When interviewing comedian Will Arnett for the career-spanning docuseries The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, director Mike Downie found himself crying behind the camera as memories of his late brother Gord came flooding back.
"I just kept thinking, 'Oh my God, Gordy, you would be so fucking proud,'" Downie tells Exclaim! during a Zoom call. "This guy's such a fan. He went to these Hip shows — first in New York, then in L.A. He never hung around to meet the band. He was there with his Canadian friends. For him, it was like an umbilical cord, as a young actor in New York and then L.A. It connected him back to Canada — this music, and seeing them live, and seeing other Canadians there."
Arnett's experience, of being a Canadian who uses the Hip's music to connect with his own cultural upbringing, is common. Amidst Canada's fraught colonial history, Gord Downie's regionally specific lyrics and the band's rugged mix of bar blues, plaintive folk and meat-and-potatoes rock 'n' roll are something that fans across the country can unreservedly take pride in.
Justin Trudeau, Jay Baruchel, Dan Aykroyd and Geddy Lee are just a few of the notable Canadians who speak to the band's importance in No Dress Rehearsal. "They were emotional. They were raw. These guys had theories about the band," Mike Downie says of the doc's celebrity interviewees.
While Canadians have often looked south of the border to find validation and commercial success, the Hip have "helped many Canadians appreciate our ability to create great art here at home," Mike Downie points out. "I think they helped build up some of this quiet pride that Prime Minister Trudeau mentions in the documentary — helped contribute to the cultural confidence that I think we have today."
That pride comes across in No Dress Rehearsal, a four-part Prime Video docuseries (out tomorrow, September 20) that traces the band's career from their origins as high school buddies in Kingston, ON, all the way through to their tear-jerking final chapter before Gord Downie's death due to brain cancer in 2017.
Along the way, Mike Downie unflinchingly highlights a side of the Hip that most fans never saw: the tensions that characterized the middle part of their career, when Gord Downie moved to Toronto and became physically and artistically disconnected from his bandmates. He increasingly took creative control over the band's recording sessions, and guitarist Rob Baker reveals in the documentary how this dysfunctional dynamic worsened his own issues with alcohol.
"Gord could be quite mercurial. He was an artist — high highs and low lows," the director says of his brother. "When you're really introspective or melancholy or worse, you can have some pretty amazing revelations about life. Those kind of insights often come from a darker place."
Mike Downie describes the documentary as showing "warts and all," pointing out that the Hip's story comes with its own built-in narrative arc: there's the glorious rise, the strained middle period, and then a reconciliation before the tragic end.
"I also was not trying to manufacture tension," he points out. "Sometimes, stories do benefit from that, but we didn't need to. It was just right there. Turn on the tap."
No Dress Rehearsal reveals a side to the Hip that fans never realized was there. But it also highlights the thing we've known all along: that the Hip are one of Canada's greatest-ever bands, who have left behind a body of work that will continue to define our country's musical identity, even if the rest of the world doesn't know it.
"The legacy is the music — those 14 studio albums. The first six just blew up, one after another after another, and created this huge pantheon of songs. But the next records, and the middle records, all have gems on them that are, I think, in many cases, still undiscovered by Hip fans themselves," says Mike Downie, pointing to the title track of 2012's Now for Plan A as a personal favourite that casual Tragically Hip fans likely aren't familiar with.
"There's a legacy of songs that people will be discovering for a long time."