June 6th, 2000. Track six on "Music @ Work" opens on tabla, and the album credits name the player as Mr. Hussein. That's the whole credit.

'The Bastard' sits between 'Stay' and 'The Completists' on the record The Tragically Hip made with Steve Berlin and Mark Vreeken, the one that took the 2001 Juno for Best Rock Album. It was never a single, and Chris from Seattle has a theory about why. It finished 119th of 169 on the TTHTop40 Countdown, and Hipbase and setlist.fm log it live just fourteen times (submitted set lists only, so the real number runs higher). Then the live poll in the Facebook group came back 36 percent love it, 46 percent like it, and 13 percent tolerate it, one of the highest tolerate numbers the show has seen.

The panel spins a 2000 recording out of Cleveland, Gord singing his heart out, and Chris hears Godzilla in the rhythm section. Then the lyric sheet comes out. Crepuscular rays. Winged elephants. Purple Italians. A fire-and-brimstone preacher shouting about Philadelphia. One panelist thinks he's cracked it after twenty-six years of not reading the words. Another thinks Gord just liked how they sounded. Nobody's sure Gord would side with either of them.

Underneath all of it sits a record the band never quite got behind. Steve came in calling "Music @ Work" his least favourite record by The Hip and walked out rediscovering it. Chris has it in his top five and has defended it on this show more than once. And jD once asked Johnny Fay about a "Music @ Work" box set. His reaction is in here, and so is Greg's reaction to his reaction.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• The icebreaker. One song by The Hip each they never got to hear live, and a pair of Calgary tickets from 2009 that Steve sold and still thinks about.

• September 23rd in The Hip Handbook. A busy date, and two of the shows on it have somebody on this panel attached.

• Steve's first time seeing The Hip was at a zoo. Yes, a zoo. Gord took the setting to heart.

• "If this song was a car it would be a V8 with a manual transmission." Chris from Seattle, and he has the downshifts mapped.

• Billy Sunday. Chris has a theory about Philadelphia, and Steve adds a layer from the ballpark.

• Pell-mell, augurs, and augers (the ice fishing kind, per the chat). Greg's read on what's about to blow.

• Steve hears another song of theirs hiding in this one, and it's one he doesn't care for at all.

• Search for this song on YouTube and you might land on a Replacements cover at First Avenue instead. Steve did.

• Next week the wheel lands on 'Radio Show,' from the "Fully Completely" sessions, the one that stayed in the vault until the 2014 deluxe reissue.

THE PANEL

• Chris from Seattle. Back again, and the loudest defender of "Music @ Work" this panel has had. Saw The Hip three times at the Moore Theatre, and first saw them with Greg, who he's known since they were both 18. His band is Loud Flowers: loudflowers.band

• Steve from Toronto. Back again, a week ahead of schedule, and his plug this week is impending fatherhood. Originally from Thunder Bay. Heard 11 of the 14 songs on "Music @ Work" live. Not this one.

• Greg from Tacoma. Back again, once his audio caught up with him. Wore this record out on a portable CD player while painting his deck in the summer of 2000, and he's the one who turned Chris on to The Hip in the first place. Makes music as Hadees Market Music.

Big thanks to Chris, Steve, and Greg, and to a stacked chat. Twenty-six years in, 'The Bastard' still sounds like Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip with the pedal on the floor.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2, raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. It's sold out, but if a ticket shakes loose, jD will hear about it first: tthpodcastseries@gmail.com. Updates at facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ. Twelve chapters across Canada and into the United States at gedfest.ca.

THE HIP HANDBOOK

The free, non-monetized archive of the discography, the lyrics, and the live performances, and where every tale of the tape starts: thehiphandbook.tthpods.com

YER LETTER

One email a month, the whole network in one place: subscribe.tthpods.com

THE TIP JAR

Greg dared you. Tips, never donations: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

FIND US

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Just as Well': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/ddf96225-1bd4-468b-881a-aa091a7e6148

'Putting Down': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/6cfb0a5e-5909-40ec-8559-62ca0acd580e

'Tiger The Lion': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/718fe20e-83d6-4c69-86eb-cc2b4af02834

Live play counts come from Hipbase and setlist.fm, and the countdown rank and poll numbers from the show itself, as cited on the stream. Release date and the tabla credit come from the "Music @ Work" credits as listed on Wikipedia.

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1990. The Misty Moon Cabaret in Halifax, MuchMusic cameras rolling, and Gord doesn't dress it up. It's a rock song. Two and a half minutes, and then gone.

'Just As Well' is track five on "Saskadelphia" (May 21, 2021), the six-song surprise that landed on the May long weekend. It was cut in New Orleans during the "Road Apples" sessions, with Don Smith producing and Bruce Barris engineering, and then it sat in the vault for more than thirty years. setlist.fm has ten documented live plays, every one of them in 1990, and nothing after. The live poll in the Facebook group came back 46 percent love it and 44 percent like it, plus 3 percent asking what in the hell 'Just As Well' even is. jD's gut says that 3 percent might be a single vote.

The panel isn't buying the ten. Patrick from Newmarket has the 1990 tour itinerary out of the "This Is Our Life" book in his head, and Glenn from Melbourne can't see a song they were workshopping on stage stopping at ten nights. Then comes the harder question: where did this one ever belong? jD hears it as a Baby Blue EP song that missed its bus. Glenn has a timeline that says otherwise, and a theory about whose pen the opening lines came off. Ian from Maple Ridge turns up halfway through, blames the West Coast clock, and still lands the comparison nobody else had.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• The icebreaker. One song each they wish they'd heard live. Patrick's answer comes with a pair of near misses that still sting, and Glenn's pick has his own surname in it.

• The Misty Moon version, spun in full. Glenn calls it the definitive take, and the line he points to is the angriest one in the song.

• "Are you ready, Bruce?" Who Bruce is, and what Ian hears in the way Gord asks.

