Ongoing History of New Music

This is part two of our remembrance of Gord Downie… We left off last time with The Hip in their golden years—a glorious run of singles, albums, tours, festivals (like edgefest, their own “another roadside attraction festival, edenfest) along with appearances on radio, TV and in movies—plus things like Junos and Much Music video awards… “Day For Night” was followed by “Trouble At The Henhouse” in 1996, which spun off five singles…the concert album, “Live Between Us” was recorded that year at Cobo Hall in Detroit… And the band continued to evolve…song structures became more complex…Gord started experimenting with different vocal styles and phrasing…and the longer the band stayed together, the more Canadian their music seemed to be with more and more references to people, events and places… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here is how we’re going to do this…we all know how important Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip have been to Canadian music, Canadian culture and Canada, period…we’ll take that as read… And when Gord died on October 18, 2017, it seemed like the whole country went into mourning…the best tweet I saw read “Canada closed…death in the family” …those six words summed things up better than anything else I saw... What I’d like to do is remember and celebrate Gord and The Hip, filling in some blanks along the way…they’ve never been interested in any kind of chronological autobiography and no book about them has ever received official authorization from the band… So, although The Hip was around for more than three decades and have some of the best fans ever, there’s still plenty of stories to be told…and along the way, we’ll remember Gord for who he was and what he did that touched so many people across this country…and we’re going to start at the very, very beginning… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’d just landed at Pearson airport in Toronto after a long flight from the far east…as soon as we left the runway, I turned on my phone…the texts and the emails came one after another…blam: Gord Downie was dying…blam: brain cancer…something called “neuroblastoma”…blam: and the prognosis wasn’t good…the condition was terminal…one year, maybe two—five at best… But that same news conference also announced that The Hip was going on tour again…the Man Machine Poem tour…that turned into a massive national celebration of all things Gord, all things hip, all things rock and all things Canadian… Tens of millions of people stopped what they were doing and watched the final show that Saturday night in August…the band never said it would the “last” anything—but I think we all knew that was the case… Then came a period of denial…sure, Gord was sick, but we were still seeing him around…a couple of interviews…his “Secret Path” documentary…showing up to receive an order of Canada…things were fine, right?... They must have been—especially after we heard about a solo album in late September…that was a sure sign that Gord was doing well, right?... Well, no…sessions for that album wrapped up in February…and since thing, radio silence…lots of rumours, but no news…nothing from him, his family, the band, his management or the label… We knew it was coming, but all we could do was wait…and then on the morning of October 18, we got the news…Gord was gone… The outpouring of affection and grief was immediate and sustained…Hip music started playing everywhere…we covered his death like other countries might cover the death of a head of state… And as the tributes continue to pour in, I thought we’d have this look back on Gord and The Hip and what they meant to us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music we dig deep into the OGH archieves to the spring of 2005 and have a look at one of the most influcential bands of the 80's They only exhisted for barely 4 years and released just 4 albums but without them would there be a Smashing Pumpkins? Nine Inch Nails? Marilyn Manson? White Zombie? This is a program in the "what's the big deal series?". An occasional look at why todays music sounds like it does.  This time we ask "What's The Big Deal About Bauhaus?!?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music. We dig deep into the OGH archieves to bring you episodes that you want to hear again. This time in Podcast form. This week it's the 2nd part of the Oral History of Madchester as told by someone who was there to see it and make it happen. Gaz Whelan of the Happy Monday's! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we sit here together, it’s been about 11 years and five months since Tool released their last album, “10,000 days”…that record came out on April 28, 2006…  Let’s put that into perspective…the last time we tool gave us a record of new material, the introduction of the iPhone was still more than a year away…Bob Barker was still hosting “The Price is Right”… And this is my favourite: that was the year when NASA launched the new Horizons Probe towards Pluto…it has since flown past Pluto and is well into the Kuiper Belt…in other words, you can travel out of the solar system in less time than it takes Tool to make an album… This isn’t the longest interval between albums from a band who has never broken up…in fact, Tool has gone out on tour multiple times, just to remain acquainted with their fans…but this has only served to underscore the point that Tool hasn’t come up with any new music since 2006… Here’s the question: why?...what’s the holdup?...where’s the new music?...those are three big questions that we’re going to try to answer…i call this show “The Tool Odyssey”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At some point, all of us will shuffle off this mortal choir and join the choir invisible…doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you may have or how famous you might be…in the end, we’re all mortal… This really hits home when musicians we love disappear forever…it’s not like we personally know these people, but because their music helps us know ourselves, a little piece of us dies with them… The circumstances of their passing’s vary…misadventure, accidents, overdoses, suicide…some can be explained away while other deaths will forever remain a mystery… With that in mind, let’s take a look back on the last hours of some of those musician’s who have left us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of… Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again. Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music… I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another… I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”… But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition… If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job… It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums… Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”… Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Milk” and then the big breakthrough with “Blood Sugar Sex Magick”… And look at REM…they released five indie records, each better than the last, before they were signed to a big major record label deal…that was hard…they were on a treadmill of recording and touring and recording and touring with little downtime…but they wanted it bad, so they did what they had to…it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll, y’know?... You can say the same of the Black Keys…a lot of people might think that these guys have what, three records in their catalogue…nope… They have eight full albums, two eps, one live album and close to two dozen singles…and unless you’re a longtime or hardcore fan, you may not know about some of the stuff they’ve done…  Let’s fix that for all the latecomers…this is catching up with the Black Keys… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You probably know someone like this: a guy (or a woman) who through having loads of talent or tons of luck or both has become successful…they have everything anyone could ever hope to have…money, notoriety, stuff…access to all kinds of pleasure and adventures and opportunity...everyone you know wishes they cold be this person… And then they screw it all up…not by bad luck or illness or any other misfortune, necessarily…they just make some bad decisions or questionable moves that damage or destroy their careers and their lives… Sometimes this downfall happens in slow motion over a period of weeks or months or even years…but sometimes, the crash comes in seconds…and in the end, there’s no one to blame except the person themselves…. This sort of things happens in music a lot…ego, bad advice, hubris, arrogance, drugs, stubbornness, being out of touch, mental illness—all these things can lead to tarnished legacies at the very least and full-on catastrophes at worse… These are stories of spectacular acts of self-sabotage… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices