15 The Young Rockers

Having lived and worked in Los Angeles, I’ve seen the starkly different approaches to getting an act off the ground there, compared to how it’s done in Canada. It’s not unusual for a young band to be bankrolled by a family member, spend some time in the garage practising and writing songs and then find that one of their first gigs is a showcase on the Sunset strip at the Rainbow, the Roxy or the Viper Room for label A&R people. It’s often pay-to-play, so bands paper the room with friends and family members. They may be talented, might look great and could be the next Guns N’ Roses, but without time to develop their skills, it’s far more likely that they’ll burn out quickly. In the past, labels could sign an act, give them some money for development and recording demos and wait for the process to play out, but when the 1980s arrived and the competition to sign an act became ferocious, big advances and premature opportunities abounded.

Not so north of the border. Slogging it out in the bars was the norm, often playing cover songs to please the crowd and the bar owner. Loverboy’s Mike Reno reflected on what it was like when he started out in the 1970s.

MIKE RENO The Canadian music scene in the early ’70s was so insane. You had to be good—so people practised and they wrote songs; they had backdrops, sparkly drums, good light shows. It was very competitive. When there’s lots of people around all doing the same thing, you’ve got to stand out.

I’m reminded of the Marx Brothers who would take their show on the road all over America for a year, honing it as they went along, until they felt they were ready to make a movie of it. If the line didn’t get a laugh, it was gone!

I have no doubt there are countless very talented people who got left by the roadside, who never made it out of those grungy rooms where no one listened, who had a family to feed or just ran out of ambition before the magic break arrived. But sometimes, an artist found what it takes to survive the rock ’n’ roll wars. Here’s Barney Bentall’s take on that crossroads in his life and career.

BARNEY BENTALL

BARNEY BENTALL I was very close [to giving up]. We had four kids…I was doing odd jobs and playing a lot in the clubs in and around Vancouver and Victoria but it was lean times and we were living in a basement suite and didn’t have a proper car. My relatives were involved in a construction company and I had an offer to go work there and I thought I should probably hang it up…I didn’t have any management and I was broke and I thought, “What am I going to do? Maybe it’s time to quit; I’ve given this a…ten-year run.” My biggest accomplishment is keeping my family together through all of this…it seemed bleak but we had this big following in Vancouver and I said, “We’ve got to try one more time.”

How’s that for a backstory? Barney Bentall and his band, the Legendary Hearts, were local favourites, but that can only sustain you for so long.

BARNEY BENTALL We demo’d “Something to Live For” on an eight-track tape machine. We worked one weekend to raise funds; nobody got paid, and we made a $3,000 video. We sent that to MuchMusic…and you guys starting playing it in significant rotation. So armed with that, we thought, “Who can represent us in this last-ditch attempt to get a record deal before getting a real job?” We came to the conclusion that I was the best person because I was so desperate at that point. I flew out to Toronto and booked a scuzzy little motel near Maple Leaf Gardens and I was able to see every record company because of the video. I was eating in a restaurant; I have two caps on my front teeth and something happened with a fork and I broke those so all I had were these two little stubs. It made for kind of a comical week because I would go to all these record companies…and say, “I lost my front teeth, how do you like me so far?”…It’s such a visual industry and they’re looking to see if this guy’s going to be able to sell records and be attractive to the public…and I looked like a hillbilly.

Erica Ehm with Barney Bentall

You can’t make this stuff up, as the saying goes. Through sheer persistence Barney did get the record deal with Sony, through True North Records, home to Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan. A second ten-year run gave the band radio and video hits with “Crime Against Love,” “Livin’ in the ’90s” and a couple of songs that Juno–winning director Jeth Weinrich did videos for: “Gin Palace” and “Do Ya.” But it was the first one that remained Barney’s favourite.

BARNEY BENTALL We made another video for “Something to Live For” with a big budget…I think we spent $30,000…we then embarked on our first cross-country tour and everywhere we went people would come, and I think the fundamental reason was MuchMusic.

So, the run ended, as it always does. And what happened to the Legendary Hearts?