• Pig heaven, "Animal Farm," and a crossroads with a certain bluesman waiting at it. Glenn's reading of the lyric is the most ambitious thing anyone has said about a two-and-a-half-minute bar song, and jD needs a second to recover.

• The boots. Patrick ties one line to what Gord did to a pair of boots at Molson Park a few months later.

• The 1970 hit they used to drop into the middle of it live, and what Glenn thinks that says about how seriously they were taking it.

• "If the Ramones did a Lynyrd Skynyrd song." Ian, on what this actually is.

• Patrick puts his NPS hat on for the poll, then admits where 'Just As Well' ranks among the six on "Saskadelphia."

• The one song Patrick still skips, even though it's shorter than this one.

• "I'll never skip it because it's too short to skip." Glenn from Melbourne, making the lazy man's case.

• Next week the wheel lands on 'The Bastard,' from "Music @ Work."

THE PANEL

• Glenn from Melbourne. Met 'Just As Well' when "Saskadelphia" came out, from a corner of the world without many bootlegs, or many people to talk about the band with. He's a photographer who leads photo tours to far-off places, with India and Bangladesh on the calendar next year. He says he's the only Glenn Lavender in the world, so look him up.

• Patrick from Newmarket. Freelance journalist and photographer, the tall guy at Toronto shows with the pro gear or the iPhone, and you'll see him at festivals across Simcoe County next year. Showed up in a 9:30 Club shirt from the one time he saw The Hip in DC. His ear for the pre-"Road Apples" material goes back to tape trading, long before Napster.

• Ian from Maple Ridge. Sings in Gift Shop, a West Coast tribute to The Tragically Hip, with an October 17th date at Club 240 in Crescent Beach. The big one is Saturday, October 24th: Gift Shop headlines GEDfest Vancouver at the Biltmore.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2, raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. It's sold out right now, but if a ticket shakes loose, jD will hear about it first. Drop him a line at jd@tthpods.com. Updates at facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

THE HIP HANDBOOK

The free discography, lyrics, and live-performance archive behind the tale of the tape every week: thehiphandbook.tthpods.com

YER LETTER

One email a month, the whole network in one place: subscribe.tthpods.com

THE TIP JAR

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Vaccination Scar': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/5fa3fc7c-f01b-4eae-a3de-5cadc658b9f9

'Putting Down': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/6cfb0a5e-5909-40ec-8559-62ca0acd580e

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 A Thursday night in October. A narrow bar on 8th Avenue in Calgary. A pile of crumpled fives and tens that added up to $7,000.

That is where GEDfest starts, and this is the episode where the people who were standing in that room tell you how it happened. GEDfest is Gord Edgar Downie Fest, a celebration of the life and music of Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip, and in 2026 it runs in twelve chapters across Canada and into the United States. It began with a handful of guys in a basement in Crestmont learning "Road Apples" front to back, and one sentence from Don Martin that changed everything: the only way we could play this live is if we had a charity.

Trickle Down is the band at the centre of it, and their origin is not a music story, it is a birthday story. Don picked up a Squier starter kit in his mid-forties with a $300 work bonus burning a hole in his pocket. A 50th birthday jam. Then a 60th birthday jam ten years later, with a singer who had a great voice and never once learned the words. Keith Dick sat down behind a kit and learned to play drums, more or less, that afternoon. Everything that follows - the Legion, the Palace, the Big Four, Buffalo - runs back through that room.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Keith on the phonetics problem. GEDfest has been pronounced just about every way a person can pronounce it, and he is quietly keeping score.

• Don's version of the origin story does not match Keith's version of the origin story, and the gap between them is the best five minutes of the episode.

• Jeff Hiscock could not get his own gear through the front door of the first GEDfest, because the room he was about to play in was already full. What he did about it involves reloading the car.

• A tax lawyer in Toronto that nobody in the organization had ever met, one link on The Tragically Hip's website, and the donation that made Don think this thing might actually have legs.

• Kevin McKay and his wife Tracy were the first two people to walk into a GEDfest that Keith had not personally invited. How they found out about it is a very Calgary answer.

• Ian Martin's opening move after seeing Trickle Down play a Canada Day gig was to walk up and start hugging the band. His second move was the website contact form, and Keith still remembers opening it.

• A man in his twenties sang every word from the front row of a packed room last year, then asked Jeff to sign the set list and told him why he was there. Jeff still gets goosebumps telling it.

• Ken Bellis on the thing about The Hip's bass parts that you do not hear until you sit down and try to play one.

THE PANEL

• Keith Dyck, co-founder of GEDfest and the drummer in Trickle Down, from Calgary. He is a partner in a wealth management firm by day, which has nothing to do with any of this. His favourite song to play is 'Blow at High Dough', and he has a confession about 'Courage' that he saves for the next episode.

• Don Martin, founding member of Trickle Down, from Calgary. Keith's father-in-law. Came for 'Scared', stayed for 'Nautical Disaster', and once had WestJet lose his luggage and find it again on the morning of a podcast taping.

• Ian Martyn, board director of chapters, from Calgary. Twelve cities this year, and he can tell you a story from most of them. Describes his own involvement as a bromance, and he is not wrong.

• Jeff Hiscock, guitar player in Trickle Down, from Calgary. Favourite to listen to is 'Fully Completely'. Favourite to play is 'Nautical Disaster', for a reason involving singer Dave Harris's shoulder that has now become a nightly ritual.

• Kevin McKay, OG GEDhead, from Calgary. Works in the medical industry, which is part of why this one landed the way it did. Currently on a 'Poets' kick, and he is right to be.

• Ken Bellis, bass player in Trickle Down, from Calgary. Went with 'Grace, Too' inside four seconds, as a bass player is obliged to do. Also wore the wrong shirt.

