Roll on Gord
“Cold wind blowing over your private parts.”
Are you hot when this breeze blows? Is it a welcomed, soothing respite from sweaty balls and sticky legs? Or, are you already chilled, and your most tender, fragile parts feel that much icier?
It’s an ambiguous line, but it is both startling and illuminating. According to Margaret Atwood, diction that “startles and illuminates” is a crucial aspect of poetry. And the writing of Gord Downie and the music of his band, The Hip, certainly do both.
I was ten years old when Fully Completely came out, and I still remember the startling cover image. Breasts, legs, arms, faces, all seemingly crammed into small boxes, and pressed against an unseen glass – fuzzy, distorted, yet evocative. It was risqué enough for me to feel like I was seeing something taboo.
The songs were told from dark perspectives (“everrrry day, I’m dumpin the bodies”), they taught me about history and made me feel Canadian in a simple way that I understood (“the last goal he ever scored, won the Leafs the Cup…I stole this from a hockey card”). My dad was a big Leafs fan after all, and I did collect hockey cards (Upper Deck, big ups!).
2 years later, Day For Night resonated even more, as I’d developed into adolescence. “Nautical Disaster” will forever pump blood through my veins – “anyway, SUSan, if you like, a con – VER – sation” and “FIVE hundred more were thrashing MADLY.” The energy of Gord’s impassioned delivery is palpable. Yet, the speaker details a terrible accident - a narrative he conflates with the dissolution of his relationship with Susan. How did he make a 12 year old boy interested in this?
Years passed, musical tastes ebbed and flowed, and much later in life I returned to Gord. I’m an English teacher and I love poetry, and I came to understand and appreciate Gord as a poet. I read Coke Machine Glow, and I was lucky enough to see him perform as part of an event to raise money for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. He came on stage with Kevin Drew, who played the piano, and sang, “it’s not a coat, it’s a WINND breaker.” His voice filled the Opera House with electricity. Anticipation.
Around the same time, I somehow came across youtube videos of The Hip's 1993 tour documentary. And the fact that I've never seen them live was less a regret than something to be remedied ASAP.
So now we know he has terminal brain cancer and The Hip’s going on a final cross Canada tour. I heard the news this past week on the way to work. Immediately I felt the pangs of another lost artist. Bowie, Prince, and now, Gord.
I flipped through my stupidly large CD book, putting my life and driving record at risk, as I careened down the highway. Then I popped Day for Night in.
When I was 17, I remember having an analytical conversation with a good buddy about what this means: “...Defanged destroyer limps into the bay. Down at the beach, it's attracting quite a crowd, as kids wade through blood out to it to play.” We couldn’t make heads or tails of it then, but it was memorable enough to startle us, and seemed to illuminate something.
That same summer, I was moved by the narrative Gord presents in “Fireworks,” when he meets a girl who tells him she doesn’t “give a fuck about hockey” and he comments that “he’d never heard someone say that before.” Later he describes fireworks as “temporary towers.” Again – illuminating, in this case literally, and startling: "fireworks, emulating heaven."
“Ahead by a Century” is the song that spoke to me even in the midst of my most fervent period of hip hop worship. And I wasn’t the only one, as K-Os references the song by title in "Crabbuckit," identifying himself as an “emcee tragically hip, ahead by a century.”
It’s hard to quantify the impact that Gord has had on Canadian culture, as he’s been named Canada’s greatest poet (rough paraphrase) in the thank yous at the end of one of Joseph Boyden’s books, and people across the country hold his music close to their hearts.
This past summer I was lucky enough to spend some time at a small camp on the banks of the Onakawana River, close to Moosonee, in Northern Ontario. I was there with another teacher and a small group of students. We’d ended up there through my colleague's connection to Joseph Boyden, whose friends run the camp. Its mission statement is to connect Indigenous children back to the land and traditional knowledge, but it’s also a place designed to bring Native and non-Native children together, so both parties can gain clearer understandings of one another.
Our host and guide at the camp, who is the living inspiration for the protagonist of Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, told us lovingly about his friend, Gord, who’d been up there for a winter hunting trip, alongside Boyden.
He laughed that Gord bloodied his nose from a shotgun's recoil out on a moose hunt.
I pictured Gord out there in the snow, blood running down his face, smiling through it all.
Here's my poetic tribute:
Gord lets it roll…
Cold wind blowing over your private parts.
Exoneration that can only come
From intellectual penetration, perhaps
Predicated upon pacifism,
But only in the area of pond hockey.
What?
Conduits of cold winter freeze my eyelids
Seeing is particulated into finite bits
Shellacked crumbs caught in sticky remnants
At the glass bottom
Nearly transparent.
Nearly transcendent, but
Stuck on the thought –
Marooned on a stool,
Awaiting the next phrase
That will raise me
To what awaits.