BARNEY BENTALL Our keyboard player is now a highly regarded plastic surgeon and does a lot of sex-change operations and reconstructive surgery. Jack, our drummer, does painting for the movies. Our old bass player, Barry, is a stockbroker. Gary, who I wrote those songs with, is a lawyer. Colin works in management with Elvis Costello, Lyle Lovett and Ry Cooder. I’m the only one who’s too dumb to quit at this point. I am a part-time rancher, full-time musician.

COLIN JAMES

One of Canada’s most dynamic new artists of the time, Colin James had schooled himself on deep roots music and, at a very young age, could play those styles with authority and authenticity. The fact that he was charismatic and owned the stage only helped propel his career. Much played “Voodoo Thing,” Colin’s debut video, in high rotation, but Colin was ambivalent about the medium.

COLIN JAMES I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with it. I’ve never loved the process, but obviously, when there’s a new medium to get out there to a lot of people, you’re gonna try to do it, right? “Voodoo Thing” was an example of a good video. I have some I hated and some I liked. I felt, sometimes, with the video-makers, you became a notch on their reel to advertise as opposed to them trying to advertise you…they have a new lens or they want to try this cinéma-verité thing, whatever it is that they’re pushing, your wishes kind of became secondary.

Colin offered a couple of examples of his experiences making videos.

COLIN JAMES There’s a song called “Freedom,” which I love, and I still don’t understand what’s going on in the video. There are spoons and forks hanging from the ceiling and that’s all I know.

We had a chicken brought in from outside Toronto for the “Breakin’ up the House” video. We had a chicken wrangler who had to come out to the shoot.

There was another reason for having misgivings about making videos, as Colin found out when they shot the first single from his second album, Sudden Stop.

COLIN JAMES “Just Came Back”—That was a $250,000 shoot. We shot it in New York. Of course, if anyone told me I was really paying for them the whole time, I might not have made as many. The church was in Connecticut. We shot around Battery Park in New York, and down in the industrial area. We had a Vietnam vet helicopter guy who was hired for the day, so everyone got rides in the helicopter. I got out “to say goodbye,” as the lyric goes, with three female bodyguards…as you do!

The song won Single of the Year at the Junos in ’91. Colin’s videos made good impressions in many places. When we were chatting at his place for this interview, Colin’s wife, Heather, added her thoughts.

HEATHER I was working at a retail store in Victoria when “Voodoo Thing” came out and we had two TVs and we played MuchMusic, and “Voodoo Thing” was on every hour. We hadn’t met and weren’t seeing each other yet, but that’s how I knew who he was…it was such a huge part of my day.

I asked Colin, despite his doubts about music video, how he felt about Much in those days.

Colin James and Jeff Healey

COLIN JAMES MuchMusic at its best, at the time when it was at its most fresh and unjaded, where it would have a great performance live with Dwight Yoakam, and then right after that Jeff Healey and I would come in with the guitars and play together and the next day you have the Spice Girls, whatever it was, it was fascinating…it was covering everybody, it wasn’t saying, here’s our demographic. You never knew who was going to be on, it could’ve been anybody…and that was truly exciting.

BLUE RODEO

While acts like Corey Hart and the photogenic Glass Tiger were easy to get behind, there were other artists that Much chose to champion who were not as obvious. It was John Martin’s passion for a floundering debut act on Warner that convinced us to give their video high rotation. The response to “Try” by Blue Rodeo set them on the road to being an iconic Canadian band.

Jim Cuddy talks about the origins of the band’s sound.

Laurie Brown with Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo

JIM CUDDY When I finished Queen’s [university] in the spring of ’78, Greg picked me up…and I had decided I was going to devote one year to music, and Greg said, “We should get a band.” I said, “Okay, that’s a good idea”…and we’ve had a band ever since then without a break. The HiFis that we started in Toronto—we just did fast pop music of the day, Costello influenced. Then we moved to New York and we had a couple of bands…we did reggae, we did ska, we did pop. It was great to be in New York where there were so many players, but a terrible place to start a band. Nobody wants to hear a fucking new band; they want to hear Tom Waits who’s playing that night, or David Byrne. At the end of that we realized that the most natural style for us was this strumming country rock stuff that was starting to bubble up again. Everybody was looking back again at the Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons. Coincidentally, we had no idea what was going on in Toronto, but when we came back to Toronto, that really was what was happening.