GEDFEST 2026

GEDfest is Gord Edgar Downie Fest, and in its ninth year it runs in twelve chapters across Canada and, for the first time, in the United States. Every chapter raises money for a cause in its own community. Find your city at gedfest.ca. jD runs the Toronto chapter, playing the Horseshoe Tavern on Saturday, October 17, with Grace, 2 on stage, raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets and details at facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

THE HIP HANDBOOK

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July 16th, 2005. Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland. The Tragically Hip played 'Vaccination Scar' for the fifty-ninth time, and never again.

Track four on "In Between Evolution" (June 29th, 2004), the ninth studio record of thirteen, cut at Studio X in Seattle with Adam Kasper producing, and the album landed at number one in Canada in its first week. 'Vaccination Scar' was the first single off it. It finished 66th on the TTHTop40 Countdown, nowhere near the top 40. Then the live poll went up in the Facebook group and came back 64 percent love it, 33 percent like it. jD's read on the leftover one percent: that's the margin of error, not three actual humans.

Which brings up the thing the panel cannot get past. Fifty-nine live plays, and forty-two of them were show openers. The band walked out and led with this song more nights than not. On the record, it sits fourth. jD calls that a missed opportunity and wants to put the question to the band directly. Jeff from Newmarket has a baseball-lineup theory. Brian from Buffalo thinks there's no way it shouldn't open the thing. Nobody defends the sequencing, and everybody agrees the band was going to do exactly what it wanted anyway.

It is also a political record, made in an election year in an American studio, and Tracey from LA says the song reads different now than it did in 2004. Underneath all of it: the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a word that turns out to have nothing to do with the bridge at all, and one line in the album booklet that settles an argument the internet has been having for twenty years.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• The icebreaker. One song each they never got to hear live. Brian's answer comes attached to a number that stings.
• jD did some housekeeping in the shuffle machine before the show. The odds for every future episode just changed.
• The lap steel argument. Jeff's case for why the slide lines on this one hit differently than every other Hip song with a slide on it, and the earlier song he says is its cousin.
• The American word. Gord never says it out loud, and Jeff has a guess at what it is.
• Forgetting, or for getting. Greg from Tacoma has the album booklet open in the chat, and the answer is better than either one.
• Wobbly, and the Wobblies. What jD found when he stopped looking at the bridge.
• The broken guitar string tour. Brian's name for this stretch of shows, and what he thinks Gord was taking out on those strings.
• A story about Eddie Vedder and the cutting room floor that nobody in the room can quite confirm.
• Where Brian ranks it out of every song the band ever recorded, off a list he sat down and made the week Gord died.
• "It's three chords with attitude. It's like garage band, punk." Tracey from LA, on why the simplicity is the whole point.
• Next week the wheel lands on 'Evelyn,' from the debut EP, the Baby Blue album.

THE PANEL

• Tracey from LA. Back again. Came to the band late and is making up for it with bootlegs and live recordings, and she would take any of it live, though 'Grace, Too' is what she would ask the jukebox genie for. Hears Gord's phrasing as cards coming out of a magician's mouth.
• Brian from Buffalo. Back again. 54 shows deep, an honorary Canadian who reckons he learned most of his Canadian history off Hip lyrics. Saw this song four times, all four in a row, three of them as the opener, and never again after that. Go Bills.
• Jeff from Newmarket. His first time in the chair, originally out of Belleville, which makes him the second Jeff from that town to sit on this panel and the reason jD is coughing into his hand all episode. Plays guitar, bass, and sings in a cover band with a January 16th date at the Monarch in Toronto. Not a Hip tribute act, but The Hip rotates into the set often enough.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

THE HIP HANDBOOK

The free discography, lyrics, and live-performance archive behind the tale of the tape every week: thehiphandbook.tthpods.com. Built on setlist.fm and Hipbase, with every source credited on the page.

YER LETTER

Once a month, one email, the whole network in one place. What went out across all eight shows, what is coming, what jD has been listening to, and the odd thing that never makes it to a microphone. It is free, it is a letter rather than a broadcast, and it goes out to the community first. subscribe.tthpods.com

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Putting Down': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/6cfb0a5e-5909-40ec-8559-62ca0acd580e

'Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/68d2991b-9074-43ef-bd71-aa832c59a787

Live play counts and the retirement date come from setlist.fm and Hipbase by way of The Hip Handbook, as cited on the stream. Album credits and the release date come from Wikipedia and the "In Between Evolution" sleeve (see Block C).

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August 20th, 2016. Kingston. Thirteen songs into the last set The Tragically Hip ever played, and 'Putting Down' made the cut.

Track four on "Music @ Work" (2000), the second of two records Steve Berlin made with the boys, and the one that took home the 2001 Juno for Best Rock Album (per Wikipedia and Discogs, still owed a HipMuseum or This Is Our Life cross-check). It sits at 143 out of 169 on the TTHTop40 Countdown, a deep cut by that measure alone. Then the Facebook group poll came back and the ranking didn't survive contact with the room: like or love landing somewhere in the 80s or 90s percent, by the panel's own count. Justin's read: run the original poll again with a fan base twice the size it was when it ran, and 143 doesn't happen.

It's a callback week too. This same song turned up at Historic Fort York on June 24th, 2006, four songs ahead of 'No Threat,' the track this show covered last week (per setlist.fm).

The lyrics get worked over three different ways before anybody lands close to the same page. Indigenous reconciliation, read through "the documented indigenous" and "civilization flipped its desk." A career-long metaphor about writing itself, "paint and sketch" as the whole method. And a theory about the United State of Ricochet that might be about atomic particles, might be about Gord catching flack for something he said, might be neither. Nobody wins the argument. Everybody's a little bit right, which tracks for a Gord Downie lyric.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Breck's debut, and the two words he reaches for before anything else about the song: crispy and classic.
• The unsteeped teabag. What Breck gets called mid-episode, and why it sticks.
• A grade five teacher with an alarming approach to desk discipline, and the times tables it apparently taught for life.
• The case for Gord Sinclair's harmonies being the most underrated thing on the whole record. Justin makes it twice, unprompted.
• End of summer picks. Justin's answer is this song itself, which is the whole reason he's in the chair this week. Breck goes with 'Ahead By A Century'. Toots goes with 'Lake Fever', the track right before this one on the record.
• "I feel this tune and I know all the words and I can sing all the words, but it doesn't mean that I understand them." Justin, more or less summing up the whole hour.

