potsie Wrote:One factor that increased my enjoyment of TATH was the timing of the release. Early May, university exams had finished two weeks earlier, and now I had a "summer" album. First thing I did when I got my CD was make a cassette copy for the car. I played the shit out of it that summer.
TATH was also the first CD I ever bought that didn't have a jewel case. I liked the album design but I hated the cardboard. It messed up the uniformity of my CD racks!
I agree, it was a great summer album. The cardboard cover for that album was the worst though. I went through two copies on CD simply because the disc would get scratched to hell from constantly taking it out & putting it back in the sleeve.
I was about 13 years old when this album was huge. My love for the band really began here. Ahead by a Century was on the radio all the time. Gift Shop and ABAC were played at just about every school dance. When I was fourteen, I got my first summer job umpiring baseball. I would work three or four T-ball and rookie ball games a week. I saved most of the money, and at the end of the summer I bought a big stereo for my room and Trouble at the Henhouse. I listened to it nonstop. I remember lying in bed with headphones on and the volume cranked as Robbie went into his solo at the end of Gift Shop. Everything was right with the world.
This is the first Hip album I bought after devouring their back catalogue and countless bootlegs (which I listened to while delivering newspapers around age 13), having first heard/seen them on SNL. As I look back now, Fully Completely and Day For Night were each already major departures, but I didn't realize it because I listened to all their older albums at once. TATH seemed like a huge left turn to me at the time.
Butts Wigglin' was the first radio single, and I remember being almost hurt by how different it sounded, really deeply concerned by it. Then ABAC was released - I listened to it over and over again on cassette. It also seemed really foreign to me (so did Poets when I heard it on radio 2 years later), but I still really liked it.
My dad drove me to Sunrise records to buy it at midnight on release day. I remember trying to make out the lyrics, waiting in line while they played the album overhead. Having only recently discovered any real interest in music, it was an amazing time to be a Hip fan, with so many other die-hards lining up for albums and camping out overnight for tickets. I loved recognizing lyrics I'd heard on bootlegs. I loved the new accompanying website and poetry.
I would not have admitted at the time, but it was probably my least favourite Hip album. Since then, my appreciation for it has grown immensely. If I had to pick an album for the band to pull out any random non-single to play live, it would be this one. Some of my favourite live Hip memories have been surprise renditions of Sherpa, Flamenco, and Don't Wake Daddy.
This album probably marked the first and only time Hip fans have agreed on a bad song - Coconut Cream. I've never hated it (the only Hip song I cannot listen to is Streets Ahead), but I do remember being perplexed when someone in the band said that the song was interrupted by a jet flying overhead during the ending, so they cut the song and left the jet sound in, since it was such a good take - really?!
With the Hip's catalogue now complete, I think this album stands as their most indie/artsy/experimental. I wish they had explored this sound (and in particular, Gord's restrained vocals) further in later albums.
This is the last album I had to catch up with after discovering the Hip; after working through the rest of the back catalogue (except the EP) and as I put it on, I was not disappointed.
As others have mentioned, while I liked the idea of the packaging, in practice it was awful and I don't know how many times I launched that CD across the room. My original still plays but it is a mess of scratches.
I really like the Ludwig remaster of the vinyl (never heard the OG) and I think it really opened up several things that I missed over many listens of the CD.
As to the album, loved the first five tracks, really liked the next two, WTF'ed at Coconut Cream (although I don't hate it), like Let's Stay Engaged and love the last two. "Put it Off" is one of my all time favourite lyrics by Gord; to me, his poetry just soars on this song and (like most of their closers) this is such an amazing song.
Shane
General consensus appears to be "Coconut Cream, WTF?" I think of it as three different ideas crammed together. The riff is pretty cool, and to me sounds like a band jam that didn't evolve too far and was looking for words. Low register vocals and Paul's background is neat. Lyrically it seems like Gord had a few ideas in his notes (butterflies and fat cats, circle jerks) and made it fit. The airplane ending, which I've always taken as a concession that the song had nowhere else to go but a wrap up.
