As could anyone who watched him command 40,000 people at any given outdoor appearance during the 1990s, singing songs that were summer soundtracks for an entire generation. Anyone who managed to catch him fronting the Tragically Hip in 1985, playing covers at a roadhouse in Renfrew, Ont., could tell you that. Gordon Edgar Downie was one of the most riveting and mystifying performers in rock’n’roll history.
Then sit back and see what happens, because it’s not like you can control it. The poet whose metaphors had inspired generations of rock’n’roll fans had nothing more to say-with words, anyway.ĭo the work. He stoked the fire until sparks came out. Then he got up, silently, walked over to a pile of wood, picked up two logs, and returned to put them on the fire. And it seems like you get up there every single time and give it!” “Gord, I always wanted to ask you: how do you get the energy to make it so real every day? I think if I put myself out there like that, on the line, and make people emotionally connect with me, I feel like I couldn’t ever do it again, because I’d get bored or I just couldn’t summon the same amount of emotion. There were a few others there, though, most of whom knew enough to respect the privacy of the cancer-stricken man who had travelled hundreds of kilometres to disappear. Just a few close friends on a starry night in front of a campfire. It would turn out to be the last show of his band’s 30-year, multi-million-selling, award-winning career, a fate many suspected at the time.īut things were much quieter now. Where some go to get lost.ĭays earlier, this quiet man had held much of the entire nation rapt, millions watching as he summoned all his strength to tackle his terminal condition, to fend back-however briefly-the inevitability of death.
In the remote north, in a land where the many not born there dare not go.
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