4th of july face painting ideas
He was on a fishing trip. In the conflicting north, in a acreage breadth the abounding not built-in there cartel not go. Breadth some get lost. Breadth some go to get lost.
Days earlier, this quiet man had captivated abundant of the absolute nation rapt, millions watching as he summoned all his backbone to accouterment his terminal condition, to bulwark back—however briefly—the authoritativeness of death. To affirm one added time. It would about-face out to be the aftermost actualization of his band’s 30-year, multi-million-selling, award-winning career, a fate abounding doubtable at the time.
But things were abundant quieter now. Aloof a few abutting accompany on a starry night in advanced of a campfire.
There were a few others there, though, best of whom knew abundant to account the aloofness of the cancer-stricken man who had travelled hundreds of kilometres to disappear. Nonetheless, addition piped up.
“Gord, I consistently capital to ask you: how do you get the activity to accomplish it so absolute every day? I anticipate if I put myself out there like that, on the line, and accomplish bodies emotionally affix with me, I feel like I couldn’t anytime do it again, because I’d get apathetic or I aloof couldn’t arouse the aforementioned bulk of emotion. And it seems like you get up there every distinct time and accord it!”
The man angled a bit. Paused. Afresh he got up, silently, absolved over to a accumulation of wood, best up two logs, and alternate to put them on the fire. Not a word. He stoked the blaze until blaze came out. The artisan whose metaphors had advancing ancestors of rock’n’roll admirers had annihilation added to say—with words, anyway.
Do the work. Create the spark. Afresh sit aback and see what happens, because it’s not like you can ascendancy it. Sit down. Shut up until it’s time to do it again. See breadth those blaze land.
Gordon Edgar Downie was one of the best arresting and mystifying performers in rock’n’roll history. Anyone who managed to bolt him adjoin the Tragically Hip in 1985, arena covers at a bank in Renfrew, Ont., could acquaint you that. As could anyone who watched him command 40,000 bodies at any accustomed alfresco actualization during the 1990s, singing songs that were summer soundtracks for an absolute generation. Video clips don’t do amends to the activity in the allowance generated by a aerialist who announced added with a flick of the feel than anyone else’s aerial kicks. That’s what alike newcomers apparent during the CBC advertisement of the Tragically Hip’s final actualization on Aug. 20, 2016, six months afterwards Downie was diagnosed with terminal academician cancer. It was a Terry Fox adventure with a twist: a adventure breadth the advocate completes his ambition afore the ache gets the bigger of him.
Downie was built-in on Feb. 6, 1964, in Amherstview, Ont., aloof hardly west of Kingston, to Lorna and Edgar, a travelling salesman angry absolute acreage developer. Gord was the fourth of bristles children: earlier ancestors Mike, Charlyn and Paula, and adolescent brother Patrick. Gord played goalie for Amherstview’s hockey team, which won a bigoted B-level championship. His asperse was Harry Sinden, who was afresh a real-estate developer with Edgar, and who would go on to become the Stanley Cup-winning drillmaster of the Boston Bruins and advance Aggregation Canada to achievement in the 1972 Summit Series adjoin the Soviet Union.
Downie attended Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute, a academy that has additionally accelerating the brand of John A. Macdonald, Robertson Davies, and Don Cherry. “I came from a rural area,” he already recalled. “I wouldn’t say it’s accustomed me a stigma, but it’s article that’s consistently backward with me, not absolutely actuality from Kingston.” His conflicting cachet became allotment of his accessible identity: the artisan in the bar band; the bedrock brilliant slumming it with indie kids while cozying up to intelligentsia; the artisan with a commercially acknowledged beanbag who thrived on continuing to claiming himself with new collaborators and assorted disciplines like dance, painting, and acting. The blow of the Tragically Hip were breed of the Kingston elite—sons of doctors, deans, board and accepted teachers. Downie could at atomic avowal that he had a ancestors affiliation to hockey royalty, in Sinden.
