The 40th anniversary of the Tragically Hip is a milestone that’s been marked in a number of special ways. There’s the new documentary, No Dress Rehearsal, helmed by Canadian filmmaker Mike Downie (brother of the band’s late frontman, Gord Downie), which is available now on streaming at Amazon Prime. The group’s history is also comprehensively collected in a new book, This is Our Life, which presents the band’s story in 130,000 words, drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with the individual members.
Musically, a new box set for their 1989 debut, Up to Here, presents the album, freshly remastered, alongside a wealth of additional bonus material. The outtakes, demos and live recordings help to present a larger view of the original sessions for Up to Here and it’s an incredibly engaging journey.
During a recent conversation for The Record Player podcast, guitarist Rob Baker joined Matt Wardlaw to look back at the band’s history. Here are some excerpts from that conversation below. You can hear the complete interview wherever you get your podcasts.
I’ve been watching the new documentary. How did Dan Akyroyd come into the world of the Hip?
Well, he’s kind of a Kingston guy. He lives on a little lake just north of Kingston, like 20 minutes from where I live. I live right downtown, and he’s 20 minutes north. And somewhere along the way, we crossed paths. We had a lot of friends in common. I guess there was a we used to play a lot of biker bars in Kingston. One of the guys who was sort of a center of the biker community, but no longer affiliated, was this friend of ours, Wally, and at the beginning of the Saturday Night Live thing, he says “From Kingston, Ontario, home of Walter Frank High and the Tragically Hip.” Wally High was this biker dude, and Dan’s a bit of a biker, right? He rides with bikers. He’s a Harley guy and Wally was the go-between for us and Dan, I think. He was a great guy.
Anyways, somewhere along the way, we all got to know Dan a bit, but Johnny [Fay] and and Dan became really fast friends. They were running buddies for a lot of years, and they still stay in pretty close touch. Dan records his House of Blues…I don’t know if he’s still doing it, I don’t think he is, but he was doing his House of Blues radio show out of Johnny’s [recording studio]. Johnny bought an old decommissioned bank. It had been robbed too many times, and so they decommissioned it. But it’s all these thick walls and vaults, and you can go into the vault, close the door, which doesn’t lock anymore, and the sound in there is incredible. So then you don’t have any extraneous noise. So as a recording booth, it’s incredible. So that’s where Dan [recorded] his show from.
Non-traditional recording spaces like that are great, right?
Yeah, why not? We did two records at [Daniel] Lanois’ studio in New Orleans, and it’s this big, massive mansion, you know. It’s ridiculous, and [has] high ceilings. We recorded and everything sounded amazing. Don Smith got it back to the studio, like a proper mix studio, to do it. And he was like, “Oh my God, it sounds completely different!” Because he was used to listening to it, you know, with no separation. There’s not a separate control room. So he was hearing everything with all this natural reverb the whole time. And he gets back into a mixing studio, and there’s no reverb on everything! [Laughs] So he had to rebuild that. But yeah, no, I love the non-traditional spaces. The Bathouse [The Hip’s recording studio], it was a stagecoach stop on the way to between Kingston and Toronto when Toronto was still called York, and Kingston was the capital of Canada. It was a place where people would stop and spend the night and park their horses and feed them and then carry on the next day. So it’s all converted now into, it’s really just a house, but [with] great big rooms and [it’s] perfect for a band to set up and rehearse in. And if you’re rehearsing and it sounds good, you throw the mics up.
I loved hearing you mention biker bars. That makes me think of a song like “Highway Girl.” It seems like the storytelling element has always been there with you guys, but it’s a really interesting transition, isn’t it, going from the band that does songs like that to later things like “Gift Shop.”
Yeah, I suppose it is. When we came up, Kingston’s a funny little town. I think to some extent, Hamilton is another town like that, and I’m sure there are lots all over North America, but Kingston had, when we were coming up, there were 12 prisons here, so all the prisoners’ families would congregate. It’s a geographical hub point. So if you’re dealing speed or hookers, or whatever it is you’re dealing, it’s between Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Syracuse, and it’s right where the Great Lakes end, and the river crossing is very small. So [it’s a] great smuggling point, great for getting drugs back and forth across the border and whatever else. So there’s this whole seedy side to Kingston. There are bikers, there’s mafia, there’s this stuff going on.
And at the same time, it’s a very white collar town, health insurance, a Canadian version of an Ivy League university. So for us, it was about appealing to all of these people, playing biker bars and then the next day or the same night playing a frat party, right? We played Sweet 16 parties. We’d play to everyone. It doesn’t matter [what the setting was], they were all audiences to us. Sometimes you had to treat them a little differently. But that’s where we started, and then it was just a matter of trying not to repeat what we’d done musically, which is a challenge. You know, you have your set of influences that you bring to it, and sometimes you have to push your own comfort zone, find new ways to turn yourself on or to turn on your mates and but that was the objective always.
What’s it been like for you going back to the Up to Here album with this new box set?
Well, I think we always knew at some point that this record would get remastered, reissued, and we knew that there was lots of good material. Like, we recorded other songs that didn’t make the final cut, and not for a reason of quality. It was reason of sequencing and old songs get pushed off by new songs because you’re more charged up about the new songs. Was it right to have “38 Years Old” push “Get Back Again” off the record? I don’t know, but either way, one of them would have sat on a shelf for 30 years and then [it would] see the light of day. So in the end, I don’t think it matters. For us, I think we all thought that it was a really strong record, that there aren’t bum tracks on it and that it would see the light of day again. It was just a matter of amassing the stuff, getting it all under one roof, and knowing when the right time was [to release it]. 35 years seemed as good a time as any. We can still remember the stories at this point. Five years down the road, there’s no guarantee.
