No Dress Rehearsal – A film of blood and band

In 1995, Kingston actor Dan Aykroyd of Blues Brothers fame returned to 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s iconic Studio 8H stage to guest on Saturday Night Live, the show he helped popularize 20 years prior as one of its original cast members. When invited by showrunner and fellow Canuck Lorne Michaels, Aykroyd presented one stipulation: that episode’s musical guest had to be the Tragically Hip. And so, on March 25, Aykroyd, donning a memorably oversized Canadian coat of arms on a white T-shirt, introduced the Hip to more than 10 million people tuned in to their television sets. Gord Sinclair, Rob Baker, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois, and Gord Downie had just passed around a joint backstage to quell their nerves. Now a little too stoned, and no less nervous for it, the band performed a recent single, Grace, Too and, without warning, Downie cheekily replaced the opening lyric “He said, ‘I’m fabulously rich’” to “He said, ‘I’m tragically hip’” – thereafter a staple of their live performances.

It was but one of many legendary moments enjoyed by a legendary band before and after that milestone, from when they were grinding away as a local success gigging at Kingston bars to touring Ontario to packing venues across the country, then around the world, and eventually to when they would once again perform live for more than 10 million viewers one last time, during their televised final concert in Kingston in 2016 at what was then still known as the K-Rock Centre. Aired by CBC as A National Celebration, the show was the final stop of a tour that the whole country knew was to be their last following Gord Downie’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

Mike Downie, brother to the Hip’s inimitable late frontman, has successfully mounted an ambitious documentary project, The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, that tells these stories and dozens more that happened throughout the remarkable career of Canada’s most beloved rock band. Having just premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and now streaming on Prime Video, the series spans four hour-long episodes that follow the band’s journey from humble high-school beginnings to their final bow in 2016 and beyond. Downie’s doc soars due to its rare level of detail. Of course, the Hip’s meteoric rise in this country is an inevitably significant chapter of the story, but what makes No Dress Rehearsal special is how every chapter is given its due.

Fans will appreciate how comprehensively the story is told, but other viewers less familiar will be just as compelled to watch it through to the end and leave as Hip experts themselves. More than just a run-of-the-mill music bio, this is a document of an important part of Canadian history.

In Part One: Looking for a Place to Happen, Mike Downie chronicles the earliest days in the teens’ musical careers at Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute (KCVI) (purchased by Queen’s after it closed in 2020) where each member went to high school but were yet to have their fates so closely intertwined. Footage of the surviving members walking through the hallways in the present day is tinged with bittersweet poignancy. Their talent was obvious from the outset but that didn’t prevent Gord Downie from getting ousted from his first band. Meanwhile, close childhood friends Rob Baker and Gord Sinclair played together in Rick and the Rodents. The Hip would later give a nod to Rob and Gord’s early band in the music video for their song Poets, where they pose as “the Rodents” in the basement of the Kingston cat house – an infamous, and Guinness World Record-holding home on Elm Street overrun with hundreds of cats. 

Downie had already stood out to his eventual band members from a show at a school dance where his magnetic presence, unique voice, and wild dance moves suggested something singular. Before they were the Hip, Rob and Gord Downie would join forces in a band called the Filters while attending Queen’s. Later, Gord and Rob formed a new band – that’s when Sinclair, also a student, came back into the fold. Drummer Johnny Fay signed up soon after; Langlois would join a couple years later. Before long, a band resembling the Hip as everyone would soon come to know them played its first show at the Toucan on Princess Street, where they would go on to play regularly. Here Mike Downie cuts between incredible footage of this vintage debut performance with Fay walking through the bar in the present day, the camera following him to the basement that served as their dressing room.

“I actually did some homework down here,” recalls Fay, adding that he once wrote an essay on The Great Gatsby between sets (I wonder what grade he got?). Locals and Queen’s alumni will especially appreciate these nostalgic glimpses of Kingston’s past.

No Dress Rehearsal benefits immensely from having Mike Downie at the helm, in part for the sheer wealth of archival material – a feature film’s typical length simply could not have provided adequate running time – the access, and perhaps most importantly for its familial feel throughout. In a documentary, trust between subjects and the director is paramount. Were someone else behind the camera, the extensive interviews with the surviving band members surely would not have the same intimacy. Their voices shape the documentary and give it authenticity.

The range of other interview subjects is impressive, from actors Will Arnett and Jay Baruchel to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And there’s Aykroyd, too, of course. Bona fide Canadian music aficionado George Stroumboulopoulos provides expert commentary throughout. He points out that the band’s nationwide adoration had little to do with nationalism. While Downie’s lyrics often evoked distinctly Canadian characters, stories, and histories, they were never nationalistic. They were honest. Sometimes they were provocative, even profound, such as with 38 Years Old, which alludes to a prison break from Millhaven Institution and is written from the perspective of an escapee’s younger brother: “He’s 38 years old/Never kissed a girl.” On Now the Struggle Has a Name, Downie confronts Canada’s uneasy grappling with its colonial past: “Now the struggle has a name/We are the same, it hasn’t changed/I still feel the same.” 

