For those of you who are faithful readers of this blog, you will be aware that I am a Monday-to-Friday blogger only. I reserve my weekend time for my family. However, while I may not publish new content on the weekend, I still attend to blog matters on the weekend when time allows in order to reply to comments that may have arrived, to engage in site maintenance and/or to work on my writing schedule for the upcoming week. Not surprisingly, my days with highest audience engagement tend to happen during the week. On the weekend, traffic usually drops by half. I don’t tend to worry about that sort of thing. It is how the blogging game goes. If you publish new content, chances are greater that audiences will come. Take time off and audiences will drift away to other sites. Since my site isn’t monetized, I am not losing any money by not posting on the weekends. Instead, I am enriched by having extra time with the ones that I love most while they are home from work and school.
Each post I publish usually generates between 80-100 page views and visitors, which may not be big numbers for some sites, but it is good for me. For the most part, the “numbers” as they relate to my small website are more a vanity thing than anything else. They don’t count for anything much in reality, but just the same, it is always cool when they crest over a nice round number such as 100. So, imagine my surprise when I checked my WordPress account this weekend, only to discover that I had received well over 100 page views and visitors on a day that I hadn’t even published! The last time something out of the ordinary happened to my site was the day that Myles Goodwin, the former lead singer of Canadian rock band April Wine, passed away. Someone in the official April Wine fan club was using Google to find stories about the band and came across a post that I had written about April Wine years earlier. That person thought that I had done a good job telling the band’s story and shared my post on the official April Wine Facebook page. From there, over 400 people read that post in one day! I received lots of nice comments and set a personal record for daily page views and visitors. The beauty of that was that I didn’t even have to do anything. My post was just out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed. Because it was there, people who needed to find it did, and the event took on an energy all on its own. Well, the same sort of thing happened again this weekend, except it wasn’t a death that drew people to my work. Instead, it was, of all things, a PBS pledge drive.
The closest large American city that I live near is Buffalo, New York. My hometown rests on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Places like Buffalo and Rochester, New York, sit across the lake on the southern shores. Even though I have never been to Rochester and have only ever driven past Buffalo, we still get lots of television and radio broadcasting from those two cities, giving them both an air of familiarity in our home. This past weekend, Buffalo’s Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) engaged in its most storied and mythical of events, their annual pledge drive. For those who may not know, public broadcasting stations like WNED receive a lot of their funding in the form of viewer donations and grants from Arts-minded organizations. The yearly fundraising drive is a time when these stations usually bring out their most popular programming which they play, stopping at regular intervals to open the phones for donations. These pledge breaks are often torturous because they usually break away from their A-list programme just as it was reaching some dramatic point in the production. There were times in the past when I almost made a pledge just to hurry the pledge break along so they would get back to the show I wanted to keep watching! Well, this weekend, WNED in Buffalo did a very smart thing: they aired a programme from Canada from 2016 that was called “A National Celebration”. This show was a three-hour-long, commercial-free telecast put on by the CBC that broadcast the final concert performed by the band The Tragically Hip in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. On the surface, it may have seemed odd for an American PBS station to devote such valuable air time to a Canadian broadcast, but as it turned out, WNED was very clever to have done so indeed! The Tragically Hip may go down in history as one of, if not, the best and most beloved Canadian rock n’ roll band of all time. Gord Downie is certainly one of the most revered of our performers. But one of the things about The Tragically Hip was, as popular as they were in Canada, they were just as popular in US border towns and cities such as Detroit, Seattle and yes, even Buffalo! By airing that CBC special, WNED not only captured their regular US audience, but they also got a large Canadian crossover audience to watch Gord Downie and the boys sing together one final time. What this all has to do with me and my blog is that when I first began writing about music, just prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2019, it was the music of The Tragically Hip that got me started. I have written posts for about twenty or so of their songs prior to today. For the record, my best-performing post of all time is one that I wrote about their song “Long Time Running”, which has several thousand page views alone. You can go back and read my early work by simply clicking on the hashtag #TheTragicallyHip on the left hand side of this page. Apparently, reading my old posts about The Hip is what a lot of people ended up doing this past weekend due to the WNED pledge drive. In the same way that my old April Wine post was searchable when people needed that content, my old Hip posts were sitting there waiting to be clicked on as well. A quick look at my traffic stats on the weekend showed that ten of my old Tragically Hip posts were accessed on the weekend. Needless to say, this news sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole that saw me revisiting their songs and videos, especially their live performances which were always so strong. In going down that rabbit hole, I came across an article online that was published during their final tour in 2016. This article contained a map of Canada and showed the exact locations referenced in so many of their songs. This reminded me of how, when I first started writing the Great Canadian Road Trip series, I used to also profile music that spoke of specific Canadian locations but had gotten away from that in recent posts, tending to use the birthplace of the artist as the pit stop location. Well, that article reconnected me to one of my favourite-sounding Tragically Hip songs called “The Luxury”. This song has one of the most direct place name links in their entire catalogue. So, please join me as we leave Buffalo, New York, cross the border back into Canada and follow the Trans Canada Highway across the prairies to the town of Golden, British Columbia, home of the former roadside attraction known as the Golden Rim Motor Inn, site of today’s pit stop on the Great Canadian Road Trip!