Looking through set lists, I was surprised at how much it was played on this tour. Like gsmacleod, I can't say I hate the song, it just feels like one of their most throwaway songs.
One thing I do remember about this album is it seemed to come quick after DFN. Looking at dates, it was actually two years between the releases, but they toured DFN right up until the end of 1995. I recall seeing some later shows, and then TATH seemed to come out not long after (would have been 6 or 7 months).
This is my favourite album of all time because it's the first Hip album I ever owned and really took note of. I was around 10 years old when I first saw the video for ABAC on Chum FM 30 on City TV. It was a family ritual to watch that show every Sunday night. I became obsessed with that song and subsequently with Gift Shop. I received the cassette that Christmas. The flood of nostalgia I still get from listening to this album is incomparable.
From laying on the floor as a 10 year old in 1996 watching the Ahead by a Century video, to standing in Kingston 20 years later watching them play it as the last song they'd ever perform live is a pretty cool bookend for me.
I find this album to lack any real middle of the road tracks. There are mostly stunners with a few bottom of the Hip barrel tracks sprinkled in. Not much in between.
I like the riff in "Coconut Cream" but the couplet "There's a cannon shooting coconut cream, 40 gallons in a steady stream" should receive serious consideration as Gord's worst. It is either a very lazy Seussian rhyme, a failed attempt at interesting surrealist imagery, or an unpleasant-to-contemplate sexual metaphor. The third option needs to be considered when trying to make sense of it in terms of the overall context of the song, especially given the "circle jerk" line. I personally think the couplet is completely unhinged from the verses, however given Gord's "Rod Stewart Buffalo Rain Out Rant", he is known to have spent some time contemplating bodily fluids. And that's about all I want to say about that!
One of the changes in the live show that came with the TATH tour was the move to having seats on the arena floor. Up until this point most (all?) Hip arena shows on Canadian soil had general admission for floor tickets. The band was still cooking on this tour but I missed being part of the ebb and flow in the sea of bodies on the floor. Putting in the folding chairs didn't prevent standing and dancing, but it did eliminate most physical contact, and as a result probably cut back on the number of fights at shows. At a show I saw on the DFN tour, Gord stopped the band mid-song to admonish two meatheads that were trading punches in the mosh pit. He probably had to do this less once the masses on the floor were tamed by folding chairs.
potsie Wrote:One of my memories surrounding the lead-up to the release of TATH is the distinctly negative discussion regarding Downie’s voice that took place on the alt.music.tragically-hip newsgroup. Butts Wigglin’ was the first song to be heard off of TATH when it was released on April 9th, 1996 on the Kids in the Hall “Brain Candy” soundtrack. This set off a wave of rhetoric on the newsgroup (where I was an admittedly infrequent visitor and poster in the mid 1990’s) that culminated with an eviscerating post by the Hip’s road manager Dave Powell.
Funny, I was an every day reader of that newsgroup from the time it started, and I don't remember this at all!
potsie Wrote:The other thing that was a bit off-putting at the time was the title of the song “Butts Wigglin’”. Anyone who listened to bootlegs in the mid 90’s was aware of Downie’s great sense of humour on stage, but this was not always evident on record.
Yeah I seem to remember him introducing Paul as Mr. Butts Wigglin? Sean would know...
andrew sharpe Wrote:potsie Wrote:One of my memories surrounding the lead-up to the release of TATH is the distinctly negative discussion regarding Downie’s voice that took place on the alt.music.tragically-hip newsgroup. Butts Wigglin’ was the first song to be heard off of TATH when it was released on April 9th, 1996 on the Kids in the Hall “Brain Candy” soundtrack. This set off a wave of rhetoric on the newsgroup (where I was an admittedly infrequent visitor and poster in the mid 1990’s) that culminated with an eviscerating post by the Hip’s road manager Dave Powell.
Funny, I was an every day reader of that newsgroup from the time it started, and I don't remember this at all!
