The Tragically Hips Rob Baker Discusses 40th Anniversary, New Box Set & Amazon Prime Documentary

0:04 Hey, you unto yes censure, Wow, pray you. Wake up America. It's time for the Adventures of Whiteman on W four C. Why not con Lis pomp Beach is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the light Man. No dress rehearsal. This is our life. That's what you gotta do. You gotta make the most of it. Taxed in Ontario, Canada. My friends that tragically. If any of us were in another bed, I don't think we'd be able to do it because we wouldn't be in another bed with our friends.

0:50 Crowds would get so loud that you couldn't hear anything happening. On stage. They put on a monster show. They were loud and tight and forceful, and Gore was mesmerizing. Made it cool to. Be a Canadian. I feel silly being sort of emotional about it. The songs that we wrote better a lot to people. It came at its cost thirty years. Relationships can get strained. We probably should have had some therapy. Think at that point we probably needed it. We knew there were problems. There was anger and frustration and resentment, and then Gore got his diagnosis. First we'd come frame cancer and it was incurable, the worst.

1:34 Of the worst memories, which used to be my fortee and now I can't remember people's names and can't remember lyrics. What he's planning to do next is nothing short of awe inspiring. He got together and started to rehearse, to write an end to our own story. Now dress. People can't mountain. They showed their appreciation, gave gored their love, and it helped. Him and. I swear as we progressed, he got better and it was unbelievable, and by the end of the tour he felt like old gorn.

2:24 Multiple generations of Canadians decided to tragically Hip for our. Band, they will define for generations to come the music that exemplifies this country. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man w four c Y Radio. And I'm very excited about our next guest because we got a lot to talk about. It's very exciting. So let's welcome to the show. Rob Baker from the tragically Hip. How are you? I'm pretty good, good to be here, good to have you, and wow. Does it kind of blow your mind as we're gonna be talking about your fortieth anniversary here?

3:08 Yeah? Yeah, I was four years old when we made the first record. Wow, it's just amazing that, like how many bands nowadays that you think wouldn't have survived through all of the you know, the era of rock and roll that we were in, to be still around forty years later. I was just at a live show the other day. They were celebrating their fortieth anniversary. It just kind of it kind of blows my mind. We didn't even think we'd be. Here for forty years from then. I remember my dad telling me the Beatles. He said, yeah, yeah, they're hot now, but in ten years, will anyone know their music? Will anyone sing their songs?

3:50 Wow? Yeah, well he was pretty wrong. I know, right even you know, it's interesting too because like when my first entries to music was the Beatles, it seems like every generation that is like their entry into music. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. When my son was really young, I made him cassette tapes and he had a little player that he could control his own music and listen to what he wanted. But I kind of curated for him, and it was you know, he'd have a tape of the Beatles, he'd have a tape of Bob Marley, he'd have a tape of you know, African African rock, dance music, whatever, just things that because I didn't want him listening to kids music.

4:36 For God's sake. Oh, I hear good quality music. There's lots of great music that anyone can love, and it's a foundation that you can build on. The Beatles are a good foundation. Yeah, you know. So it's interesting to me. So how I originally found out about the Beatles was I think I was in like first or second grade and some we had to do some oral presentation and some kid in the class did on the Beatles and it made me really interesting. Then I found out about that nineteen sixty nine radio show with talking about Paul McCartney being dead. So I started buying all the albums to get all all the hints and check out all the stuff. For it to figure out if he really was alive or not.

5:19 Say them backwards, no doubt, right, you know. So it's interesting. We kind of do live in different times now that I think a lot of newer music is more simplistic now than it was then. I think I think the key was is because you didn't have a lot of these different types of music that are artists. Musicians could experiment back then, like the Beatles were the kings of experimentation. Yeah, everything's moved more and more into silos. You know, if you'd in the sixties and seventies, if you liked rock music, you'd go see, you know whatever, the amboy Dukes and you go see the rascals, and you go see the Mamas and the puppas or whatever it was.

6:08 I like rock music, and it's a broad term. Yes. By nineteen eighty, it's the early eighties, it's like, well, I like this type of rock music. It's down into little sub genres, and since then it's even more subgenres, to the point that no one can keep track of any of it anymore. No, ultimately, I just I always just liked music. And it's not just rock music. I like rock blues, and I like swing music, and I like straight up jazz, and I like African music, whatever it is. I like good music. I don't even understand how people can like one super specific type of music and that's it. Like, do I have my favorites, Yes, But it also depends on your mood too, and what you're doing or what have you.

6:57 Sometimes you're in the mood for one time type of music, sometimes something else. It all depends, and I think I think it just makes you more well rounded when you're open to a lot more different types of art and music. Yeah, music is music is a friend and a gift to us that you know, it can be a teacher, it can console you or relax you, it can commiserate with you. It's you know, it's there for you in good times, in bad times. You celebrate with it, and you you know, you cry the blues with it. It's there for a lot of different reasons. And if you only had one type of music, it's like only having one friend.