Next week the wheel lands on 'Vaccination Scar,' from "In Between Evolution."

THE PANEL

• Breck from Reno. First time in the chair. A musician (formerly of Trouble Show) who hears the interplay between Paul and Rob before he hears anything else. Plays Sagebrush Sounds in Winnemucca, Nevada this month, put on by High Desert Habit, with new music of his own coming this fall.
• Toots from Whitby. Back again. A pro gigging drummer, twenty years alongside Matthew Holpe, with a sold-out barn show called September Songs on the 12th and a new project debuting October 30th, his 50th birthday, at Melanie Pringles in Whitby.
• Justin from Bridport, Vermont. Back again, and showed up having already decided this was his song of the summer before jD even asked the question. Announces Sprint Cars of New England at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and helps run the Vermont Motorsports Hall of Fame, which names its 2026 class in early October at the Milk Bowl, Thunder Road.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

THE HIP HANDBOOK

The free discography, lyrics, and live-performance archive keeps growing: thehiphandbook.tthpods.com.

YER LETTER

Once a month, the whole network in one email. subscribe.tthpods.com

THE TIP JAR

If the shows are worth something to you, buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40.

FIND US

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'No Threat': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/46c0301d-0fa0-4cb4-8154-1836552e3a66

'Tiger The Lion': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/718fe20e-83d6-4c69-86eb-cc2b4af02834

Setlist details for Kingston (August 20, 2016) and Fort York (June 24, 2006) come from setlist.fm, cited here. Album credits and the Juno Award come from Wikipedia and Discogs (see the fact-check notes in Block C).

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June 24th, 2006. Historic Fort York, Toronto. Twenty-two songs, and buried at number fourteen is a track The Tragically Hip only ever played nine times.

That is the version we spin. Same night they pulled '38 Years Old' out of the vault for the first time since July of 1995. Nine plays for 'No Threat', per Hipbase and setlist.fm, and one of those nine got audited live on this stream. There was an entry claiming November 15th, 1991. Andrew went after it, Steve pulled the tape down to check, and the correction went in while the mics were still hot.

'No Threat' opens "Yer Favourites", the November 2005 double disc where fans voted on every track except the two nobody had heard yet. This one, and 'The New Maybe' closing disc two. Adam Kasper made both, the same man who made "In Between Evolution" the year before. Track one is the brand new song. Track two is 'Grace, Too'. Kevin has a word for that sequencing decision, and the word is bold.

It landed at 85 on the TTHTop40 Countdown, between 'Daredevil' and 'Sherpa'. Then the poll came back from the Facebook group with a stack of loves, which was nobody's prediction at this table, plus eight percent who came right out and said they dislike it. Steve did not vote. Steve tells us where he would have landed, and it opens something bigger than the song: what do you do with a band you love and songs you don't? He has a list. He is not sorry about the list.

Then there is the guitar. Jeff from Vaughan puts it in the chat first, that it is the guitar that doesn't work here, and Kevin has been circling the same thing all week. A chord that goes somewhere your ear refuses to follow. He can tell you which side of the mix it comes from and which of the two of them is playing it.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Yelly Gord. Andrew's name for the thing that starts here and does not stop, straight through 'Yer Not the Ocean' and into a version of 'Blow at High Dough' that is barely a word any more. Where it came from, and which album this song belonged on instead.

• Kevin catches the flip. First person the whole way through, and then for one line it isn't, and there is a woman in the room.

• The last thing Gord says in the song. Nobody here can explain it. Three theories, no verdict, and one line jD reads out that stops everybody cold: you die to your fans one window at a time.

• Andrew went hunting the origin story. Nine or ten full shows from 1996, chasing a rant that is supposed to be the seed of this song. He did not find it. He found something else about peacekeeping that he cannot now unhear.

• The Hip headlined the first two concerts ever held at the Air Canada Centre. Steve knows who opened, and who played the third night.

• The anniversary weekend. jD in Kingston for Springer Market Square, murals and painted guitars all over a town that does not normally do it up. Steve stretched it over three days in Toronto and got a west end blackout two songs into the last show. Kevin was in Ireland.

• The live record, and the two songs on it that are not live. Andrew has a fix.

• End of summer picks. Steve's 'The Dire Wolf' and a whole summer in Kingston in 2002. Andrew's '11th Fret', a hangover song and he means that kindly. Kevin's 'Three Pistols', Tom Thomson and Algonquin Park. Steve's first answer was not one of theirs at all, and he owns it on air.

Next week the wheel lands on 'Putting Down' from "Music @ Work". Which the band played at Fort York that same June night in 2006, four songs before this one. So there's that.

THE PANEL

• Kevin from Sarnia. First time at the table. He was buying every one of these records the week it came out and cannot remember buying this one, which tells you something. Plays in a cover band called 402 West, named for the highway between London and Sarnia.

• Andrew from Winnipeg. Back again, and the closest thing this show has to a research department. Plays bass in Crooked Ice, whose record is "Dark Stars", and he cut the video too. His radio show and podcast is Soup Full of Radio.

• Steve from Toronto. Fourth time on a jD show inside a month, which he points out himself. At Fort York in 2006, in the building in Kingston in 2016. He rides for the Tragically Clipped, a Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation team that began as an act of spite between two friends and has raised over $200,000 since. What happened to one of his riders at a rest stop is worth the wait.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

YER LETTER

Once a month, the whole network in one email. Where the shows are headed, what got made, and what did not fit anywhere else. Free. subscribe.tthpods.com

THE TIP JAR

If the shows are worth something to you, buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40.

