Posts: 6,734
Threads: 665
Joined: Jun 2002
Reputation:
0
LIVE BETWEEN US
partially explained on tuesday may six
LBU BIO IV
...Every one in the band was immediately drawn to the quality of Mark's recording. Even as a rough board mix, things sounded great. The real acid test came when we put up the multis and listened more closely, looking for problems. The show just seemed to get better and better each time. It never lost the excitement of that first listen, which has always been our test for picking versions of songs in the studio; it's not how it sounds the first time, it's the 100th time that counts. We knew we had something special on our hands. It was then that we began to talk about releasing this as a live record. It's not like we're claiming this to be the best live Hip performance ever. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It has always been our fear that by releasing something live we'd be sanctioning it as a definitive performance. That night the band was 'on', tight, with Gord at his captivating best. But every gig is different and special, just like snowflakes.
That Saturday, November 23, was, however, a very special night. We had managed to capture a moment in time, which is all that a live recording can be. The point is that for the first time we couldn't find any reason not to do this, and sometimes for us that's reason enough. We lived with the show for a month and by mid-February had decided to go ahead with a final mix. We were in the middle of writing and recording in our studio and mixing was not something we were set up to do. We decided to send the tapes to our old friend Don Smith who, along with producing our first two records, happens to be one the world's greatest live recording and mixing engineers. He had a hole in his schedule and started to work. Mark, who has mixed the band every night for seven years now, sat in with Don to ensure that it was as close to the real thing as we could get...
"We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream"
Dana
Posts: 6,734
Threads: 665
Joined: Jun 2002
Reputation:
0
LIVE BETWEEN US
partially explained on thursday may eight
LBU Bio V
...The biggest hurdle was a question of time. We wanted to boil the show down to 70 minutes of music to fit onto a single CD. Doing a double live record was out of the question for us. Too expensive and too much music for one sitting. We wanted to do something with its own pace like a real live set, with a beginning, middle and end that you could hear and feel. The encores, 700ft Ceiling, Daredevil, and Flamenco were all sacrificed to that end. Stephen Marcussen put on the finishing touches at Precision Mastering. From there it was just a question of artwork and design. Our good friend Clemens Rikken, the famous Dutch photographer, had been with us during the tour and supplied us with more than enough brilliant photos. With the help of Andrew McLachlan, as usual, we pieced the package together while sitting around the dinner table at the studio. The whole process, which in so many ways had been ten years in the making, took us less than two weeks once we got rolling.
As it turns out, The Tragically Hip Live Between Us will not be the first live record made at the venerable Cobo Arena. Simply put, it's a great room to play as far as hockey rinks go. Unlike most arenas, there is nothing behind the stage area, just a wall which projects everything outwards to the crowd. As a result the room sounds great, and that sound quality adds to the quality of the performance and so on and so on. Maybe that's it. The end result is there on tape, an evening when all the intangibles of live performance come together to create magic. It's the room, the band, the crew, the crowd, the set, the evening and about a thousand other elements all falling into place. Who knows, maybe it's the water. Detroit Rock City!
Enjoy at Top Speed, Gord S
"We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream"
Dana
Posts: 6,734
Threads: 665
Joined: Jun 2002
Reputation:
0
Coda
thursday may fifteen
LBU BIO VI
More about Live Between Us
Paul
What songs to cut …
We were able to eliminate some things right away - the encore was eliminated because Gord says "Good night" at the end of the main part of the show and this seemed a good way to end the CD. Flamenco is available on other things and Daredevil didn’t make it either because we do a slow Daredevil jam for about 13 minutes or maybe 15 minutes, so it was calling to be chopped off .
With reference to joining the band …
I was a big fan of the Hip in their first year together, hung out with both Gords and I was good friends with Davis. When they had the parting of the ways it sort of looked like they might keep going or not keep going and I didn’t have any idea that they would ask me to join the band but they did.
By the time we got to Cobo …
We played Thunder Bay just before Cobo, which was also a really good gig. We were enjoying the whole tour; the shows, the Rheostatics, and the crew. It was the middle of the tour so everyone was becoming pretty comfortable and there was a good vibe going down to Detroit. We got there about 10 or 11, had a really good time down at the hotel bar with a lot of the crew, we were there until it closed.