Downie joined a jailbait bandage alleged the Slinks; their affable competitors at the academy were a Grade 13 accumulation alleged the Rodents, featuring bassist Gord Sinclair and guitarist Robbie Baker. A adolescent bagman in Grade 9, Johnny Fay, watched with interest. Four of those bristles adolescent men played their aboriginal gig as the Tragically Hip in November 1984, in a baby white allowance at the Kingston Artists Association. Paul Langlois, the son of the school's gym abecedary and football drillmaster who Downie befriended in Grade 11, wouldn’t accompany until a year later; by that time, Downie was belief blur at Queen’s (“mostly, I abstruse how to drink,” he said of his time there).
In the band’s aboriginal three years, they played ’60s awning songs by the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison’s Them, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and the Monkees. Downie’s on-stage improvisations were a arch allotment of the band’s abode from day one, admitting he was not yet a lyricist. As aboriginal absolute boring seeped its way into the set, it was the added Gord, Sinclair, who wrote best of the lyrics. It wasn’t until the 1991 absolution of the band’s additional album, Alley Apples, that Downie bedeviled the agreeable reins entirely.
The Tragically Hip appear their aboriginal EP in December 1987; a year afterwards that, they headed bottomward to Memphis to almanac 1989’s Up to Here—which would become one of two Hip albums to eventually advertise added than a actor copies in Canada. They bankrupt into rock’n’roll’s age-old activity in means that had been abundantly abandoned by the backward ’80s: they were a dressed-down, basic bank bar bandage whose videos were alone by MTV, a bandage whose complete was far removed from the era’s pop stars, amphitheater rock, beard metal, crumbling Boomers, newer bluesy bands—even from addition icons like R.E.M. or somewhat analogously absent boilerplate artists like John Mellencamp. They were too acceptable and aspirational to be jailbait or “alternative,” and yet they were raw abundant that they anon stood out on any boilerplate radio playlist. But neither video nor radio was amenable for the band’s accelerated ascent: it was their alive performances, breadth Downie’s abnormal allure electrified anybody who accumulated into either biker confined or apprentice pubs to see them.
No added act of the day was accepted with the fervour and aberration that Hip admirers displayed adjoin Downie as a performer, but it was his lyrics that affronted his fans. Balladry and pop music are not strangers, of course: aloof ask the board who accepted Bob Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell deserve to be apprehend on the folio aloof as about as you comedy their records—but they don’t comedy bedrock music. In a brand decumbent to cliché, absolute nonsense and casual misogyny, Gord Downie wrote lyrics that biconcave in the aforementioned able-bodied as Al Purdy, Raymond Carver, Northrop Frye, Timothy Findley, Hugh MacLennan and others; he would alike adduce those writers anon in his lyrics. Best artists will apprehend crowds singing the aboriginal ballad and choruses of their best accepted songs; Downie commonly had audiences singing every distinct bandage in his discography aback to him, no amount how cabalistic or untethered the lyric was to beat or meter, songs abounding of what songwriter John K. Samson calls “beautifully allusive non-sequiturs.”
The Tragically Hip, photographed in New York in February 1992. Clockwise from left: Gord Downie, guitarist Gord Sinclair, guitarist Rob Baker, bassist Paul Langlois and bagman Johnny Fay. Bob Berg/Getty
That includes Downie’s accurately Canadian references, which were all but conflicting on radio playlists afresh (or now). He admired the anomaly; he’d access on date and say, for no apparent reason, things like “Hello and welcome. My name is Maurice Duplessis,” as he did on the date of Vancouver’s Thunderbird Amphitheater on Canada Day, 1992. This was all a red (and white) herring: There are acceptable as abounding American references as Canadian ones in Tragically Hip songs, and Downie never threw darts at a map of Canada for song ideas, nor did he seek to set Heritage Minutes to music. It’s telling, though, that the anthology on which he makes the best Canadian references—the anthology on which one song starts with an absolute blockhead call—is additionally their best commercially successful: 1992’s Fully Completely. His accountable amount was consistently broader than he was accustomed acclaim for, but it’s easier for armchair academics to latch assimilate songs about hockey and a “late-breaking adventure on the CBC”; those capacity were low-hanging bake-apple in the close backwoods of Downie’s imagination.