FIND US

Home: home.tthpods.com

Email: jd@tthpods.com

Facebook community: community.tthpods.com

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Tiger The Lion': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/718fe20e-83d6-4c69-86eb-cc2b4af02834

'Emperor Penguin': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/a2f229b2-b5fc-41e4-8d78-632080d31a3b

'Pigeon Camera': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/49a9167c-6f8d-4641-8306-959189b38ec8

Live performance counts, dates, and the Fort York set list come from Hipbase and setlist.fm, as cited on the stream. Production credits from the "Yer Favourites" liner notes.

#TheTragicallyHip #YerFavourites #TTHOnShuffle #GordDownie #TheHip #TTHPods

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June 16th, 2000. The first of only 89 times The Tragically Hip ever played 'Tiger The Lion' live, and the last one is a long way off from there.

Eighty-nine, per Hipbase and setlist.fm. That's the whole run, first to last, June 2000 to a night in November 2009. Fifteen of those as an opener, which makes sense to everybody at the table. Fifteen as an encore, which makes sense to nobody. It never went out as a single. The record it sits second on went two times platinum in Canada and took home the Juno, and it's the second of the two Steve Berlin made with the boys. 'Tiger The Lion' landed at number 65 on the TTHTop40 Countdown and not one person in this room is at peace with that.

Then there's the poll. Just over half the Facebook group came back with love it, which the panel did not see coming, and close to eight in ten landed at like it or better. For a track this strange, sitting where it sits, that's a number worth chewing on. Somebody in the comments wanted an option between love it and like it. Jeff has a fix for that, and it's better than extra medium.

Duxoop from Toledo dropped a question in the chat that stopped the table cold. What is that opening noise? Jeff had already gone looking earlier in the week, so we get the answer live: what the sound actually is, who made it, and the instrument buried underneath it that most of the congregation has never once picked out. Twenty-six years of listening and there it is, right in front of everybody the whole time.

We spin the MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive version from that same summer, Chris Brown and Kate Fenner on stage with them, and then Jeff comes back with something none of us caught. Gord is reciting under Rob's outro. Not scatting. Reciting. From a poem, by a Canadian poet Gord loved enough to record in full for a tribute record years later. And the hotel that poem is named for is a ten minute walk from where Jeff grew up.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• John fucking Cage. Greg pulls the passage Gord was reading and puts it in a bigger frame, and it turns out to be about a whole lot more than music. Jeff, meanwhile, has listened to some John Cage and has thoughts about it that are not kind, and he says them anyway.

• A song with no chorus. Not a bridge in the middle either, just a break. So how does it hook anybody? Dave takes a run at that one, and at what Rob does on the outro instead of what any other guitar player would have done with all that room.

• Greg's theory that the catalogue splits into four groups, that this is where the art rock properly starts, and that this cut sits in the top five heaviest songs the band ever recorded. Bombs dropping. His words.

• The sequencing. 'My Music At Work' into 'Tiger The Lion' into 'Lake Fever'. Dave would have moved it. Greg would not have moved a thing.

• Where the lyrics turn. Dave on the shift that starts around this record and how much harder Gord makes you work from here on in, and Greg on the mouth shapes and the dancing and writing words that sound right before they mean anything.

• First listens. A leaked MP3 that took seven hours to download. A boombox on a deck in Tacoma running the record two days straight. A Calgary apartment full of diehards filing this one under wait, what.

Next week the wheel lands on 'No Threat', one of the two new tracks tucked onto "Yer Favourites". Brand new panel, brand new song.

THE PANEL

• Greg from Tacoma. Met the boys back around 'New Orleans Is Sinking', has seven to ten copies of every CD and gave most of them away. He makes music with AI under Hadees Market Music, spelled H-A-D-E-E-S, after his grandparents Hazel and Ira D.

• Jeff from Belleville. Third time in the chair. Belleville sits on the Bay of Quinte, which is exactly why the last ten minutes of this one belong to him.

• Dave from Halifax. First time at the table, and a musician, which shows the second the outro starts.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

THE TIP JAR

Greg asked for this link on mic, so here it is. If the shows are worth something to you, buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40.

FIND US

Home: home.tthpods.com

Email: jd@tthpods.com

Facebook community: community.tthpods.com

Instagram: @tthpods

YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods

Yer Letter: subscribe.tthpods.com

MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Emperor Penguin': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/a2f229b2-b5fc-41e4-8d78-632080d31a3b

'Pigeon Camera': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/49a9167c-6f8d-4641-8306-959189b38ec8

'Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/68d2991b-9074-43ef-bd71-aa832c59a787

Live performance counts, dates, and chart details come from Hipbase and setlist.fm, as cited on the stream. Album details from the "Music @ Work" credits.