7:41 Yeah, right, one friend. One thing that you ever do with that friend, you know, because it's so concise now to your point, you know. And I find that even when in the eighties when they started like separating people within the rock genre, like even in those separations, they didn't sound the same. They sounded different. Now it's almost like an algebraic equation sometimes, you know. I remember I first started playing guitar and my dad was listening to me. He's like, man, you should give that up because you suck. And what I was really doing is I really didn't know what I was doing, so I was experimenting. I wanted to see what sounds I can make the guitar have, because if you think of all the great guitarists, probably including yourself, like that's how you found your unique sound as a musician.

8:38 Yeah, you play, you experiment and hopefully you know, if the consensus is that you suck, then maybe do something else. But fortunately my parents never said that. They're pretty They're pretty indulgent. And you know, I still have the guitars they got me for you know, an acoustic guitar they got me when I was thirteen, wow, for my twelfth birthday. And an electric guitar they got me for my thirteenth birthday. Wow. An electric guitar my dad took me out to get for my thirteenth birthday. Was at every single show they had played. I played that guitar every show.

9:21 Wow. I was going to ask about that. So that is way cool. I love that and it's kind of like, how does it make you feel now to play that guitar? Nowadays? I love it. I only pull it out for special things. At a certain point, it was my main guitar that I did everything on for about the first five or six years, and then it became an open ee guitar for me, and I played lots of songs through the years in open ees, so I'd play it on, you know, half a dozen songs every night. But it's one of the sweetest sounding guitars I've ever had. I got a lot of guitars here. I'm looking around the room and i can just within eyesight there twenty plus guitars in this room.

10:04 So nice and it's here, so. You probably you get to a point where you like, like you collect them in the sense of that you love the guitar so much that when you see one that really is cool, and then you play. It a little bit and you have a feel for it, it's like, well, I have to have that one too. Yeah, sometimes, you know. I walked into a local guitar store in Kingston and the guy said, you got to check this out. It's a nineteen twenty nine Dobro guitar. And I was like, I'm not checking it out. I'm not. He said, oh, you should, just like just check it out field, just hold it in your hands. I was like, I'm not going to do it.

10:47 I walked around for about twenty minutes and I said, okay, give me a slide and I sat down. I played about two notes on it, and I was like, okay, how much? But every guitar does something a little bit different, you know, in theory, they're all the same, you could. You know. I'm looking at a rack here ahead in front of me of like seven strats, and each one is different. And if I was recording a song, and I would like it needs that one. Yeah. See. And that's the truth to me. That's a true guitarist right there. Because somebody that's trying to make and play guitar but maybe isn't true guitarist can't tell the difference, you know, either the sound or to feel.

11:33 I think many times we try and impose ourselves on the music. You try and shape the music to what you wanted to do and this is what I want to sound like. And I think that for all of us in the band, it was you let the song tell you what it wants to do. Yes, you were there to serve the song, and it'll tell you what song, what sound it needs, and it'll tell you where to play and when not to play. I love it. That's so true. Like that to me, that's the difference. That that's the difference between somebody that plays guitar and somebody that is a guitarist, or somebody that plays a drum and is a drummer, or any you take, any musical instrument, including the vocals. Like, to me, that's the difference.

12:25 So I love that explanation there. So let's talk about this Amazon Prime documentary as way way cool. UH, tell us a little bit about that. Uh. Mike Downey, who is Gordon Downey's older brother, came to us, and we had known Mike since before the band days, UH, and he had done a previous documentary for us, documenting a tour roadside attraction tour that we had done in the early nineties, and he came and said, I want to do a documentary. I think it's time that you guys did one. And I don't think he had any idea that it was going to be four parts or on Amazon. It was still pretty amorphous at that time, but we agreed to do it, gave him full access to our archives, and we agreed to sit down and do interviews, which were going to be kind of far ranging interviews. It ended up being about fifteen hours for each of us over three days of five hours at a time, covering different parts of our career, and we just said, if we're going to do this, it's got to be honest. We don't want to do a fluff piece about the band. We don't want to it's not a promo piece because we don't really have anything to sell.

13:50 I guess we do, maybe, but that's never been our primary objective. So we just thought. We got into these conversations with them, and one at a time. He took us all individually, and although there are cameras set up in their lights, very quickly all that stuff falls away and you're just in conversation with someone. Yeah, he's asking you a question, you're answering as honestly as you can, and that leads the conversation. You just carry on and it's only later when you see it being edited into something that's telling the story and you're thinking, wow, I really just kind of let the whole world in on this conversation we're having, and some of it was kind of vulnerable and personal, and.

14:47 But that's the way it had to be. Yeah, there's no point in doing it if you're not going to do that it's just otherwise, it's just a fluff piece promo. No doubt. We don't need more promo, No, after forty years, I should hope not, especially when you're great musicians like yourself. And now you even have this new box set. So that's pretty cool too. So there's so much going on for his fortieth anniversary. I love it. What are some great reasons for people to get the box set? Opposed to somebody saying, well, I ready have all of that, why do they want the box set?