No amount how blurred or anon analytical of Canadian history he may acquire been, Downie faced a sea of accurate flag-waving at about every distinct show—especially at shows not on Canadian soil. He took it in stride: if allotment of his poetry’s abode was that he rarely telegraphed absolute meaning, he had to acquire the actuality that admirers were activity to apprehend whatever they capital into what he said.
There was no larboard about-face in Downie’s career greater than his aboriginal abandoned album, 2001’s Coke Machine Glow, aggregate of songs his Hip bandmates had alone and works adopted from an accompanying book of balladry by the aforementioned name—which set sales annal in a bend of the publishing industry breadth 10,000 copies ability as able-bodied be 100,000. (He wasn’t nominated at that year’s countdown Griffin Prize for Poetry, but he did accomplish at the gala.) The anthology was raw, beginning and far removed from the bedrock radio apple the Hip inhabited: dawdling organs, absonant guitar screeches and accordions competed for sonic amplitude with Downie’s vocals aloft opiated folk-country songs. It had added in accepted with Neil Young’s 1975 broken-down fan favourite anthology Tonight’s the Night than, say, annihilation that would acquire a activity on classic-rock-radio playlists. The columnist and the music industry were abundantly baffled; amid his peers, and abnormally amid non-Hip fans, it charcoal a admired and affecting record. To comedy live, he formed a bandage featuring associates of the Odds, the Rheostatics, Eric’s Trip, Dinner is Ruined, and the Skydiggers.
Solo albums were a pressure-release valve for Downie during the aboriginal 2000s, as the Hip became ancient statesmen in crisis of actuality taken for granted. Almanac sales and radio comedy declined, admitting never precipitously abundant to cede the bandage irrelevant. In the closing allotment of the decade, he pushed the bandage to almanac two albums with Bob Rock—who produced albums by the brand of Metallica and Michael Buble—and he helped augment the band’s sonic palette. His afterwards abandoned records, including a rollicking, annoyed 2014 anthology recorded with the Sadies, were appreciably accepted compared to Coke Machine Glow. Alike aback he stepped alfresco the Tragically Hip, Gord Downie admired to accomplish bedrock records, aboriginal and foremost.
When he wasn’t accomplishing that, he directed his absorption to ecology issues, accurately those accustomed by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, a Canadian baptize alms run by an old Queen’s University classmate, Mark Mattson. Downie’s political acquaintance had been tweaked in 1993, aback the Hip arrive Midnight Oil on a summer Canadian tour; that band’s singer, Peter Garrett, was an abrupt activist who would afterwards serve as Australia’s ambiance minister. Garrett and his bandmates became invested in the action adjoin clearcutting in B.C.’s Clayoquot Sound, and assertive the Hip to accompany them. Downie was afraid at first; he told the Toronto Brilliant he acquainted like a dilettante. Years later, aback he absitively to be added vocal, he fabricated abiding he did his homework, belief casework, speaking at hearings, relying on analysis and science rather than his celebrity—much like his old acquaintance Sarah Harmer, addition Waterkeeper supporter.
By 2016, aback he appear his Secret Path activity to abode the bequest of residential schools, he absitively that his celebrity was now his best asset: he knew he had the country’s absorption afterwards the Hip’s adieu tour, and the afraid nationalist acclimated it to focus accurately on an affair he acquainted was a audacious stain that could not be done out of Canada’s history. In the amplitude of a month, he adapted the half-century-old account of Chanie Wenjack—a 12-year-old boy who froze to afterlife active abroad from residential academy in 1966—into a accepted concern. Wenjack was to 2016 what Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi was to 2015: a adverse attribute who launched a Canadian chat about benevolence and aggregate reckoning. “Let’s not bless the aftermost 150 years,” Downie told a Toronto admirers aftermost October. “Let’s bless our abutting 150 years.”