Yeah, it definitely happened. I spent a lot of time on there in the weeks leading up to the album release, and then not much after. I remember the incredulity... "Did the Hip's road manager just put a bunch of whiners in their place?" Dave Powell is a great writer (as evidenced by his Tales from the Hip journal) and I remember this post being up to his high standards. Wish I could better remember exactly what he wrote.
potsie Wrote:I find this album to lack any real middle of the road tracks. There are mostly stunners with a few bottom of the Hip barrel tracks sprinkled in. Not much in between.
I like the riff in "Coconut Cream" but the couplet "There's a cannon shooting coconut cream, 40 gallons in a steady stream" should receive serious consideration as Gord's worst. It is either a very lazy Seussian rhyme, a failed attempt at interesting surrealist imagery, or an unpleasant-to-contemplate sexual metaphor. The third option needs to be considered when trying to make sense of it in terms of the overall context of the song, especially given the "circle jerk" line. I personally think the couplet is completely unhinged from the verses, however given Gord's "Rod Stewart Buffalo Rain Out Rant", he is known to have spent some time contemplating bodily fluids. And that's about all I want to say about that!
Are you saying that Coconut Cream is being nominated for the "Roadie Named Bart" award for lazy rhyming. Other contenders: "Heard the tap at the window in the middle of the night / Held back the curtain for my older brother, Mike" and "Eat you cooked, eat you raw / I'm gonna rip you up like a big chainsaw".
I'm not sure I'm going to provide much "insight" into the album, but I would also like to note that this was my first "line-up at midnight and buy it at HMV" Hip album. I went on the night of the same day I had my wisdom teeth out, after the knock-out gas had worn off, and we ended up eating Taco Bell in the wee hours of the morning and it was glorious. I had to listen to my cooler older brother lamenting that there were no rockers on the album and tell me that the only reason I thought Gift Shop was any good was because everything else on the album was mediocre. I was devastated by this opinion.
My first favourite song was "700 Ft. Ceiling" because I had just finished first year at Queens and had secured a house for 2nd Year September across from Victoria Park in Kingston on Frontenac Street. My aforesaid cooler older brother had at this point been renting a house for two years kitty-korner to the park on Brock Street with four other friends. His landlord was none other than Mr. Edgar Downie. We used to wonder whether Gord had ever lived in the house. They used to (maybe they still do) make a rink in Victoria Park in the winter, and you'd see the hoses out there to flood it or at least resurface and maintain it (I don't think they had a zamboni in Victoria Park). I imagined that maybe Gord was singing about going to THAT park and watching them do THAT flooding, and I was about to live right there.
You may recall in the lead-up to Henhouse's release, the Hip posted 20- or 30-second snippets of the songs on their nascent website. I had saved whatever I could to floppy disc and listened to the snippets ad nauseam. In the couple weeks before the release, when visiting my brother's house, Edgar Downie was there one day dealing with rent or repairs or whatever. I worked up the nerve to ask him about his son's band and to say that I was really looking forward to the new album based on what I had heard. He very nicely said to me that he was really proud of the boys and that he thought is was the best work they had ever done, and that you could really see the progression from the EP to what we were about to hear on Henhouse.
That was as close as I ever got to Gord, vicariously through a couple moment's conversation with his dad, but that memory remains with me to this day and it is why TATH will always be something special for me.
ct
To me, this album is the sound of a band that has been walking a tightrope for a few years, ploughing its furrow with relentless labour and intensity, consciously putting its feet up, stretching out, and relaxing. And if you ask me the band never reproduced the locked-in intensity of those early years. It developed other strengths, made a lot of good music, but did not (maybe could not) get back to the manic focus of youth.
So this is sort of a 'threshold' album for me. It marks the end of the explosive 'superstar/super-hungry' phase of the Hip's career, and ushers in their transition to mature 'career band.'
There's a lot of stuff on here that not too many levels up from fooling around.'Butts,' 'Apartment,' 'Coconut,' and 'Sherpa' all sound to me like a band willingly surrendering its previous boundaries - and standards - and just doing what comes to mind. Of the songs I just mentioned, only 'The Apartment Song' really pleases me as a neat bit of fun; 'Butts' is excellent for what it is (with a very strong and unsettling lyric about public success) but ultimately a bit of a bore, while 'Coconut' is just dumb, and 'Sherpa' confuses dope-induced spacey-ness for something interesting. Yawn.