Looking back at Blue Rodeo’s considerable body of work and the videos that helped establish the band, it strikes me that they have next to nothing to live down. I wondered how they avoided the siren call of mid-’80s weirdness in drum sounds, wardrobe, and anything else that causes others shivers of regret now.

JIM CUDDY We had so accepted failure as our route. By the time we came back [from New York] and started Blue Rodeo I was thirty, and we’d already done seven to eight years of not chasing trends, [yet] trying to adapt what we did to what was popular. Not only did we not like ourselves doing that, we didn’t like the people we encountered, so when we first came to Warner, we came with no strings attached. We’d had it suggested that we be k.d. lang’s backup band for six months. We had no fucking interest in that. I think because we had failed for so long, we just didn’t see any point in trying to change anything that we were.

Kevin Shea who was in promotion at Warner at the time tells the story from the label point of view.

KEVIN SHEA Blue Rodeo had a following. They’d play at the Horseshoe and there’d be lineups around the block…but no one wanted to step up because their music was so different than what was happening on radio…Their first single had gotten one station, CHUM-FM, because [DJ] Ingrid Schumacher was married to Cleave Anderson, their drummer. We knew “Try” was a magic song…but you didn’t lead with a ballad, especially to establish a new band. It was panic time; there was no sales. So Jim Cuddy…and his wife called in all their favours [to make the “Try” video]…We put the single out to radio and nothing…crickets…we thought this was a magic track. We couldn’t get the radio stations we needed. Then MuchMusic added it into a significant rotation.

Jim remembers well the lead-up to shooting the video.

JIM CUDDY We were very lucky because I got a job at a film company called McWaters Vanlint. Derek Vanlint was well-known—he’d been the cinematographer on Alien.

People from the company used to come and see the band play in the clubs and offered to shoot the video for “Try.” The costs would be mostly covered, but with one condition. “Derek is going to do it, but you’ll have no say in what he does.” They paid for film, processing, everything, but at the last moment Derek got sick and they brought this guy I’d been working with, Michael Buckley, who was a South African cameraman. Michael loved filming women and with Michelle [McAdorey from Warner band Crash Vegas], the girl in the video, who was [also] Greg’s girlfriend at the time, he knew he wanted to do some beautiful, luxurious, slow-motion shots around her. We filmed at the magic hours, dawn and dusk.

The band’s respect for their director and appreciation of the resulting video made it easy to embrace the medium.

JIM CUDDY We weren’t going to dress up or any of that shit but when we first saw ourselves walking under the Gardiner [Expressway] in slow motion, we couldn’t have been more in love with ourselves. We thought we looked awesome! That was very much the filmmaking of the day—really, really macro shots, lots of slow motion—Michael was a very sensual filmmaker.

“Try” was named Video and Single of the Year at the ’89 Juno Awards.

JIM CUDDY “Try” cost us maybe $1,000. And it was all done on 35mm. Our next bunch of videos were with Michael. We were so lucky to have the skills and the support of an actual film company that was mostly doing commercials. I worked fifteen hours a day doing commercials as well as doing the band.

Soon, Jim was able to give up his day job but Blue Rodeo found that having a hit record carried some baggage.

JIM CUDDY I remember when we’d go up north and people would look at us and scream, and that’s not from radio. That’s from imagery, from the impact of seeing something you’ve seen a big image of. There was a certain period of time, when we had to weed out the audiences we got just from “Try,” and just from that video, because they didn’t necessarily like everything else we did. So there was this period of adjustment.

For the title track of the album Outskirts, the band hired Don Allan to direct a moody performance piece.

DON ALLAN I set up a giant Ferris wheel in High Park [in Toronto] to make it look surreal. I tried to find a barn that was falling apart with lots of holes in it so we could have giant lights shooting out of it with purple gels on them. We had the band set up in front of the barn and we’d been shooting for a while and we took a break. As I’m walking, these cops are coming towards me and they have a look like they’ve seen a ghost, hands on their holsters, asking what’s going on. They’d gotten a report of a UFO. They didn’t know anything about the shoot. They’d been driving along in the area and all of a sudden had seen this barn glowing purple. We actually made Entertainment Tonight because of what happened.