#TheTragicallyHip #MusicAtWork #TTHOnShuffle #GordDownie #TheHip #TTHPods

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, it's jD here. August 20th, 2026. Bath, Ontario. A stone coach house west of Kingston that the band turned into a recording room, where "Phantom Power", "Music @ Work", "We Are The Same", and "Man Machine Poem" were all made. Ten years to the day since the last show. This is the last one. Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour ran the length of the Man Machine Poem Tour, city by city, Victoria east to Kingston, and it ends here, in the room where the last record was made. Three fans at the table, and not one of them tells August 20th the same way. One was on the floor. One was in the square with 25,000 people. One was on his couch in Brockville with a bottle of wine and a good reason. 🎸 𝗪𝗛𝗢'𝗦 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘 Shamus from Brockville is a teacher whose marriage is punctuated by The Hip turning up uninvited. A wedding present in 1997 from a friend running sound on Another Roadside Attraction put him somewhere he was not supposed to be, then somewhere better. A door held open at a highway rest stop in 2002 put a member of the band right in front of him and his wife, and what the two of them said in unison is the whole thing in four words. He tried for Kingston, he tried for Ottawa, and he got into the penultimate show because of one message from his wife on the afternoon of. He still has the ticket. He brought it. Eric from Ottawa went to seven shows before Kingston, most of them out west, most of them alone, on advice from his spouse that turned out to be exactly backwards. Kingston was the white whale. He got in because a Canada Post employee named Jonathan Allard refreshed a screen at the right second, ended up holding two front row tickets and nobody to bring, and posted an ad asking people to make him a proposal. What Eric offered instead of a markup, and what he handed over three months in advance on nothing but trust, is the best ticket story this series has turned up. Then he found his seat and found out what was bolted to the floor in front of it. Tiffany from Kingston got a tattoo the morning of the show. The lyrics come from a song she had never heard live, off a record she was still learning, and she was hoping against hope they would play it. They played it. She spent the night in Springer Market Square with her husband and her best friend, bused home so she would not have to think about parking, and hit play on the PVR before her coat was off. She also has the sharpest read on why a night that size, that emotional, with that much beer in it, produced no trouble at all. 💬 𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗬 𝗦𝗔𝗜𝗗 "You're acknowledging that you're on the way out, unfortunately, but yet you're going to park that emotion and you're going to be the undisputed best frontman ever." - Eric from Ottawa "It kind of felt like the day after a wedding. You get married and you've got all this anticipation. And then the event happens and it's over. And you're just sort of like, well, what now?" - Tiffany from Kingston "As a person who's been in bands, there's a thing where nobody's leading. It's almost like a Ouija board." - Shamus from Brockville ⚡ 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗡𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 Thirty songs at the Rogers K-Rock Centre. Three encores, which was not something they did. Eight songs played tight together at the front of the stage before the thunderstorm broke the set open, and the panel has a theory about why the five of them stood that close. Each of them brought one song back. Shamus picked '𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘦', off the record he could not bring himself to listen to until he heard it live. Tiffany picked '𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘉𝘭𝘶𝘦', which is now on her arm. Eric picked '𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴', and his reason has nothing to do with the band and everything to do with where eight thousand people were looking. Setlist confirmed via setlist.fm. ❤️ 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗠 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗔𝗡𝗘𝗟 Tiffany and her husband run a food drive for the Humane Society every December - Fill The Sleigh on Facebook, a sleigh on the front lawn, and about 150 blow molds around it. Three years in, nearly $5,000 and over 5,000 pounds of food. Shamus asks only that you share the road, use yer blinker, and be kind to each other. 🎧 𝗟𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗡 Listen: [EPISODE LINK NEEDED] 🎟️ 𝗚𝗘𝗗𝗙𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗢 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 Saturday, October 17th, 2026. The Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, with Grace 2 on the stage. GEDfest raises money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer, and this community has put nearly $40,000 toward causes like these since 2018. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ Thank you to Shamus, Eric, and Tiffany for closing this out, and to every person who sat down over the run of this series and handed over the most specific night of their life. It was never really about the setlist. So there's that. Where were you on August 20th, 2016? Floor, square, couch, somewhere else entirely. Tell me in the comments. #TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #TTHPods #HipFans #CanadianMusic #InGordWeTrust

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August 20th, 2016. The Rogers K-Rock Centre, Kingston, Ontario. Thirty songs. Three encores, which was not a thing they did. And a country that put down whatever it was holding.

Ten years later, jD asked fifteen people one question. Not what they made of it. Not where it ranks. Just this: where were you.

The answers do not go where you would expect. An airplane hangar outside Olympia, Washington. A garage door in the country north of Superior with fifty people camped in the yard. A smoker in Calgary that had been running since sunrise. A lakeside deck in upstate New York with a bottle of Macallan 12 on it and a great blue heron that keeps turning up in the shape of an album cover. An arena in Chicago where a man from Detroit stood in a Gord Downie shirt underneath a Tigers jersey, missing the whole thing on purpose, waiting to find out whether two sentences he had typed five days earlier had reached anybody.

They had. That is all yer getting.

Who's Here

Adam from Tampa had never seen The Hip play a note and owned five of the records. At 7:55 he told his houseguests he would be back in either five minutes or two and a half hours, went upstairs, and typed the words CBC and The Tragically Hip into a search bar. What he did the following morning cost him the next four years.

Andy from London was three weeks deep into Scotland with a speaking gig in Pennsylvania waiting on the Monday. He flew home without his family for exactly one day. Where he watched it, and who was running the sound there, is the part that still gets him.

Brian from Canastota got hooked by a Saturday Night Live performance in 1995 and never came unhooked. Bose rig on the deck, the lake in front of him, and a heron that has been showing up in a very particular silhouette for years. His wife found him out there at two in the morning.

Brock from Kitchener was in the lower bowl. A ticket scanner went down and he ended up sitting inside a nearly empty K-Rock Centre while eight thousand people waited outside. Ten years on he has still never watched the broadcast. Not once, not one song.

Colin from Winnipeg lost his mother and had his first child inside the same fortnight, and had to move a funeral to do it. He watched with a newborn who is ten years old now. He has a plan for the rewatch, and it involves all three kids.

Dan from Buffalo and Colleen from Buffalo drove in from the Hamilton show with no tickets, no expectations, and their phones switched off at the border. Dan wandered down to look at a boat show at half past nine in the morning and got into a line without asking what the line was for. He was number twenty-eight.

Duxoop from Toledo watched at home, alone, so that nobody could see him cry, pulling CBC down through a Windsor channel on Ohio cable. He knew twelve of the thirty songs that night. He is up to nineteen now, and the way he counts them is not the way you would count them.