Golden, B.C., sits just inside the border between British Columbia and Alberta. It is about an hour due west of Calgary. Golden is one of those places that young bands traversing the country in vans or on buses pass as they make their way westward to Vancouver along the Trans-Canada, or else eastward from Vancouver as they head back across the rest of this great land. In their early days, The Tragically Hip were just another band in a van driving from one gig to another. They passed through many cities and towns along the way, meeting all sorts of colourful characters, too. The one thing that separated The Tragically Hip, even in those very early days, is that they were sharing this experience with a man named Gord Downie, who viewed the unfolding landscape with the sensibilities of a poet. As the other members of the band have all said in interviews, they were all in the same van seeing the same things on the side of the road; they were all in the same bars and diners eating the same greasy food with the locals, but it was Gord Downie, the dedicated diarist, who took those shared experiences and turned them into songs that came to define a country. The song “The Luxury” came from the band’s sophomore album Road Apples. “The Luxury” was never released as a single, but like so many of their songs, it became a fan favourite from their CDs and was often featured in the set lists for live concerts. By the time the band was ready to record Road Apples, the decision had been made to have Gord Downie write the lyrics for all of their songs. This decision meant that Gord became responsible for “speaking for the band”, as it were, as lyricist. It was a responsibility that he took very seriously. Thus, the songs on Road Apples, such as “Little Bones”, “Cordelia”, “Three Pistols”, “Twist My Arm”, “Long Time Running”, “Fiddler’s Green” and “The Luxury” became far more detailed and descriptive, evolving from the rock foundations that had been created on their debut album Up to Here. Furthermore, the band had made other decisions regarding their creative direction. One other key decision was to take ownership of the production aspects of their work. This saw them record Road Apples at the New Orleans studio of expat Canadian Daniel Lanois. Being in New Orleans instilled within the band the belief that the Blues would still be required, so to speak, and that they were going to make music their way, music executives be damned.
The end result of this was an album that announced to Canadians and the rest of the world that The Tragically Hip were going to create some of the most memorable music by a Canadian band that had ever been recorded. They were going to tell our stories in a uniquely personal but universal way. And because the lyrics were flowing from the mind of Gord Downie, we could be assured that the stories he told would be interesting, creative, open to varying interpretations and, of course, highly singable, all at the same time. This brings us back to our young Tragically Hip band traveling across the prairies in a van. On one such pass across Canada, the boys drove through the town of Golden, British Columbia. On the side of the road they passed a small independent motel called The Golden Rim Motor Inn. This motel was not part of any chain. Instead, it was one of those small motels on the side of the road that offer hourly rates that make them a favoured home base for prostitutes to work out of. Truckers often stop there on their way from here to there with their cargo. So do people with not much money to spend who still need a warm bed and roof over their heads for the night just the same. The sign out in front of The Golden Rim Motor Inn boasted of having “soft water and a colour TV”. As The Hip drove past, Downie made note of the amenities and wrote them in a book of ideas that he kept with him. The members of the band made jokes about the sort of people who would consider “soft water and a colour TV” as being an enticement. What must their lives have been like to be lured in by that sign? From this conversation, the seeds of a story were planted. “The Luxury” is a song that tells the sordid story of a man and a woman who stay in one of the rooms at The Golden Rim Motor Inn. The man and woman may be a couple, but more likely, she is a prostitute and he is a customer. There are some listeners of this song who believe that the man is an ex-con, recently released from prison and having a hard time readjusting to life on the outside. In any case, at the core of “The Luxury” lie excellent Blues guitar licks by Gord Sinclair on bass and Paul Langlois and Rob Baker on lead and rhythm guitar on top of a story about being “so consumed by the shape I’m in that I can’t enjoy the luxury”. It is easy in this life of ours to fail to take pleasure in who we are and what we have before us because of ideas that haunt us about life being better elsewhere. For the characters in this song, having “soft water and a colour TV” should be luxuries to be enjoyed, but for one reason or another, they can’t be at this time. As such, “The Luxury” becomes a song that is about personal angst on a universal level, built on a foundation of The Blues that resulted in a song that simply sounded great when Gord belted it out live.
But those days are over. Gord Downie passed away from brain cancer and now only exists in our hearts and memories and, of course, in hundreds of YouTube videos and a certain three-hour-long CBC special. The poetry of Gord Downie’s lyrics is what drew me and so many others to the music of The Tragically Hip. It is what continues to bring Hip fans together years after his death. It is certainly one of the things that most inspired me to put fingers to keyboard and write about music, especially Canadian music. For us, as fans, the luxury of what we get to enjoy is fist pumping to a song such as this, getting lost in how great it sounds, all the while believing that the lyrics are meant for someone other than us.
Thanks to WNED for reigniting my love for The Tragically Hip and for inadvertently sending well over 100 visitors my way on a sleepy April weekend. I hope that “A National Celebration” drew in the number of pledges you were hoping for. As for The Tragically Hip, thanks again guys for creating some of the most amazing music that continues to inspire us so many years later. If any of you are interested in checking out my earlier posts about The Tragically Hip, feel free to click on the hashtag to the left near the top of this post. If you have any favourite Hip songs or memories that you wish to share, feel free to do so in the comments below. For now, I will bid you adieu. Have a great rest of your day. I will see you again soon with more great Canadian tunes. Until then, take care. Bye for now.
The link to the official website to The Tragically Hip can be found here.
The link to the live video for the song “The Luxury” can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here. ***Both videos are audio only. The lyric video has printed lyrics in the description section of the video.
The link to the official website for WNED TV in Buffalo, New York, can be found here.
The link to the official website for the town of Golden, British Columbia, can be found here.
The Golden Rim Motor Inn is no longer in business. However, the link to an advertisement from 2003 for the GRMI can be found here.
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