When the band went to make the video for the title track of their next album, Diamond Mine, they returned to working with Michael Buckley, but things didn’t go as planned.

JIM CUDDY The funny thing about “Diamond Mine” is that it was shot in colour and there was an error at the processing plant. They ruined the film. We were away and Michael phoned us and said, in his slow laconic way, “They’ve ruined the film but I think this is good. Watch it in black and white, it’s beautiful.” And we did see it in black and white and it was absolutely stunning.

Later, when the band was looking for something different, they approached Curtis Wehrfritz about shooting the video for “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet.” The director relates the first conversation he had with them about the video.

Erica Ehm with Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo

CURTIS WEHRFRITZ They had been doing a lot of performance videos because [Jim and Greg] are both very charismatic. They approached me and I said, “Probably not a good idea,” in a polite way. I said, “I’m pretty good at portraiture but I…don’t want to be a literal cartoonist; I don’t want to illustrate your lyric.” They said, “Well, what would you do?” and I said, “I wouldn’t have you play in it; in fact, I would probably have little of you…” I said why don’t we do a short film, an imagistic thing. The record company would have to be okay with not featuring the lifestyle of the band. The band had enough power to do that. The script was a collaboration with Greg, shot in and around his farm where they were beginning to record…we took on the challenge of shooting up there in February. Greg had been going through some things where he fainted and he said, “The sensation of vertigo when you come to and this benevolent look of concern of faces hovering over you was quite an out-of-body strange and beautiful thing.” In the video there’s this kind of funeral and there’s an image of the guys looking over the lens. [Greg] said, “You’re between two worlds and you don’t really know what this is.”

They worked with Wehrfritz on “Bad Timing,” which Jim recalls with affection.

JIM CUDDY I thought “Bad Timing” was a great video. It has my kids in it. Mary Margaret O’Hara is in it going crazy on the motorcycle. Often we worked in our own community with friends—that was sort of the whole point of the band.

THE NORTHERN PIKES

Around the time Barney Bentall and the boys were starting out, the Northern Pikes emerged from the indie scene in Saskatoon. Signed to Virgin Records, they had a hit with a song called “Teenland” from their first album, Big Blue Sky. The follow-up, Snow in June (sounds like a good prairie album title, doesn’t it?), featured what became the band’s biggest hit, “She Ain’t Pretty,” written and sung by band member Bryan Potvin. When it came time for the video, they turned to director Ron Berti and Total Eclipse productions, who the band had developed a strong relationship with. Bryan recalls the genesis of the video.

BRYAN POTVIN Our record company president Doug Chappell loved a cold-and-flu remedy commercial that was on TV at the time. It featured old-school claymation that he thought would be cool to incorporate into the “She Ain’t Pretty” video. The opening exterior shot of the saloon was a model the size of a Barbie house. I had this in my possession for a long time after the shoot. I did keep the little steer skull as a keepsake—I glued it onto the headstock of an acoustic guitar I own. Looks pretty badass.

I asked Bryan about Much’s support of the Juno-nominated “She Ain’t Pretty” video, and their other work.

BRYAN POTVIN I certainly can’t speak for other bands of our vintage who were supported by Much the way we were, but my deep appreciation of how fortunate we were to have that support didn’t come until later in life. When you are in a band attempting to succeed the way we were, there is a certain amount of confidence you must have to push yourself forward each day. I always thought we were a very good pop/rock band and we were decent looking guys—I couldn’t find a reason why Much wouldn’t support us.

I mentioned one of my favourite moments in Much history, which featured Bryan leaning out of a moving train car as it pulled into Melville, Saskatchewan, playing guitar while someone held onto his belt from behind.

BRYAN POTVIN Yeah, I did some pretty idiotic shit back then. I always felt pressure, from myself, to deliver a “show.” And that didn’t simply mean playing and singing our songs competently—it meant performing, leaving the audience with something that they’ll really remember…We played a gig once where the stage was encircled by a moat so I decided to traipse through knee-deep water with my electric guitar on—a really bad idea. I gave a MuchMusic cameraman a black eye at a show in St. John’s, Newfoundland, when I stage dove into the crowd, guitar and all. I did that another time in Sudbury and the audience parted like the Red Sea. I landed violently on the arena’s concrete floor with people all around me looking rather astonished. So the Much train thing was a natural extension of that stuff—brave or stupid or some sort of hybrid of both…Yes, it could have been a disaster but think of the headlines my death would have created, ha-ha-ha.

