip’s reputation as a group to be reckoned with.
Now, two decades after those recording sessions — and four years since Downie passed away in 2017 from brain cancer — the band has released Saskadelphia, a collection of six tracks that were left off Road Apples. “I was very hesitant to push play,” Langlois tells Sharp. “I thought, ‘Well, they didn’t make the record, they’re not going to be that good,’ and it was quite the opposite.” Before all the accolades, awards (17 Juno Awards, the Order of Canada), and arena shows (including their final 2016 concert, which was broadcast and livestreamed on CBC, and reached 11.7 million people), rol- licking songs like “Crack My Spine Like a Whip” and “Reformed Baptist Blues” show- cased a quintet eager to prove themselves and deeply committed to their craft.
From their respective homes in Kingston and Toronto, Langlois and Fay discuss the making of Saskadelphia, the Hip’s enduring reputation as “Canada’s band,” and Down- ie’s legacy.
Tell me about the process of finding these songs — because I understand you weren’t sure if some of them even existed anymore.
JOHNNY FAY: I think all of us had talked 86 SHARPMAGAZINE.COM SUMMER 2021
over the years of unearthing some of these songs. For Road Apples especially, we went in super prepared. When you make a re- cord, you never know if you’re going to make a second record, and our manager Jake Gold said, “When you’re on the road, you’re going to be preparing for your next records.” We always knew that these songs existed, although we might not have neces- sarily known the titles. We heard about the [2008] fire at Universal Studios and what was really alarming to us, Robby pointed it out, was that we were mentioned in a New York Times article. So we were sit- ting there wondering if we had songs in this fire, and what had happened was the majority of stuff had been transferred up after [1992 album] Fully Completely. So in an iron mountain somewhere in Toronto were tapes. The process involved going up there and looking at boxes with no writing on the back, just writing on the spine, but it had been changed so many times that we could see our engineer’s writing, we could see our assistant who was with us, Mark Vreeken, we could see his writing on it, and then all these other numbers. We really didn’t know until we took the tapes, baked them, and then listened to them. That process took about two years.
Where did the title Saskadelphia come from?
JF: We used to do this thing where we would sit in front of a chalkboard and throw titles out. I remember driving and, I think it was near Kingston, there was this church called the Church of the Christadelphians, and I was like, “You can graft one word onto another, ‘delphia,’ what does that mean?” At the time, we were playing similar clubs in the United States and Canada, and you wondered where you were half the time
because the clubs kind of looked the same. Our record company didn’t like the name because they were U.S. and they thought Saskadelphia was too Canadian, so we gave them Road Apples, which was the most Ca- nadian thing, which is what Canadian kids play hockey with out in the prairies.
Was “too Canadian” a criticism that you received a lot in those early days before you had a few records under your belts? PL: My personal opinion is we sort of got pi- geonholed a bit later in our career for being “Canada’s band.” Hey, we all love Canada, we’ve all chosen to stay here, we’re all proud to be from here. Our crowd in Detroit ver- sus our crowd in Austin versus our crowd in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, we treated it all the same. We were as proud of our history in Boston as we are proud of our history in Toronto. We worked our way up in all these places, and it really depended on the city. In Europe, especially in Holland, but in other countries too, they came out to see us be- cause we had come over from Canada. We appreciated that we started with full rooms there. If we could start with a full room, well, we could keep that room full. It’s when you start with the empty room, and that’s what the case was in Canada and the United States, empty rooms, so we just had to build it up. We treated the two countries the same.
When this album was recorded, you guys were in your late twenties. If you could go back in time and give that Hip any advice about navigating the industry and the success that followed, what would you say?
JF: Don’t change a thing. Because we had this most incredible band called Rush — they’ve influenced Metallica, Pearl Jam, countless other bands. They did everything on their
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Photo by Jim Herrington