Gary McCracken wrote a song called 'Small Town Blues' about wanting to leave Sarnia, Ontario, behind, built on a line he was proud of: "You can only drive down main street so many times." His band, Max Webster, kept the music and had lyricist Pye Dubois rework the words; the result became the 1979 hit 'A Million Vacations,' and McCracken sang it himself, lead vocal from behind his own drum kit. He left Sarnia for the touring life, then came back to it anyway. McCracken died in Sarnia on September 17, 2026, at 75, after spending his later decades there teaching music.

He was born in Sarnia on May 19, 1951, and started on drums before he was a teenager. At Sarnia Collegiate he became friends with a classmate named Kim Mitchell, and by the mid-1970s both were playing in bands around southwestern Ontario, McCracken keeping time for the Windsor trio Zing Dingo alongside bassist Dave Myles, who would later join him in Max Webster. When Mitchell needed a drummer for his own band in 1976, he called McCracken, who made his recording debut the following year on High Class in Borrowed Shoes.

McCracken stayed with Max Webster through four studio albums: that record, Mutiny Up My Sleeve, A Million Vacations, and 1980's Universal Juveniles, before the band dissolved in 1981. A Million Vacations went platinum in Canada, and the title track kept finding new listeners on the radio for years afterward; two decades on, it was still drawing hundreds of votes in an online readers' poll of the best Canadian rock songs. "Everyone agreed we would do that song," McCracken said of submitting 'Small Town Blues' for the album, and he later marveled, half amused, at how many fans never made the connection between the singer and the man keeping time: "Half the people in Canada don't even realize I sing the damn song."

Universal Juveniles carried 'Battle Scar,' a dual-drummer collaboration with Rush's Neil Peart. McCracken and Peart worked out the arrangement together beforehand, then recorded it in the summer of 1980 at Phase One Studios in Toronto with producer Jack Richardson, trading cymbal crashes and groove across two full kits. The pairing grew out of years on the road: Max Webster had opened for Rush more than 200 times through the late 1970s, and Geddy Lee remembered McCracken, whom he called 'Stixie,' as a close friend from those tours, recalling a spontaneous trip to Paris together when a show was cancelled.

In 1985, McCracken left touring behind, got married, and returned to Sarnia to teach music, a job he held for nearly three decades. He kept playing too, working with Triumph, Wrabit, Klaatu and Tres Hombres and releasing an instrumental solo album, Audioscapes, in 2000. Looking back on Max Webster's odd mix of hard rock and humor, he put it simply: "We did quite well for a band that was so weird." In 2007, Toronto's Q107 named him among its Top 40 Classic Rock Drummers of All Time, the same year he rejoined Max Webster for a run of reunion shows; a Sarnia newspaper profile in 2013 found him still teaching, still working through songs with students much as he once worked through parts with Peart.

Max Webster's own recognition came later still: in 2023 the band was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame at a Massey Hall ceremony, one of 13 Canadian rock acts honoured that night alongside April Wine, Loverboy and Trooper. McCracken, the band's longest-serving drummer across four stints between 1976 and 2007, attended in person with his former bandmates. Word of his death in September 2026 brought tributes from across Canadian rock. Bandleader Kim Mitchell called him "my brother in RAWK" in a short online post. Lee Aaron, who hired McCracken for her own band after Max Webster split, called it "the astounding privilege of having Gary in my live band." Geddy Lee wrote, "Just heard the very sad news that my old friend, drummer, Gary 'Stixie' McCracken has passed away."

Away from music, McCracken followed sports and spent summers camping, canoeing and fishing at Stony Lake in Ontario's Kawarthas. He is survived by his daughter, Molly McCracken, and his twin sister, Kathy Seager, along with nieces and nephews in the Sarnia area; he was predeceased by his sister, Connie McNeil, and his parents, Doris and John McCracken. His imprint sits in two unlikely places: a song about escaping a small town that became his signature, still played on classic rock radio, and nearly three decades of Sarnia students who learned timekeeping from a touring professional rather than a legend. Max Webster's plaque on Canada's Walk of Fame carries his name next to the bandmates he crossed the country and the ocean with as a young man; the drum lessons in his hometown were where he chose to spend the rest of his working life.