Greg from Tacoma spent the evening at his mother Rosalie's 79th birthday party in an airplane hangar, slipping off to a corner every ten minutes with a phone and no headphones. What he heard inside 'Grace, Too' that night he has never stopped hearing, and the people standing beside him in that hangar are a large part of why.

Janice from Kitchener stopped for a photo at the Welcome to Kingston sign, signed the banners downtown, and walked into the arena at the exact moment it stopped letting anybody else in. She has a theory about how many people are eventually going to claim they were in that room.

Jimmy from Detroit had tickets for the London and Toronto shows, and a promise to his wife that put him in Chicago on the 20th instead. Five days out he sat down and wrote two sentences on a message board. He will go to his grave believing somebody read them.

Joanne from Thunder Bay had seen the August 12th show in Toronto and could not get to Kingston. A friend rigged a projector onto a garage door out in the country and fifty people camped in the yard to watch it. One song landed harder than everything around it, and it was not the closer.

Spencer from Calgary made three racks of ribs, a couple dozen perogies by hand, and a house rule about side conversations. Gold glitter letters stuck to the fridge spelling out the songs he was hoping for. Then he walks the setlist album block by album block, and a decade later the surprises still surprise him.

Steve from Toronto got a single ticket half an hour after they went on sale and watched from ten rows back. He has the sharpest disagreement in the whole episode, and it is not about the band. It is about whether the people watching it and the people inside it were even at the same event.

Todd from Fort Mac says the words Fort Mac and 2016 and everybody already knows he means the fire. He watched at his grandfather's house in Louisdale, Cape Breton, with the family in from out west. It was the last time all of them were in that room together.

What They Said

"I'll start with the punchline, which was I was in an airplane hangar weeping."  - Greg from Tacoma

"I went by myself, but I was not alone."  - Andy from London

"When you're watching it on TV and Gord's breaking down at the end of the song, you feel completely helpless. But when you're at the show and that happens, you just start making as much noise as you know how to make to help your guy pull through."  - Steve from Toronto

"To me, it's a celebration of Canadian culture. And I know that was never the intention, but it's just always what it turned out to be."  - Todd from Fort Mac

About That Night

Thirty songs at the Rogers K-Rock Centre. 'Fifty-Mission Cap' into 'Courage', 'Wheat Kings', and 'At the Hundredth Meridian' - four songs in and the whole country was already accounted for. Then 'Tired as Fuck', uncensored, on the national broadcaster. Then a thunderstorm nobody had been warned about. Then 'My Music at Work', 'Lake Fever', 'Toronto #4', and 'The Last of the Unplucked Gems', which is not a setlist, it is a dare. Three encores, closing on 'Ahead by a Century'. Setlist confirmed via setlist.fm.

Fifteen people, one date, and not one of them tells it the same way. That is the whole point of this show, and Kingston is where it lands.

GEDfest Toronto 2026

Saturday, October 17th, 2026. The Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, with Grace, 2 on the stage. GEDfest raises money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer, and this community has put nearly $40,000 toward causes like these since 2018. Tickets and details: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

The Community

Yer Letter lands once a month with everything happening across the network. Subscribe at subscribe.tthpods.com. The Facebook group is roughly 7,500 fans deep and still climbing at community.tthpods.com. Leave yer own Hipstory any time - jD reads every one.

• Home: home.tthpods.com
• Email: jd@tthpods.com
• Instagram: @tthpods
• YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods

Tip Jar

Editing is hard and the battery needs charging. Buy jD a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

More From The Final Tour

• Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Ottawa: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/7fb753ff-654b-4be4-ab44-3cbae3b7a68b
• Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Hamilton: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/fae76ee3-738f-4007-80c8-7140729bb295

Closing

Thank you to Adam, Andy, Brian, Brock, Colin, Dan, Colleen, Duxoop, Greg, Janice, Jimmy, Joanne, Spencer, Steve, and Todd. Fifteen people handed over the most specific night of their lives and asked for nothing back. So there's that.

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #TTHPods #HipFans #CanadianMusic #InGordWeTrust

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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

August 18, 2016. Ottawa, the second last night, and two fans who were in that building take jD back inside - ten years to the day.

Thursday, August 18, 2016. The Canadian Tire Centre, out past the ring of car dealerships in the west end, and The Tragically Hip had two nights left. Kingston was already a pipe dream by then. For most of the country, Ottawa was the last chance.

Ten years to the day, jD sits down with two fans who were in that room. Shawn from Ottawa, who has been in this community since he was sixteen. And Justin from Bridport, who you know from Discovering Downie, and who only got to Ottawa because a stranger with long hair heard "Yer Favourites" playing over the PA at a dirt track in Vermont.

Two ticket stories, and neither one lands where you would guess. Shawn's shows up in his inbox, out of a presale nobody has ever really talked about in public, and there is something waiting in the will call envelope that nobody warned him about. Justin's shows up from a man whose name he did not have yet. He said yes first and introduced himself second.

The songs: Justin starts to say 'Grace, Too', catches himself, and lands somewhere else. Shawn takes a deep cut off "In Between Evolution", the first record that ever got its hooks into him. They both land on 'Summer's Killing Us', and Ottawa turned out to be the last place The Tragically Hip ever played it.

Then they walk the set list, and it is not the greatest hits argument you would expect. 'Opiated' out of nowhere. Four from "In Between Evolution" and four from "Day for Night", and the moment mid-set when Shawn worked out that none of those songs were going to make it to Kingston. Justin honoured Gord's wishes and kept the phone in his pocket, right up until he didn't.

There is the morning of the announcement, too. Justin spent it alone in a car in Vermont, listening to a DJ who could not finish a sentence, with nobody to call. Shawn spent it in a country where everybody already knew before he was properly awake. Ten years later, hearing each other's version, that gap is the thing that gets them both.

And then there is what happened after the lights came up, which involves two flights of stairs, a room that was not supposed to be a party, and a conversation outside it with somebody's grandfather. That one belongs to Shawn.