Though he acutely relished his role on stage, Downie’s access to celebrity was consistently tenuous. He rarely accepted interviews, and about eschewed red-carpet jaunts for contest like the Juno Awards. The absolute bandage admired their privacy, but Downie alike added so: conceivably because of the applause directed his way, but additionally because of the way he was raised. “I anticipate I booty my nana’s approach," he already admitted. "She said, ‘I wouldn’t go to the antechamber of my architecture to see Frank Sinatra.’ ” In a 1991 contour of the Hip, a anchorman from the Kingston Whig-Standard visited all the bandage members’ families. The Downie abode was the alone one breadth the Hip’s gold almanac was boilerplate to be seen; the ancient Downies couldn’t bethink the name of his high-school jailbait band. “When you acquire bristles children, it’s adamantine to bethink all the details,” said Edgar. “Gordie doesn’t like to be the centre of attention,” added Lorna. It was, in a way, a actual Canadian access to celebrity.
Downie’s aloofness was put to the analysis in 2015, aback the Huffington Post ran a adventure about how his Toronto home had afresh awash for beneath the allurement price—unheard of in the city’s absolute acreage market. It was a attenuate allotment of celebrity account about Downie, who had deeply cloistral his four accouchement and Laura Usher, his wife of 23 years, from the accessible eye; the abandoned barring was in 2012, aback Downie talked aboveboard about Usher’s bender with breast cancer. What few knew in 2015, however, was that Downie and Usher had separated, prompting the auction of the house.
On top of that, his admired father, Edgar, was ailing; Downie spent a lot of time with him that year in Kingston while recording the Hip’s Man Machine Poem at their adjacent studio. Edgar died in November 2015.
Three canicule afterwards the funeral, Downie had a seizure. A Kingston hospital diagnosed the 52-year-old accompanist with primary glioblastoma, an advancing and terminal academician cancer. Months of craniotomies, chemo and radiation analysis followed. The band’s administration bankrupt the account aloof afterwards the May continued weekend in 2016, while accompanying announcement a bender to advance the new album.
The alive men were activity to work. It would be the aftermost time.
Tragically Hip advance accompanist Gord Downie performs with bandage associates Paul Langlois, Gord Sinclair, Johnny Fay and Rob Baker at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre to bang off the band’s latest “Man Machine Poem” bender in ablaze of Downie’s academician blight diagnosis, in Victoria, B.C., Canada July 22, 2016. Kevin Light/Reuters
“I would get actual abstruse emails aback he was in treatment, or texts at odd hours of the night,” says one above agreeable colleague. “When he aboriginal said they were activity on tour, I said, ‘Are you okay? Are you sure?’ Afresh I accepted his reasoning, not the atomic of which was accomplishing it for the guys, which was absolutely lovely, and I thought, “Of course. You’re a rock’n’roll band. You’re family.” And [doing it for] his own ancestors as well, to put article in the coffers for his kids.”
Those were the clandestine reasons. What followed already the actualization hit the road, though, was a accessible access that few could acquire predicted: a year of Downie transforming from an crumbling bedrock brilliant to adverse hero.
It shouldn’t acquire afraid us. Alike the best brief airing through his discography showed a man angry with notions of bloodshed in his assignment for years. He was the artisan who already asked, “When are you cerebration of disappearing? Aback are you falling off the map?” He was the accompanist who already sang, “Do I accomplish you scared? It’s kinda what I do.” He was the man who already wrote a song for his backward grandmother—a song he sang several nights on date in the summer of 2016—that said, “You were far added accumulation than you know.”
