I Took Mushrooms and Experienced Peak Canadiana at a Tragically Hip Concert

All photos courtesy of Julien Bowry

If you’re Canadian, The Tragically Hip are like the air above your head: they’re always around, but you don’t necessarily feel their presence until it becomes a force you can’t ignore. Despite the fact that all of my American compatriots went “who?” when I said I was seeing the Tragically Hip in concert, my Canadian friends expelled excitement at the idea of seeing “The Hip.” After all, this is a band that managed to amass nine #1 albums in Canada and win 14 Junos over the course of their storied career, not to mention playing Saturday Night Live and performing for the first show ever held at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre in February of 1999. The Kingston, Ontario, group is so damn Canadian they got signed to a record deal after playing at the legendary The Horseshoe Tavern, and have gone on to make songs for the purpose of bringing awareness to fresh water. If they were any more Canadian, they would star in a movie about curling—which they did, when they played themselves on Men With Brooms.

But despite their maple-soaked legacy, my personal connection to the band is far removed from what most Canadians experienced. I was born the year after their debut album Up To Here came out, and didn’t immigrate to Toronto until 1994, by which time The Tragically Hip had already put out three more albums. When I did get into the Canadian music scene, I gravitated more to the experimental folk/rap hybrid of the Barenaked Ladies than I did to the Tragically Hip, who I always saw as more of a late analog to The Eagles with their blend of country and classic rock. But I decided to catch up by diving in with both feet and attending my first Tragically Hip show at the Air Canada Centre, almost 16 years to the day after they played the venue’s inaugural show. I wanted to see why this band had managed to become so immensely popular in Canada, so I decided to go and treat the concert like a sociology experiment where I’d look at not just the group, but the people who showed up to see them.

I then decided to take mushrooms, because I don’t take half steps with my experiments.

The crowd struck me as overwhelmingly white and plain—a mix of men and women, either in their late 30s or early 60s, all who wouldn’t appear out of place if they had attended the Maple Leafs game the night before in the same venue. It was the type of crowd to loudly remark that “he fucking nailed it” after every time frontman Gordon Downie did something of note, which was often. I showed up alone, grabbed my seat, and discreetly ate the contents of my baggie. Two rows up, I saw an old man who looked like Larry David sneak a hit of a joint, and felt a tinge of relatability with the aged music fan. But then he took a selfie with the stage in the background on his Blackberry, and the tinge was gone. The lights dimmed in the venue and blue spotlights lit the stage as The Tragically Hip came out to the sound of 16,000 people howling with excitement.

For someone who is 51 years old, Gordon Downie can still perform. He wasn’t exactly running around the stage, likely due to the leather pants he chose to wear, but the man knows how to play to the crowd. One minute he’s whipping the mic cord like a bullwhip, the next he’s doing that tiptoe shuffle that Prince does at the end of Purple Rain. I wasn’t as impressed with Downie’s showmanship as I was with the crowd’s reaction to it—every time I looked behind me, throngs of people were shouting the words back to Downie. To get an idea of the level of fandom in attendance, at one point I saw three regular balloons bounce lazily in front of my eyes—balloons that someone had clearly brought from home for the sole purpose of unleashing them into the crowd to improve the experience of seeing The Tragically Hip.

At one point, curtains fell around the stage to give Downie enough time to put on a white cowboy hat. Around this time, the colours started to bleed together and I became hyper-aware of the vapour trails floating around the people in the room. The mushrooms were beginning to kick in just in time for me to enjoy the second act. Anyone who has taken mushrooms would probably advise you not to do them alone or in a large crowd of strangers, and they would be correct 99% of the time. But the exception to that rule turns out to be seeing The Tragically Hip in concert.

The positive energy in the arena became almost palpable and, I couldn’t help but feel happy. Though I’ve never actively sought out a song by the band, memories came to me of hearing these hits leak out of suburban garages where I grew up. Their music is the perfect soundtrack for communal activities: meant to be listened to with friends on a beach, or in a car, or in a stadium with friendly drunk people who will probably be hungover for their middle management job tomorrow. More than one person high-fived me at the end of a song, and the appeal of the cult of The Hip became crystal clear. This was peak Canadiana. I left before the encore to avoid the crowds, walking through the exit with a smile spread across my face.

In a world where the biggest Canadian acts are measured on their ability to go viral, it’s slightly surprising to see that even The Tragically Hip’s two most popular YouTube videos have less than three million views combined. The group never managed to get huge in America, but their influence can’t be ignored. They haven’t released an album in three years, but still managed to pack the Air Canada Centre on one of the coldest nights of the year. Canadian acts often worry about “crossing over,” but if they went to a single show put on by The Tragically Hip and looked around at the crowd, they might see that there’s an abundance of fans to be gained at home.

Slava Pastuk still can’t name a single Tragically Hip song – @SlavaP