SASS JORDAN

Sass Jordan broke the mould for Canadian female artists in the early Much era—she entered singing raucously, laughing lustily and swearing a blue streak—this was no Jane Siberry, Sarah McLachlan or Luba. She was hilarious, charming and knew what she wanted.

Sass Jordan and Natalie Richard

SASS JORDAN I was doing this television show in Montreal in 1982 called Radio Video. I interviewed Phil Collins, KISS, Def Leppard, Bryan Ferry, Nina Hagen, INXS. I did it because I wanted to know what [it would be] like to be the rock star that I’m going to be.

When she launched her career six years later in 1988 with “Tell Somebody,” she appeared to be bursting out of the screen.

SASS JORDAN I was on a mission. I loved what I was doing and we were having the greatest time ever. Much pretty much made my career. It made me nationally well-known overnight…It made a huge impact. It wasn’t just a voice but it was an image that you could identify and relate to. That was the beginning of our cultural shift to visual media becoming so predominant.

It will come as no surprise that there’s a cautionary tale here.

SASS JORDAN Overnight I couldn’t go to the laundromat. That’s why I moved to Los Angeles. I was absolutely horrified that this thing that I had wanted so badly, to be well-known, was now happening to me and I fucking hated it.

There’s a benefit to having your voice heard and admired, and it resulted in a once-in-a-lifetime hit for Sass in 1992.

SASS JORDAN Kevin Costner, who starred in The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston, was a massive Joe Cocker fan and he wanted to use a Joe Cocker song in the soundtrack. They decided on “Trust in Me,” which had been recorded several years earlier. Kevin was driving around L.A. and heard one of my songs on the radio and said, “That’s the voice for the duet on this Cocker track because we need to update it, make it new and fresh.” That was a dramatic turning point in how I sang—to hear how Joe phrased it. It made a massive impact on me. After that recording I went on tour with Joe Cocker for two months and I didn’t meet him until the last night of the tour. I said, “Joe, it was such an extraordinary experience getting to sing with you on that song.” And he looks at me and goes, “What song?” He had no idea. It sold thirty-two million copies.

In her amusing and self-deprecating way, Sass sums up her music video career.

SASS JORDAN I didn’t like most of them. I thought I was a jackass in most of them. I thought some of them were really fucking boring.

54-40

The Vancouver indie scene of the early ’80s was fertile ground for new bands like Spirit of the West, Skinny Puppy and 54-40. Lead singer of 54-40, Neil Osborne, tells a now familiar story of how a young band used the opportunity that video offered.

NEIL OSBORNE The video revolution defined us. When we got signed to Warner Brothers, we were kind of out of left field and we put out “Baby Ran.” Rock radio didn’t pick up “Baby Ran”; MuchMusic did. That was how we took off…if you went out to universities or clubs everybody was playing MuchMusic…everybody looks back now and says that [song is] classic rock but at the time we weren’t getting played, not until it was obvious that they kind of had to. We’d start selling out the Commodore [a premiere concert venue in Vancouver] or something like that…Much became the radio.

Neil talked about how they approached making videos in the early days of the band.

NEIL OSBORNE Making videos was fun. We used to use that word that young bands do—“integrity” (laughs). It was a way of protecting our image, as fragile as it seemed. We wanted to make sure it didn’t misrepresent us. Tamara Davis did the “Baby Ran” video, part of it was shot at the Commodore. It looked like old Doors footage. Then we had no budget for the “I Go Blind” video, which is basically Phil [guitarist Comparelli] and I in Cowichan sweaters walking through Stanley Park.

As the band’s popularity grew, they took on more ambitious themes. Neil explains the origins of the song “One Gun” and how some of the images found their way into the video.

NEIL OSBORNE My wife was doing investigative work for human rights through university and the Catholic Church in Argentina and Chile. She was smuggled, during the Pinochet era, into Argentina to do some research. She brought back a lot of posters and we wanted to use that as a vehicle. That was a time when you could jam stuff [into a video] as a vehicle to have a political conscience, to say something. I wrote the song “One Gun” about her trip there. The idea being that if you’re oppressed you can’t have the freedom to express yourself, to love somebody.