I'm also going to verge on sacrilege here. 'Gift Shop' is a good song but the prelude and coda are too long, and I felt for years that it needed to be given a break from their live sets. In other words, I find it good but overrated. I know Gord D loved 'Vienna,' but that's another one that I rate as decent more than top-flight. 'Daddy' is interesting but never really lit my fuse either; too long and plodding for my taste. Fortunately 'Ahead by a Century' is one of the best things they ever did, while 'Flamenco' and '700 Ft Ceiling' are absolutely first-rate. And 'Put It off' is one of my favourite tracks in their entire canon, distilling as it does their unique sense of menace - a virtue largely absent on this record - and some of Gord's most brilliant lyrics. It's no mean feat to write of the birth of one's child in this ominous, cryptic, off-kilter way.
The track that maybe comes closest to what I think this album is really all about it 'Let's Stay Engaged.' That cut is totally unlike anything they did before; it gives us a cool-toned detachment that is wildly removed from the blistering hysteria of their earlier work, pointing to a Gord D in particular who wanted to work on other, more relaxed planes; and yet it remains ear-worm catchy, characteristic, for all its divergence with what went before, of Gord's minimalist melodic inclinations. I sing that one to myself a lot.
But its not really a major song, just as this is not really a major album.
A mixed bag, then. And not a record I take from the shelf very often, truth be told. But I mostly enjoy its odd and erratic - and very distinctive - journey when I do. In the end, though, it's more a detour than a landmark.
I thought I’d go over the lyrics of TATH and highlight some Downie-isms, but I found there weren't a lot of noticeable Downie-isms to be found. No explicit references to Canada – save for the Eric’s Trip shout-out and the implicit reference to outdoor skating rinks in 700ft Ceiling. No reported speech. No “fucks”(!) No similar lines in two different songs. That said, I’m certain that a deeper lyrical analysis would certainly uncover more Downie-isms. There are a couple Cobain references – one explicit in Don’t Wake Daddy, and one implicit with the “territorial piss-posts” line in Springtime that mirror’s Nirvana’s Territorial Pissings. And maybe the notion of fatherhood creeps in with Don’t Wake Daddy…and “Til our daddy gets home from work” from Coconut Cream, as well as throughout Put If Off.
For me, what TATH demonstrates is that The Hip weren’t afraid to subvert expectations - not just fan expectations...but their own. Up to this point, each album has been different than the previous and this one is no different. In the radio interview I linked to earlier, Gord addresses the sound of each album by saying basically that despite any conscious effort to come up with a sonic blueprint for an album, the songs ultimately dictate the sound and direction of the album. I think this is great thing – and what kept The Hip relevant over 30 years. They didn’t work against the songs in order to create a “Hip” sounding record. Lesser bands may have said, “Hey, that thing we did last time worked, let’s do that again.” While, there has been no doubt some of that – even on a subconscious level, I think one of this album’s greatest strengths is that the boys let the songs lead the way…not the other way around. Sure we get a Coconut Cream (which I don’t dislike)…but it also means we’re not simply getting re-treads of things that came before.
As Gord sang 4 years on Tiger The Lion, "You'll be serving the song..."
I gave the album a spin on the weekend, and then listened to a few of the tracks from different live shows. One thing that struck me was how restrained the vocals are on the recorded version of Gift Shop, versus live. Especially the final lines "We get to feel small, from high up above...." were delivered with a far different emphasis versus the recorded versions. In the final Kingston show, Gord put an incredible amount of emotion into to the song.
It's always been a favorite of mine, but one that I never really ascribed a meaning to. I know in some interviews the band alluded to the Grand Canyon, and I always took it as "the smallness of humanity". Only in watching that final show did it really click for me that it's (maybe) about our place in the world and mortality.
I was also struck by how depressing this album is in spots. ABAC weirdly became a bit of a summer anthem, I think it took the place of the anthem on Parliament Hill on July 1, but that last line always gives me pause.