In the latter part of his life and career, Gord Downie devoted himself to his Secret Path project, a concept album about Chanie Wenjack, an Anishinaabe boy who died in 1966 after escaping from a residential school. It would be the final release during Downie’s life (several posthumous albums have emerged since). In detailing the final two years of Gord Downie’s life and his determination to draw awareness to the need for truth and reconciliation between Canada and Indigenous Peoples, No Dress Rehearsal evolves into something deeply moving and inspiring.

Made lovingly by family – both blood and band – the series brings into relief just how fresh the loss of Gord Downie and the Hip still is. But it also underlines an artistic legacy of the highest order. It sharpens our appreciation of the music and what it means to several generations of Canadians, and counting. 

No Dress Rehearsal, perhaps, but they nailed it. So, too, does this invaluable series that puts it all into perspective.

Adam Cook is a film critic, curator, and a student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies PhD program at Queen’s, where he teaches in the Film and Media department.

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The Hip’s real story

No Dress Rehearsal received the People’s Choice Documentary Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Doctoral film studies student Adam Cook interviewed director Mike Downie, Artsci'86, and band member Gord Sinclair, Artsci’86, LLD’16, about what it was like to make the docuseries – and the film’s most emotional moment.

Congratulations on the People's Choice Documentary Award at TIFF. Tell us about the premiere.

MIKE DOWNIE: The series premiered on TIFF’s opening day. We screened the whole thing that afternoon and four hours later you come out into the sunshine on King Street with the festival in full swing and this live event with Choir!Choir!Choir! leading thousands of people in the street singing Ahead By a Century and Grace, Too – it was mind-blowing.

GORD SINCLAIR: Overwhelming, just an incredible experience, I got to say.

The series has such a great balance of new and archival footage. What was it like going through decades of material to put it together?

MD: You can only go as far as the archive will take you in many ways. We had stuff coming from people who had something on their shelves, blew the dust off, and sent it to us. I was very grateful. Our amazing team created a robust and searchable database with all the materials which allowed us to really pull the gems out of there. You can't just choose your favourites. You try to include what is going to contribute to the whole. It was a great challenge.

As the filmmaker, was your job made easier or more difficult by the fact that you are so connected to your subject?

MD: Mostly easier but I’d get stuck on things and needed other people. Sometimes it was dropping a story, sometimes it was someone saying, “No, I don't think we need to go into that.” You can imagine some of that would be emotional because of the connections and the people that I wanted to be in there. But then you got a team saying, “well, we're serving the story.” We had a question that we were trying to answer: “Why?” Why did this band mean so much to so many? And why did so many Canadians see something of themselves in that group standing up on the stage?

There’s a great moment where both George Stroumboulopoulos and Jay Baruchel each mention how the music was devoid of nationalism. I think this is such an important point. People mention The Hip and Canadiana in the same breath but do you think that the honesty – and even ambivalence – in the music is part of why it resonates with so many people across the country?

GS: I think so. Canadians are very poor compared to our American cousins when it comes to celebrating our culture. We learned early on that this is a broad country from coast to coast. We can't pretend to know each other as a nation unless we understand the perspective from people from the North, from Newfoundland, Vancouver Island, the Prairies, and everywhere in between. Being from a small town we could relate to what it's like to be a teenager or young adult in a town that doesn't have other towns closer than six hours away. When an artist comes to a town like that to play, it means something. We soaked that up as we crisscrossed Canada. In the States, if a baseball player had hit a grand slam home run to winning the World Series in the late ’50s then disappeared that summer, there would be a Disney movie made about it. We don’t do that. And we thought maybe someone should. Not to wave the flag but to tell human stories. That's what we tried to do our whole career.

MD: Gord read a lot of Canadian authors. He had a special fascination with smaller stories. A lot of those songs tell those. It wasn’t cultural medicine that was meant to be good for you. These are gripping and interesting stories. I like that they were telling these stories in a confident way without a clear objective other than to tell their own stories – our own stories.

I’m sure a lot of filmmakers would have loved to make a documentary about the Hip. But having Mike at the helm gives it a uniquely familial feel. How did that affect working on the project?

GS: It was really great. When the Downie family moved in to Kingston – which is covered in the doc – Gord and Paul were in Grade 11 and they became immediately best friends. Mike was in grade 13 with Rob and I so we got to know each other really well. Making the doc, Mike was really sensitive to our upbringing and our friendships. He knew it intimately. A documentarian without that connectivity would probably do a birds-eye-view thing, an objective look at the group, a puff piece. Mike was down there in the weeds with us since we were in high school and so he knows what the weeds look like, and he knows where the real story is, you know?

In addition to telling the band’s story, No Dress Rehearsal also documents a very different period in Kingston, and especially its music scene. Does the doc jog any special memories?

