Between a Rock and a Hip place
Gord Downie talks about making ‘great Canadian rock album’ with big-name producer
John Kendle

Gord Downie is sitting in a hotel lounge, talking about having seen Trailer Park Boys: The Movie at a Winnipeg cinema the previous evening.

Because The Tragically Hip’s frontman has a cameo in the film, playing a cop alongside Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, he’d already attended the movie’s Toronto premiere. But he went again “just to watch it.”

“It was fun,” he reports. “The crowd laughed all the way through and people were lined up outside for the next show, which is always a good sign.”

Told that the film was No. 1 at the Canadian box office in its opening weekend — the first time a domestic release has achieved such a lofty height — Downie is enthused.

“It makes total sense, ” he says. “I remember (former Alliance Atlantis exec) Robert Lantos saying about Men With Brooms a few years ago, ‘If it can’t be done with this movie, it can’t be done.’

“He was talking about exporting, à la The Full Monty, to the world, and I was skeptical because I’d seen Men With Brooms before it came out.

“The thing about Trailer Park Boys is it doesn’t actually aspire to any of those things, yet it just achieves on many levels,” Downie says. “(Writer/director Mike) Clattenburg’s a buddy of mine but I really do think he’s like Chekhov.

“There’s a scene where Ricky uses a cut-out Coke bottle as his cup. Nothing’s going on as he’s doing it — it’s all happening while he’s talking about something else — and he scoops up some rainwater that’s gathered in a dent in his car and then he adds some Kool-Aid powder.

“I mean, that’s it — it’s just poetry.”

Downie’s appreciative of that kind of detail. As a songwriter, he’s been a keen observer of life’s comedy of manners for years. After nearly two decades of public scrutiny and stardom, he knows what it’s like to hit No.1 in Canada and to be labelled as somehow ‘quintessentially Canadian’ for a vision that’s distinctly his — so he’s happy to see his friends get a seat at the same table.

Downie, 42, is in Winnipeg on this October morning doing something he’s never done before — a cross-country promotional tour for The Hip’s new album, World Container. It’s Friday, the end of a long week of talking about himself, but Downie looks happy. The album has been well received, and Downie hasn’t had to defend so much as explain his band’s decision to work with Bob Rock, the Canadian über-producer who helped create best-selling rock albums by the likes of Cher, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, The Cult, Metallica and Mötley Crüe.

When The Hip said in 2005 that Rock would produce the band’s next album, more than a few eyebrows were raised. Some Metallica fans still blame Rock for watering down their favourite group — for rounding off the rough edges and making Metallica an FM radio monster — and many people wondered if The Hip would ‘get Rocked’ in the same way.

Certainly there are some new things to behold on World Container. There’s keyboard balladry in the form of the title track and a song called Pretend, and lilting Caribbean and Eastern melodies can be discerned in The Lonely End of the Rink and In View (the album’s first single). Downie himself steps out and lyrically addresses the subject of love and romance — what he calls “the elephant in the room” — more directly than before.

Downie says he and bandmates Rob Baker (guitar), Johnny Fay (drums), Paul Langlois (guitar) and Gord Sinclair (bass) were well aware what the name ‘Bob Rock’ might mean to some. He also says the group had wanted to work with Rock in 2001, on In Violet Light. The producer was busy with Our Lady Peace’s Gravity, so The Hip moved on to Hugh Padgham.

This time around the initial suggestion was made by Rock’s manager, Canadian music-biz legend Bruce Allen, who, funnily enough, has said in the past that he isn’t The Hip’s biggest fan.

“It went down that Bruce suggested it to Bob, and Bob wanted to meet me. That’s the way he works,” Downie recalls.

“So it was, ‘Let’s talk on the phone,’ then ‘Let’s meet.’

“I booked a flight and flew out to see him in Maui. Then it was, ‘Let’s meet the guys.’ And then it was, ‘Let’s meet in Vancouver and cut a couple of tracks.’ And then it was, ‘Let’s meet in Toronto.’

“By then we were doing an album, but it took a while longer than we expected, as life’s circumstances intervened.”

What struck Downie most about Rock — who is quite possibly one of the world’s two or three most-famous record producers — was the man’s unadorned enthusiasm for what he does.

“I think people hear ‘Bob Rock’ and don’t really look beyond it. He’s really a likable, genuine, hardworking guy who also happens to be an artist,” Downie says. “He’s got a painter’s soul. He’s got an excitement and an enthusiasm that I’ve never seen before.”

In the studio, Rock, 52, was neither a taskmaster nor a dictator, Downie says.

“(He was always) asking us to consider things, never pushing,” the frontman recalls. “He was always prefacing himself with something self-effacing that denoted unhingedness — ‘Call me crazy but…’ or ‘I might be insane but…’ — and he would say these things whenever something occurred to him that he heard or wanted to hear.”

He adds: “I know he was impressed by the band’s agility and interest and experience to be able to conjure up what he needed, pretty much spur of the moment and I think, for a producer like that, that’s good times.”

At one point in our conversation, Downie likens Rock’s passion as akin to that of a 16-year-old music fan running out to buy the latest albums.

“That’s still there in him,” Downie says. “He can tell you exactly when he bought a certain record and what he was doing at the time, and he will tell you stories about how his whole musical life has affected him, and that’s infectious.

“I think what he does is channel all that stuff back into your music — the fandom and the love of music. He reminds you of your part in a long line of musicians and how lucky and great this is. All of that is very healthy, and Bob’s a very healthy guy.”

Downie also believes the experience of recording with Rock led the five members of the Kingston-based group — who have known each other for what seems like forever — to become even closer.

“Everything was leading us to be more family oriented,” he says. “Everyone become sort of more comfortable in whatever their role happens to be, and it all became more fun.

“This is rock ’n’ roll. It’s about music, about fun, about celebrating our relationship with and to each other. I was really proud of the band — I mean, the four guys, not so much myself — because I could tell they wanted to celebrate it.”

In the media release that accompanied World Container, Rock says he wanted to try to make ‘the Great Canadian Rock Album’ with The Hip.

Downie has always shied away from these sorts of statements, so I ask him how he reacts when Rock says this kind of thing.

“I say ‘fuck yeah,’” the singer says, smiling broadly. “He can say something like that — I can’t. But I also didn’t ask him to clarify that or elaborate on it. As far as I can guess, I think he’s probably alluding to the fact we all have that ‘great Canadian something’ in us that we’re all in the midst of trying to do or thinking about.”