Steve Anthony with Neil Osborne of 54-40

For their fourth major label record, 54-40 was signed to Sony, who showed their support through the corporate chequebook.

NEIL OSBORNE These were the days when your first video was $150 grand. Can you believe it? That was our record budget.

The first video was for “She-la,” an important song for the band, and for Neil and his family in particular.

NEIL OSBORNE My wife was dealing with battered women and kids and she ran a transition house—that was the theme.

Sony hooked them up with a hot new director.

NEIL OSBORNE [Curtis] Wehrfritz was the talk of the town at the time. I remember having a meeting with him and he talked so fancy, I had no idea what he was saying. I had faith that I’d be able to control what I did, at least, and a little bit how we looked. When we got to the set I was blown away—the triplets, the camera angles. When you’re talking on paper I have no idea—I’m not a visual thinker, I’m an aural thinker. It was like a playground—like going in the Ikea ballroom.

Curtis talked about how he tried to stay true to the song’s meaning.

CURTIS WEHRFRITZ We built a set and lifted it twenty feet in the air to create all these gravity switch-ups because that was a metaphor for upheaval…my feeling was “it can’t just be a documentary on missing women.”

As for the look of the band…

CURTIS WEHRFRITZ Neil did the old punk rocker [trick] and got a can of Coke to make his hair stand up.

54-40 rode the wave for a long time in rock ’n’ roll years, but Neil remembers the day when he realized that the old paradigm was on its way out.

NEIL OSBORNE There was a new president at Sony [Canada], Rick Camilleri. I walk into his office and he’s got his feet on his desk and he’s throwing a Nerf basketball at the hoop on the wall. He says, “It’s all going to end and I’m getting out of here.” I’m like, “huh,” the dumb musician. “I just want to make my records, man. What are you talking about?” “CDs—we blew it.” He gave me the lecture…“The record industry is going to end.” He was basically telling me what the future was. When you give someone a CD you’re giving them a master. When it’s vinyl—you buy one, it wears out, you buy another one, a cassette—buy one, it wears out, you buy another one, but with CDs you’re giving everybody a master. He got out and went to TV.

Osborne did have an agenda that day at Sony.

NEIL OSBORNE [Guitarist] Phil Comparelli used to say, “Why can’t we be like Honeymoon Suite, on the beach with a bunch of babes? Why do we have to do all these weird dark videos in cold places?”

He pitched Camilleri on an idea for the band’s next videos.

NEIL OSBORNE So I said, “Look, instead of hiring whatever flamboyant weird dude who’s the hottest thing to make our video where we’re going to stand in a fucking ice bucket stamping on a cold puddle…how about we go around the world in two or three weeks?…It’ll cost the same as you give some fashion-show guy…” He went, “What a great idea.” We went to Thailand, then Kenya, Morocco…we ended up shooting four videos. We had a fantastic time and we didn’t have to stand in a puddle in a freezer.

By the late ’90s, another template was fading as bands that had been core acts for the first decade of MuchMusic’s existence found themselves moved over to the new, adult-oriented channel, MuchMoreMusic.

NEIL OSBORNE There’s always those first signs that you’re not flavour of the month anymore, they’re thinking you’re a little long in the tooth…“It’s not going to be on Much, it’s going to be on MuchMoreMusic. Don’t worry, Blue Rodeo’s on MuchMore, too.” How do you take that? When someone says, “Don’t take any offence but…,” the first thing you’re going to do is look for where you’re going to take offence. They split it. It was the chocolate bar ads versus the car ads. Everybody wants to think they can still sell chocolate bars.

THE TRAGICALLY HIP

The Tragically Hip have carved out a place as one of the most beloved bands in Canada. They got together in their native Kingston, Ontario, in the early ’80s and have been touring, releasing records and winning awards (including fourteen Junos) ever since. While they were developing their sound and working to get a foothold in the clubs around Ontario, they were watching Much. Guitarist Rob Baker recalls.

