Hip on The Hip

Bourbon blues on the street, loose and complete

Under skies all smoky blue green

I can’t forsake a Dixie dead shake so we danced the sidewalk clean

That’s the opening stanza from New Orleans is Sinking (Up to Here, 1989), simply the greatest song in rock ‘n roll and the spark that ignited my love affair with the band and in particular, the lyrical talents of Gord Downie.

There’s wonderful weirdness, hearts of darkness, clever rhyming and sweet melancholy, often all on the same album. Take the chorus from Boots or Hearts (also from Up to Here):

Fingers and toes, Fingers and toes, 40 things we share. Forty-one if you include the fact that we don’t care

Who else but Downie could get fingers and toes away from barnyard country songs and into rock and make it work?

Downie isn’t afraid to write about Canadiana – rare among Canuck rockers looking to break into the U.S.  market – from Millhaven prison breakouts (38 Years Old) to a favourite Downie topic, hockey: 50 Mission Cap, The Lonely End of the Rink and Fireworks (Phantom Power, 1998).

If there's a goal that everyone remembers; it was back in old seventy two
We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger; and all I remember is sitting beside you

You said you didn't give a fuck about hockey; and I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand and we walked home the long way; you were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr

Downie did take a bit to hone his lyrical chops. The band’s first effort, the self-titled 1987 EP, holds a few treasures best left in the chest, such as the second verse from I’m a Werewolf Baby:

I lose control I just can’t stop; You look so good like a big pork chop

Ripped my pants ripped my shirt; I’m going to eat your mother for dessert

By the time Up to Here was released two years later Downie’s poetic skills were firmly established and his prose continued to mature in the decades that followed.

There’s Twist My Arm (Road Apples, 1991), which contains this ditty:

There she blows Jacques Cousteau, hear her sing so sweet and low;

Lull me overboard, out cold, gathered in and swallowed whole

And On the Verge, where he gets back to the down and dirty tone of the ’87 EP, but pulls it off with more skillful rhyming verse:

We got horse throated huckster's whispered gimmicks
Rubbernecking all the curious cynics
And headlong walkers, one born every minute
Do I plug it in or do I stick it in it?

In Coconut Cream (Trouble at the Henhouse, 1996), Downie invokes the spirit of Dr. Seuss with these lines:

There’s a cannon shooting coconut cream; forty gallons in a steady stream

And it’s wing music to a happy cat; he likes his butterflies slow and fat

Or Freak Turbulence, a song from Music At Work (2000):

You’re older, you’re haunted, you’re ahead of your time

In corners of acres of blocks of straight lines

Blurringly, hourly we cross some great divide

Some heritage moments and some melodious minds

A voice above the engines and the jet stream combined, ‘It’s time sir, it’s time sir, do you have the time?’

Phantom Power (1998) gave us Bobcaygeon, perhaps the band’s most beautiful song and one that instantly transports me a lazy summer night in the Kawarthas where the sky was “dull and hypothetical.”

Could have been the Willie Nelson
Could have been the wine
It was in Bobcaygeon, I saw the constellations
Reveal themselves one star at a time

Then there’s The Hundredth Meridian (Fully Completely, 1992), and this little throwaway line, which turns the trick of being delightful while leaving me a little bit frightful: Left alone to get gigantic; hard, huge and haunted

I know this song is about the prairies, but you remember that guy from 38 Years Old, the one who escaped from Millhaven? This bit of prose makes me glad I’m not in the same cell as him.