The Tragically Hip: new documentary shows how group grieved

The death of the Tragically Hip’s lead singer Gord Downie united fans across Canada in their grief, but in many ways pulled his bandmates apart.

The new Prime Video docuseries “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal” reveals that all four surviving members of the Kingston, Ont., rock band took separate paths in the years after the band’s final tour. They hardly spoke as they struggled with a shared loss.

“We were all going through the process,” drummer Johnny Fay explained in a recent video interview.

“Like, we had this great career but we lost our bud. We lost our friend …We were floating out there and we didn’t have much of a connection.”

“And we weren’t reaching out to each other saying, ‘How are you handling all of this?’” added guitarist Paul Langlois.

“We could’ve checked in more.”

From the outside, it always seemed like the Hip shared a particular bond.

But as Langlois describes it, that brotherhood played out in the way it often does for musicians offstage: When they got together, they played music – pure and simple.

So when the band lost their main instrument, for a time it seemed impossible to communicate. Downie died of incurable brain cancer in October 2017.

“I spun out, I drank a lot, ran away from home,” guitarist Rob Baker is quoted as saying in “This Is Our Life,” an upcoming coffee table book on the Hip’s career.

“You think you’ve lost everything, but then you see just how much you still have.”

Seven years after Downie’s death, the band is emerging from a period of self-reflection — even healing, some of them suggest — that was propelled by “No Dress Rehearsal,” which earlier this month won the audience-voted People’s Choice award for documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The four-hour docuseries, directed by Gord’s brother Mike Downie, leans on the band’s collective memory to retrace how a few schoolyard pals became one of the country’s most popular bands with a greatest hits album outsold only by the Beatles in Canada.

Five years ago, making a Hip documentary series was on none of their agendas. The band was still grappling with their loss and hardly in touch.

But in mid-2019, reports emerged that a massive fire at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2008 had destroyed the master tapes of many popular artists. On the list of potentially impacted recordings were some works from the Hip.

“(It) was the spark that pulled us back together,” Baker recalls in their new book.

Over the next year, the band reconnected and prioritized their goals. They rehired Jake Gold, a former co-manager they fired in 2003, to better strategize their legacy and preserve their history.

Around that time, the wheels began turning on other Hip projects.

Mike Downie approached Gold to suggest a career-spanning Hip documentary with him as the director. His resume already boasted decades of documentary experience — and he had unrivalled access to the band.

“I really wanted to tell my brother’s story, tell the band’s story, tell the Kingston story, tell the Canadian story,” he said in an interview.

“It was the right time to sit down and talk about things on a really deep level, as deep as you can go. I think this became an opportunity to unweight a little bit and describe what (we’d) been carrying around.”

What transpired over hours of interviews between Mike Downie and his subjects was a deeper connection than any of them anticipated, suggested Gold, who serves as the project’s executive producer.

“He (started) asking them about their feelings and everything,” Gold said.

“For most of us, that was the first time we ever heard it. No one was thinking about the other guys at the time, and it became clear that they were mourning deeply. Everyone felt like a bit of them did die when Gord died.”

The docuseries wasn’t merely about wallowing in the sadness. The goal was to capture all of the success, struggle and tumult that defines a rock band.

Mike Downie chased down a former member of the Hip who was ousted before they hit it big, and waded into the complicated years of Gord Downie’s solo albums.

“I think it was very hard for him to make this movie,” Fay said.

“He kicked over every stone, he asked difficult questions about his brother.”

Alongside the stories, a deep library of archival footage illustrates the band’s incredible rise, starting with their 1989 debut album “Up to Here” and leading up to the final tour in 2016.

Hip drummer Fay said Prime Video offered the luxury of digging into those details over four episodes.

“It is a big ask, four hours? People are fragmented. They don’t listen to a whole song anymore,” he said.

“But (Prime) were very interested in letting us tell our story. They didn’t interfere, which I don’t know if it would’ve happened with other people.”

One question that remains unanswered is whether the Hip will ever truly reunite in some form.

They’ve flirted with the idea several times, most notably at the 2021 Juno Awards when Leslie Feist joined them to perform “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken” at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

And it’s a question that lingers in the Hip’s forthcoming book.

“Gord tried to convince me about a year before he died that we should get another singer, but I said we weren’t going to be doing that,” Langlois is quoted as saying.

“I would be actively opposed to the concept,” adds Baker.

Even if they don’t go the route of Queen or INXS, who replaced their late singers with new ones, the Hip musicians haven’t written off some other version of themselves.

“We could make an instrumental record down the road. Who knows?” Langlois suggested in an interview.

“We’re not counting each other out.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 21, 2024.