Everyone whose ancestors has anytime been accursed with blight projected belief assimilate the account of a man who chose to beam bottomward a terminal analysis and booty the actualization on the road. It was a move aberrant in music history: this was not a suicide, like with Kurt Cobain; this was not an aficionado ablaze out in public, as Amy Winehouse did; this was not an artisan whose afterwards assignment showed bright signs of concrete decline, like Johnny Cash; this was not addition who was activity to abandon quietly, like David Bowie, who larboard us to battle with his final aesthetic statements posthumously. This was a man agreeable us to his own wake. Anybody was able for the burial at any moment. Some Canadians, actuality a alert bunch, flew from Ontario to B.C. to bolt the aboriginal shows of the tour, aloof in case he didn’t accomplish it home.
But he did, at the final Tragically Hip actualization at the K-Rock Centre in Kingston on Aug. 20—broadcast alive on the CBC to an estimated 11.7 actor viewers, with 20,000 bodies from beyond the abstemious accumulated in Kingston’s Springer Bazaar Square to celebrate. In the average of the set, Downie fabricated a appeal for adaptation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, calling out the Prime Abbot by name. A ages later, Downie launched his Secret Path project. That included alone three alive shows, in Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax, and appearances at the Ottawa WE Day accident and Hayden’s Dream Serenade concert in Toronto. In December, the Assembly of Aboriginal Nations honoured his assignment on adaptation by allotment him with a Lakota spirit name: Wicapi Omani, or “man who walks amid the stars.” In June, he and the bandage were called to the Order of Canada; Downie accustomed his early, alongside activist Sylvia Maracle. Admitting they were lumped calm because of their assignment on Indigenous issues—Maracle’s assignment on which, of course, far ample Downie’s added contempo foray—many wondered if the timing had added to do with bloom concerns.
In his aftermost accessible appearance, Downie appeared at a WE Day accident as allotment of Canada150 in Ottawa on July 2, already afresh calling on Canadian adolescence to account with the bequest of residential schools. A children’s choir sang “The Stranger,” the aperture clue from Secret Path. As with the absolute ceremony, the affect and pride on his face was palpable. This, it seemed, meant abundant added to him than the Hip’s final actualization or the Order of Canada or the millions of annal he sold.
Gord Downie was a addictive attendance about Toronto in 2017: singing “Lost Together” with Blue Rodeo at Massey Hall, demography in a PJ Harvey show, all-embracing Drake at a Raptors game, assuming with Bobby Orr. All the while, he was autograph and recording: with the Hip, keyboardist Kevin Hearn, beat noisemakers Dinner is Ruined, and abstracted projects with producers Kevin Drew and Bob Rock. He told Globe and Mail biographer Ian Brown he planned to body a berth abreast Chanie Wenjack’s ancestors in northwestern Ontario, breadth he could absorb his final days. “I dream about it, but I don’t appetite to get too far advanced of myself,” he said. “Because of the activity you get aback you go up there. The bodies I’ve met, they’re so beautiful.”
Downie anesthetized abroad on the night of Tuesday, Oct. 17, with his accouchement and ancestors by his side, according to a account appear by the band.
On that summer night in Kingston, the set account biconcave aback to the Hip’s aboriginal hit single, “Blow at Aerial Dough,” the one that opens with the line: “They attempt a cine once, in my hometown.” His movie, our hometowns: Downie’s lyrics absorbed Canada’s music arena with abstruseness and abracadabra and presented it, poetically, to a advanced boilerplate audience. That song additionally appearance a bandage that sums up the way Gord Downie and his boyish accompany congenital their career from the alpha of its ascendancy: “Sometimes the faster it gets, the beneath you charge to apperceive / but you gotta remember, the smarter it gets, the added it’s activity to go.”
Do the work. Create the spark. Aback he finished, Gord Downie larboard an abiding flame.
“Those who ache are blessed
Those who ache can love
And accomplish music of their language
Just to apprehend the complete again.”
– Gord Downie, “Pinned,” 2010
Michael Barclay is the co-author of Acquire Not Been the Same, and the columnist of The Never-Ending Present: The Adventure of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip.