The show itself was really good, it’s a beautiful arena, rounder than most arenas, which was the reason why it looks so great in the dark - looks great from the stage. We were pretty happy to do a show in Detroit with obviously a lot of enthusiastic fans . After the show, we were backstage for awhile - there were a few friends that came out so everyone hung out for an hour or two and then we all went home because we had a day or so off before the show in Buffalo.
Gord D
How we met Clemens Rikken …
Here's the background. Someone was doing a story on us for a local newspaper, "A week in the life of The Tragically Hip in Europe." The reporter, Rick Baker - sort of an untraditional Dutch name - was sent along to chronicle our daily events, more so than we could have ever known at the time. Months later when we showed up in Holland again, Rick came backstage and showed me this article that was full of quotes. My spider senses started tingling so I just randomly pointed at a quote and said "what does t hat say?" and he said "well you remember when you were in the radio station and we got in the cab after and you said something about..."
But the great thing about that interview was meeting Clemens, the photographer. He was fantastic, and we got on famously. Since then we have stayed in touch over the years. Clemens doesn’t just do rock photography either, he went over and did a fairly so bering and interesting photo essay on the children of Bosnia during the war. He’s a very paradoxical kind of dude, he’s seen a lot of horrific scenes. Seems that whenever we are in Europe, we met up with Clemens and when the Fall Tour came together we ask ed him to come over to photograph some of the shows. All the photographs we used on Live Between Us came from Clemens.
Rob
On the record title …
It’s funny, Davis, who was originally the sax player in the band made this mural "the Hip live between us" a long time ago. When it came time to figure out what we were going to call this record, someone said why don’t we call it "the Hip live between us. " Then someone suggested, well why don’t you go down and photograph that thing so I went down and shot a roll of film. We took the image and used a computer to get the really interesting bits from the wall. What we got will be on the CD itself, so it kind of has this weird 3-D look.
Deciding to do a live record …
I think we decided part way through the U.S. tour that we were going to do something live. We thought okay it’s time, we’ll do something. We all knew we wanted a single show, but then we were having trouble, deciding which show to choose. Some of us woul d think this show and others would say no, that show was better. By the time of the Fall Tour we had still not found the single show we all wanted to release, but the desire was still there to find the right one and this winter we all decided on the Cobo show.
"We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream"
Dana
Posts: 1,365
Threads: 71
Joined: Apr 2009
Reputation:
0
Went through this stuff many years ago, excellent read! Thanks.
"we've only got three hundred feet to go ..."
Posts: 922
Threads: 32
Joined: Jul 2004
Reputation:
0
Nice to re-read that again. Haven't seen it in many years. Kind of re-kindles the fires for another chapter in the saga of the Tragically Hip.
Posts: 2,672
Threads: 57
Joined: Sep 2004
Reputation:
0
It's such a great recording. Wish I'd seen them on that tour.
Jeff
June 21, 2003 Toronto, ON: SkyDome
July 1, 2004 Toronto, ON: Molson Amphitheatre
November 26, 2004 Toronto, ON: Air Canada Centre
June 24, 2006 Toronto, ON: Historic Fort York
May 10, 2007 Indianapolis, IN: The Vogue
July 14, 2011 Edmonton, AB: Northlands Festival Site
June 30, 2012 Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON: The Commons at Butler's Barracks
January 23, 2013 Edmonton, AB: Rexall Place
July 28, 2016 Edmonton, AB: Rexall Place
Posts: 2
Threads: 1
Joined: Apr 2014
Reputation:
0
Our band -- Strictly Hip did a show at The Tralf in Buffalo last year where we performed 'Up To Here' in order, in its entirety note-for-note. The response was really positive so we immediately planned on doing another record in the same manner. Doing LBU seemed pretty ambitious...to perform a live record with all of its nuances and all of the intros and rants and whatnot. I suppose we will attempt that by the end of 2014. But, yeah, a very daunting musical task to identify the little stuff like I mentioned in the original post. Especially when trying to be respectful of the original performance with music accuracy. There's a lot to prepare to pull that off.
Posts: 683
Threads: 15
Joined: Oct 2004
Reputation:
0
I just posted that Gord Sinclair quote without comment to the hips tour announcement on facebook
