Chapter 11

The Tragically Hip

I spent the month of April 1994 in New Orleans producing the Tragically Hip record Day for Night, which was released in September 1994. It became the band’s first album to debut at number one on the Canadian Albums Chart. I had done some demos in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, at the band’s warehouse / rehearsal studio. In January, it was so cold I wore a snowmobile suit and a Russian army–issue hat. I discovered the drum treatment for the song “Thugs” there.

The band decided that they wanted to make the album by playing all the songs in a live set, the idea being they would perform the song without burning it out. Two weeks into the record, I felt like I didn’t have one good take under my belt, and I was getting nervous. I told Dan what was happening because he’d gone through this kind of thing with U2; he told me the best solution was to edit the best bits of all the takes to make one good one, which is what he’d done.

Each morning I would get up early and review the best parts of the songs, then begin editing them together. Once everyone showed up at noon for work, I would play the tracks I had edited, but I’d tell them that it was the last take from yesterday and everyone would agree that it was the best of all the takes and should be used.

These guys were beer drinkers like no other band I had ever seen, and they’d go through at least twenty-four beers a day and a quarter pound of weed a week. They brought their assistant, Billy Ray, and his job was to roll joints all day. Billy got the job from a letter he’d written to the band saying he was their biggest fan and would work for free, so they took a chance on him and he was with them throughout the rest of their career. I hope he got paid eventually.

Billy took a big interest in the Harleys and would polish them. I let him ride one of my bikes and he got hooked on motorcycles from that point. I ended up selling him his first bike, my Norton Dunstall 810. They’re rare and now I wish I hadn’t sold it. He ended up blowing the motor and selling it to Bob Rock, another producer.

The song “So Hard Done By” had a real tight sound, but I didn’t want to use a normal-sounding guitar for the solo, so I put Robbie Baker’s guitar through a pocket amp the size of a cigarette pack that ran off a 9-volt battery, and I got a barking little guitar sound. Daryl Johnson came over to put congas on the track, too. The record was a bit of a stretch for the band because their other records were straight-up rock records and they’d never really experimented with sounds before. Johnny Fay, the drummer, appreciated me pushing him and was into the drum treatments I was using. We ended up becoming good friends and I still get calls from him to check in.

Day for Night (1994) album art.

One night while we were recording, I noticed a guy sitting on the stairs, rocking out. After the take, I turned around and he slapped his leg, then said, “You guys rock!”

It was Brad Pitt. He was in town filming Interview with the Vampire and somehow Karen Brady had bumped into him and invited him over to see the house. Brad’s major motion picture debut was in Thelma & Louise. In the scene in which he has sex with Geena Davis’s character, the background music is Chris Whitley’s song “Kicking the Stones,” which I had recorded. Brad said he loved that track and was a big fan of Chris’s, and I told him that the song had been recorded in the room we were in, which he thought was cool. Brad decided he wanted to buy the house and have Karen run it for him, but his father and his investment broker told him that it was not a good investment.

In 2017, Gord Downie, the lead singer for the Tragically Hip, passed away. He had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer, and yet he carried on with a national tour and with recording, and he brought awareness to the issues facing the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. There is a Native American saying about two wolves of the psyche, and that the wolf you feed will be the stonger one. Gord chose not to focus on the cancer but instead to feed truth and love, which expanded as he pushed for accountability with respect to how Canada treats its Indigenous population. He generated awareness of the issues facing Indigenous Peoples and brought the horrors of the residential school system into everyday conversations, along with the deep need for reconciliation. Watching the country grieve after Gord passed reminded me of the reaction to John Lennon’s death. The outpouring of emotion was on a national scale. The country shared in the sadness, and even the Prime Minister cried while addressing the press. Gord was a great man who made a lasting impact, and it was a privilege not only to have worked with him but to have known him as a person.