ROB BAKER Everyone was watching…it was like when Saturday Night Live first came on TV. Saturday night you’d be at a party with forty people and when SNL started everyone would go quiet and settle around the TV and watch, and when the commercials came on, you’d break out in conversation, talk about what you saw and then go quiet again. For a while it was like that with MuchMusic—Friday and Saturday nights people gathered around and watched videos. I was starved for music—anytime you could see musicians perform—I used to rush home after school to watch, I think it was a band from Ottawa, some guy named Chris Ward playing guitar, doing R&B standards, like “Under the Boardwalk.”

As grateful as I am to have been a part of Rob’s misspent youth watching TV, the band picked up more powerful influences watching Much in the early days.

ROB BAKER When we came up we felt we were a year behind the Northern Pikes and 54-40. They were sort of in Grade 12 and we were in Grade 11. There were a lot of bands that we were exposed to through MuchMusic.

The Tragically Hip, whose name was a reference to former Monkee Michael Nesmith’s groundbreaking video from 1981, “Elephant Parts,” winner of the first Grammy for music video, was part of a wave of reactionary responses to the use of music video as a glitzy image-building device. Like Blue Rodeo, 54-40 and the Cowboy Junkies, the Hip were determined to be seen as musicians, not pop stars, even if the two roads led to the same destination.

ROB BAKER We had all these things we were going to put our foot down about. We’re not going to stand on a mountaintop with a wind machine blowing our hair.

Their first video was simple but effective, serving to help develop the band’s status on the road, where long-lasting careers are made.

ROB BAKER “Small Town Bringdown” is a pretty straightforward video, but it made a huge impact on our career…that song wasn’t a big radio hit, but because Much played it, it allowed us to tour the country…you’d roll into Crocks N Rolls in Thunder Bay on a Wednesday night and you’d have sixty people out to see you, which otherwise the Tragically Hip would never have had.

The 1989 release Up to Here broke the band and featured powerful videos for “New Orleans Is Sinking” and “Blow at High Dough.” For the latter, the Hip stayed with presenting themselves as a performing rock band but added another layer to the visuals to make the video stand out.

ROB BAKER “Blow at High Dough” was the first chance we ever got to conceive the video…we sat down in a little brainstorm session and I wrote down all these images on the dust sleeve from an LP. We said, “We’ll make it as much like the Ed Sullivan Show as we can and we’ll have bluescreen behind us. We’ll show a bunch of wacky black-and-white images. The video came back and it was exactly what we asked them to do.

For the video for “New Orleans Is Sinking,” the band stayed close to home.

ROB BAKER The director was someone who had been coming out to the shows for a year or so. We’d seen a crazy short film that he made about a thirty-year-old guy living at home with his mother with the umbilical cord still attached. He sat down and told us his idea for the video and we said “yeah.”

I asked Rob about the collaborative approach to creating videos.

ROB BAKER [The video for] “Locked in the Trunk of a Car” had a lot to do with what we were reading and watching at the time. We liked the whole film noir thriller [genre]. In those early days, there was lots of time sitting around in hotel rooms and books, movies, music—that was the chit chat.

As the Hip’s stature grew and more videos were expected, they found new ways to visually support the songs. I mentioned the video for “Bobcaygeon,” which features an understated performance from lead singer Gord Downie.

ROB BAKER I think Gord has a good concept of when grand gestures will carry and when they’re not necessary. If you have a camera in your face and you’re blown up big on the screen, you can do a lot more with a lot less. I think that insinuates itself into live performance as well now that they can capture every little gesture. You’re as big as Mount Rushmore on either side of the screen.

Speaking with bands from this era, there’s a common theme regarding budgets and the process leading up to shooting videos.

ROB BAKER It’s a funny thing how it goes from the first video. “Hey we’ve got a guy and he’s going to do a video for you.” Fantastic! We’re so excited. Three years down the line, you’re sitting in an office in L.A. and you have a whole morning of interviewing video directors. Instead of a fifteen-thousand-dollar budget you’ve got a hundred thousand to make a video. And [the videos] didn’t necessarily get any better.

It was nice to see a small indie band from wherever, Winnipeg—all of a sudden they start getting their video played. It was really cool that [Much] would take chances like that.

Chad Kroeger, Nickelback