GS: I'm proud to say I am and have always been a Kingstonian. Like most young men, I couldn't wait to scrape the dust of Kingston off my boots. But I have traveled the world for a living and I always come home to Kingston. What I'm most proud of is the fact that you can still see live music every night of the week here which is becoming a rarer and rarer thing. It was incredible back in the day when a touring act would come through to the Lakeview Manor or the Prince George Hotel. We lost X-Ray (Michael) MacRae earlier this year who booked for Dollar Bill's here, now Tir Nan Og, and went on to run the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto. He would bring fantastic artists and would let Rob and I sneak in back when our skulls were still soft. I get goosebumps just thinking about it like that. It speaks to the power of live music. Kingston's a great little secret and it was a great place to grow up. It continues to be a great place to live.

Do you have a favorite moment in No Dress Rehersal? Maybe something that captured the essence of everything?

GS: For me it's among the most emotional moments of the movie. Mike was able to find this big spread on the group in the Kingston Standard from very early on in our career. There’s a photograph of all our parents with each other, the ten of them without whom we would never have met or made it without their unconditional support and love. Very sadly, we’re down to three out of that ten. It's a reminder that life is about love and loss. You cannot experience one without the other. But that's what art helps you cope with. It’s a different way of expressing love and different way of expressing loss. That little picture of all our moms and dads…by far the heaviest moment … I don't think you'd find a guy in the band that would give you a different answer.

Aside from his incredible musical legacy, Gord put so much love and energy into The Secret Path project and the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund toward the end of his life. Can you talk about the significance of that part of the story?

MD: It gave him so much purpose. When he completed the final tour, which was very much in question, but of course he did it. It’s pretty hard to wrap your head around. He already had two brain surgeries and radiation treatments. To do all that and then launch himself into Secret Path … that was Gord. We had always planned that it would come out on the 50th anniversary of Chanie Wenjack’s death. We saw the initial announcement was top news across the country and I thought we needed to create something to capture the energy of that moment that could last. So we co-founded the foundation with the Chanie Wenjack family. It was pulled together in the month between our trip up to Ogoki Post to meet with the family and Secret Path’s release in October. That fund is now the largest reconciliation fund in the country for the type of work that we're doing. We're in 7,000 schools. There are charter members of the legacy school program, and we have 100 legacy spaces in corporations and institutions across the country where they've set aside physical space to create a legacy space with a beautiful print that tells the story of Chanie and Gord so they can share it. He was gone a year after we started. It's been a great thing for me, our family, and to keep Gord's memory alive and the legacy of not just what he did but what he believed in, that this could be a good country but we have some things to deal with.

Let me say this: the band have this same belief and it’s there from the start of their career. It started in Kingston. Their first big show they did at Fort Henry they made $0 and they never took a dime out of Kingston after they got of the bar circuit. They threw their weight into things  such as the Camp Trillium for children affected by cancer. They’ve always cared. The best thing you can do is to look around and admit that fortune has shined on you and you can spread some of that good fortune around.

Mike, the last time you were interviewed by the Alumni Review, you talked about Gord and his many notebooks, in the context of him being an incredible listener and observer. What do you think he would have written in his notebook about your film?

MD: He might have jotted down “too much me”. I don't know. We got to work together a lot. We made music videos together. We worked closely towards the end. I hope that he would write something in there about working together with his brother and trying to make something special. Gord was a tough one to read. But I think he'd appreciate this.

You are both Queen’s alumni. Do you have a favourite Queen’s memory?

GS: I remember distinctly when we first started playing. We would work once a month at the Lakeview. It was a strip club by day and rock and roll bar by night. We would play at Alfie’s then go to the Lakeview and the students would follow us. We were a campus band. They weren't going to go see strippers during the day, but they'd go see rock and roll at night. It speaks to the power of music and that ability to create its own community within a community. You would look at some great big biker fella across the room and he's bopping his head to the same band that you're seeing, and it's like, hey, we have more in common than I thought, you know?

It reminds me of those days at Queen's where you could see a band on a Tuesday night at Clark Hall. It’s never been an easy way to make a buck, it’s even harder now, yet people still do it. You write and sing songs because you have to. You’re inspired by your own life and by fellow musicians. And that's still alive and well in Kingston. I think that has a lot to do with students wandering downtown and seeing someone up there with a guitar and thinking “maybe I should try that some night”. Kingston is a great place for that. Queen’s is a great incubator.

The CFRC is still there too … I was a late night DJ. I could spin whatever songs I wanted. And my five friends would listen to them. That’s a real cool thing. And something that we need to develop.

MD: Queen’s changed my future. I met my wife at the end of my time there. I also stepped into the adult world and it just changed everything. I think that happens for a lot of people. Kingston and Queen’s– it’s such a nurturing place to develop. Four of my five kids have gone to Queen’s and those attributes are still really alive and well.

One specific memory comes to mind: I used to have this bike that was my best friend's mom's bike and she gave it to me. It was a classic woman's bike with a wicker basket on the front of it. I used to ride through campus on my way to class and it just made me feel so great, cruising through that beautiful campus. I don't think I was trying to be anything. I just really loved riding through Queens and people would say hi or whatever as I rode by … I'm glad you took me there because I have not thought about that in 30 years.