15:28 Well, if you're a fan of this album, and it certainly sold well in Canada and did okay in a couple of European countries. I'm not sure how well it did in the States. But if you're a fan of the record, you'll hear it more clearly than you've ever heard it. You know, mastering techniques are better than they've ever been. The atmost that comes with it, if you're into atmost, it really does put you in the room with a you know, you can almost see exactly where everyone's standing or hearing the music in the space that the music is being made in. Nice, So you've got all that going on. There's a live album that goes with the set that comes from the same time period, same six month period around that record, and there's a DVD with that or Blu ray and we're all serious hair farmers in the video. It's ridiculous how much hair there.

16:33 Is on stage right. And then there's a full album of other songs. Some songs were cut specifically for the album in Memphis while we are making the record, and because of reasons of length or sequencing, they didn't end up on the record. One of them was my favorite song from the whole session, didn't make the record, Wow, and it's out now. So that used to happen to me a lot. My favorite Why is it always my favorite song? Games? So there's that. And at the time they were also demoing. We had been demoing for eight months for Capitol Records, and after eight months we had a ton of good songs and we were ready to make a record, and they were very noncommittal, and all of a sudden, this guy shows up from mca Usa, from the La Branch, and he wants to sign the band to a seven record deal, and he said, let's go, let's do it, and he sent us to Memphis to make the record and away we went. But as a result of that all that demoing, those demos were available to us, and some of the songs from the demos, there are one or two that I think beat the versions on the final.

17:55 Albums of the original album. To get those demos are fans of the band at that point in our career. I think it's really informative. Yeah, I hope it turns on a few new people too, but I don't know. I'm sure, well, because in my opinion it's badass. And you know it's available November eighth, the box set, And so how do we tell people to get the box set to Obviously they can search for you know, no dress rehearsal on Amazon Prime, and how they can just connect to you guys in general.

18:41 Yeah, Well, the hip dot com is our site and you can find it all kinds of stuff on there. Poster dealers connect you with a poster community or the box set. There's a coffee table book, there's the Amazon documentary. There's yeah, there's all kinds of stuff. There's a merch store. But if you just want to know about the band, the history of the band, individuals, solo projects, it's all available on tip dot com love it. And I also love the fact that your document documentary was the first in history for the Toronto International Film Festival to win the People's Choice Awards. So that's that's that's a pretty great honor right there. And then and then also at the Calgary International Film Festival, you won the twenty fifth Anniversary Award for Top Overall Score.

19:41 So that's pretty cool. That's amazing. Yeah, we've been doing the film festival circuit. I really didn't see that in our current. Right, right when you first started even playing guitar, did you even think that you would be in the you know, the film festival circuit. Yea, And here I am walking down the red carpet. Oh yeah, I was really never part of the blood. It's a you know, it's interesting. You take it in stride, you take it all with a grain of salt, and enjoy it while it's here. Absolutely well, it sounds like you totally enjoy it, which is what makes you a great musician. You know, to me, how could you even be a great musician if you don't totally love it, Because besides that part of it, there's a lot of stuff why you wouldn't like being a musician, so you might as well love the reason you are one.

20:38 Yeah. Well, I got into it because I was a fan, and we all got into it because we were music fans. And it's easy for that to slip away from you while you're doing it, when it becomes a job and you're having to slog away at it. We just remind ourselves and each other regularly remember why we got in it's because we're fans. So I'm still a fan. I have a show on Serious XM that is nice once a week, and that means that I have to be scouring the internet looking for music all the time, new music, old music, and it's free form radio.

21:23 I can play. I can play an Eddie Lang recording from nineteen twenty back to back with a radio Head song. It makes no difference. I love it free form, so. I get to do what I want and talk about music in terms that makes sense to me and I hope it makes sense to other people. But it means that I have to stay engaged in music, So I'm out in the stores regularly on a weekly basis, and I'm scouring the internet looking for new music all the time and going to shows. See I love that you know, because I find it's also most iconic musicians like yourself that are still around after all this time. That's the common denominator. No matter what genre they're in, they're still fans of music, and that's the key.

22:16 So I love it. Yeah, you gotta be what are you doing if you're not. Exactly, no doubt you know, and listen. You gotta have passion because because people can tell, Like if I'm at a show, I can tell if you're going through the motions or if you're just up up there having the best time of your life. And when you guys are up there having the best time of your life, I'm like, man. That is so cool. I know it goes where I saw someone checking their watch on stage. It's like, jeez, right, I don't want to hear either. No, no, exactly. Well, we thank you for giving us all this great music for all these years, and now this cool box the documentary.

23:01 There's so much going on. I love it. And thanks a lot for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man. It's been a real pleasure. I enjoyed it. Same here ditto. Hope we can do it again. Thanks, thank you for listening to the Adventures of pipe Man on w for Cui Radio