It’s interesting, reading some interviews from the past few years, it just seems like getting your arms collectively around the archives would have been a lot. Specifically, finding out, okay, there was the Universal fire. Did we lose everything? Okay, we didn’t lose everything. There’s stuff at Iron Mountain. Just using that as an example, you get stuff from Iron Mountain and you have tape boxes that are marked, but they’re not precisely marked. It seems like the whole process has been a hell of an archaeological dig.
Yeah, even even getting the stuff out of Iron Mountain, they would say, “Well, which box do you want pulled?” We’d give them a box and pull the box and it would have like 10 Hip tapes and then four or five tapes by two or three other bands in it. It was like, “Come on, we’ve got to do a lot better than this.” And the tapes that say “Hip,” they aren’t marked. We don’t know what’s on them. We got Shawn Marino, who is [an important executive] at Universal and he really stepped up. I think maybe Jake [Gold, the manager of the band] had to put the boots to him a little bit. But he really did step up and between Shawn and Johnny, they spent a lot of time in the studio transferring two inch tapes, going through stuff and finding [material]. They had a list of what we were looking for, but Don Smith, it was a different time. [Baker chuckles]
Don Smith was used to working with the [Traveling] Wilburys and Keith Richards, so he runs two inch tape. at the end of the record, you’ve got like 40 rolls, or 80 rolls of two inch tape, in the case of Road Apples. Having to go through all of that to try and find stuff when it’s not marked properly [was a big job]. “Opiated” was marked “Opie Ate It,” right?” [Laughs] That, we could figure out. Most of the stuff wasn’t even marked. So yeah, Johnny really did yeoman’s work on that. He put in a lot of time digging through the vaults and getting pissy with the right people and making sure everything was getting transferred in the right way. And we brought our old guy, Mark Vreeken, back into the fold. He’s a super pro, and he’s been instrumental in [addressing] all of the sound quality issues as well.
I like that you had at least a working list of things you were looking for. Some bands don’t even know that much. Generally there’s one guy in the band who knows the history and remembers things like that, but sometimes there’s not.
Yeah, and I think in for a lot of the records, that would be true. It might be one person who remembered, or nobody. In the case of that album in particular, I think we all had pretty strong memories. You know, it was our first album. It was a big experience to go down to Memphis [to record]. Those memories come flooding back in a big way. When I think about, you know, recording “38 Years Old,” or “Boots or Hearts” or whatever song it was, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I remember which day that was, where I was, what time of day it was, what I was wearing.” That all that stuff comes back. How many beers I’d had, whether the dummy dust was out or not, all of that stuff. So yeah, it comes back. But Johnny, in particular, Johnny has great big ears when it comes to this stuff.
And I knew the extra songs we had done, although I didn’t know we had done “Rain, Hearts and Fires” down there. That was a that was a surprise to me. I knew we had three good outtakes and, but that was a surprise fourth [one]. And we talked about other versions of songs. You know, there had to be a good alternate “I’ll Believe in You (Or I’ll Be Leaving You Tonight)” and various other things. The Chris Wardman tapes, finding [those] was a challenge, but that was a good one too. So, yeah, Johnny has the ears for it, knowing if it’s a good take, if there are sonic problems, you know, it’s a little crisp in this area or a little dull in there that area, he’s good for that. I’m not.
I love the 1988 demos on this box set. What’s the context behind those? That’s one of the other things that’s not normal. You don’t always have demos that are such high quality and not just a cassette that someone had in a box.
Yeah, well, it depends which demos you’re talking about. You know, if we’re talking about “Rain, Hearts and Fires,” and “She’s Got What it Takes,” those songs, we were actually cutting them. We went into Memphis, we got down there with 17 songs, and cut two right away. Don Smith said [something like], “These two are not up to snuff. Let’s concentrate on these 15.” That kind of set the template for how we worked on every record after that with the idea that you want to edit, you want to get 15 great songs and then cut it to 11. Edit until it really hurts, you know. And if you’re leaving great material on the cutting room floor, then you’ve got a great record. And that’s how we always felt about it in the end, as we got more involved and trusted our producers less.
We couldn’t agree on which songs to cut, and our songs started going to 12 songs, 13 songs. I think we may have had one with 14 songs, and that doesn’t do an album any good. All of those albums would have benefited from more editing, getting it down to 11 songs, which is a good number, but So those songs weren’t demos. They were cut for the record. The Chris Wardman stuff, on the other hand, we demoed for Capitol Records for about eight months, and they would say, “Now we’ve got your studio time. Go in, give us five songs.” And we go in, we work up five songs with them, sometimes with Kenny Greer from Red Rider, other times Don Wershba was involved.
We’d hand off the demos that we recorded, and they’d say, “We really like these two. Forget the other three. Go back in and give us five more.” And it went on for eight months. At the end of eight months, they were non-committal, because the Canadian guys were charged up about it, but they couldn’t get the American [record label] guys on on board. Then, Bruce Dickinson showed up in Toronto and saw us perform one song at Massey Hall and turned to our manager and said, “I want to sign the band.” And they set up a gig for us the next night at the Horseshoe Tavern and we played. After the gig at the horseshoe, he offered us a deal [on MCA Records].
That’s the first part of our conversation with Rob. You can find the whole thing here on The Record Player podcast. Big thanks to Rob for taking time to talk about Up to Here and so many other subjects!
You can order the new Up to Here box set directly from the band and it’s also available wherever you get your music, including digital streaming.
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