Two nights later, one of them was inside the K-Rock Centre, still convinced right up to the turnstile that his ticket could not possibly be real. The other was at a racetrack, deliberately not watching.

THE PANEL

• Shawn from Ottawa - on Hipbase since he was sixteen and the resident kid brother of that community. In the family section on the night. In Kingston two nights later on a ticket a stranger handed him for nothing.

• Justin from Bridport - Discovering Downie panelist, and the PR guy, announcer, lawnmower, and toilet cleaner at a Vermont dirt track. The American in the upper bowl who felt Canadian for exactly one night.

SOURCES

Set list for August 18, 2016 at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa, and the July 22, 2016 Victoria set list - source: setlist.fm. Thanks to Darren at The Tragically Hip Archive, and to the tapers, for the recordings Shawn listened back to before this one.

THE GATHERING IN KINGSTON

August 20 to 23, 2026, alongside Forever Hip - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. The CBC broadcast re-airs on the 22nd. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list. And if you spot a purple shirt or a purple lanyard in Kingston that weekend, that's a safe person to talk to.

GEDFEST TORONTO

Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

Thanks to Shawn and Justin, because without them, there's not a show. Next stop: Kingston, and the end of the line.

MORE FROM THE TOUR

Victoria: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/99071e40-9d10-48f8-9b5d-f92416e791c3

Winnipeg: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/bf776e9a-c431-41bc-b605-f73fff1155d3

And because 'Gus: The Polar Bear from Central Park' turned up in the Ottawa set, The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream: Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/68d2991b-9074-43ef-bd71-aa832c59a787

SUPPORT THE WORK

The tip jar: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

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#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #DayForNight #InBetweenEvolution #HipFans #TTHPods

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September 14th, 2009. Edmonton. The last time The Tragically Hip ever played 'Emperor Penguin', and not one person in that building knew it.

Seventy-two performances. That's the whole run. The first on July 2nd, 1998, a couple of weeks before "Phantom Power" was even in stores, and the last one in Edmonton on the We Are The Same tour before the song went in a drawer for good. Justin pulled that off setlist.fm live on the stream, Hipbase backs it up, and it turned into the thing nobody saw coming, because one of the two guys at the table tonight is Shawn from Edmonton. He was at that show. He found out on mic.

We're on a Thursday this week, which is the end of the Thursday experiment. Back to Wednesdays next week. It was nice while we had it.

'Emperor Penguin' landed at number 32 on the TTHTop40 Countdown and neither panelist is at peace with it. One of them would have guessed somewhere around 65. The other would have shoved it higher. Nobody splits the difference. So there's that.

Then we spin a live version from Massey Hall, 2009, and Gord introduces the song with a line about why they don't play it often that tells you everything about how the band felt about it. There's a ninety-second outro hanging off the back of it that belongs to Robbie and nobody else. And somewhere early on Gord comes in on the wrong verse and does something with the save that Justin had been chewing on all day before we even hit record.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Two readings of the lyric that come at it from opposite ends and land in the same spot, and one of them hinges on which parent actually sits on the egg.

• "I like the tone of your trumpet. Come on, let's spill some paint." The most abstract stretch on the whole record, a notebook theory, and a guess involving Josh Finlayson that may not survive contact with HipMuseum.

• The late night call in radio show sitting underneath these lyrics, and the drive home through the Bible Belt that Justin still can't shake loose from this song.

• Shawn plays bass, so he hears this as a Paul and Robbie record, with Gord Sinclair and Johnny Fay rock solid and deliberately out of the way. Then Robbie takes it home.

• Steve Berlin, the first of his two with the band, and what having a producer in the room at the Bathhouse did to the atmosphere of this thing.

• "Phantom Power" as the line in the sand. The last record of the first era, and what happened to a good chunk of the congregation immediately after it.

• Shawn spent real time with the guys in the early days. Sound checks with six people in the room. Gord showing him the notebook. And a lyric on one of the most loved songs in the catalogue that he can tell you exactly where they were sitting when it came up. We get about ninety seconds of that story. It deserves its own episode, and we are going to get it.

Next week is 'Tiger The Lion', which is track one on the record that follows the record that ends with this song. Brand new panel, brand new song, and yes, the shuffle is actually random. I promise.

THE PANEL

• Justin from Bridport, Vermont. He announces the sprint cars of New England, so if you're anywhere in the northeast, go find a dirt track. He's also a Discovering Downie panelist.

• Shawn from Edmonton. The Port Bickerton Lighthouse Arts Festival goes August 24th in Port Bickerton, Nova Scotia, put on by the Port Bickerton Lighthouse Association. East Coast and Maritime acts, artists, and the biggest one they've done yet.

THREE CHAIRS IN THE BATHHOUSE

On August 20th at 1:00 pm I'm filming the final episode of Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour inside the Bathhouse in Bath, Ontario. Ten years to the day since Kingston. Three chairs are open to fans. Email jd@tthpods.com by August 15th with your name, email, phone number, whether you can be there in person, and a one minute video on why it should be you. Travel is on you. That's the only catch.

THE GATHERING - KINGSTON, AUGUST 20 TO 23

Alongside Forever Hip. A mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a screening of Long Time Running, the CBC re-airing on the 22nd, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

FIND US

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Bobcaygeon': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/dca7d1f5-6dea-4df8-b8d1-33008aa46cbd

'Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/68d2991b-9074-43ef-bd71-aa832c59a787

Live performance counts and dates come from Hipbase and setlist.fm, as cited on the stream.

#TheTragicallyHip #EmperorPenguin #PhantomPower #TTHPods #HipHeads #OnShuffle

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August 16, 2016. The Hip arrived in the Hammer, and three fans who were in the building take jD back inside - ten years to the day.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016. FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, four days out from the end of everything, and The Tragically Hip pulled into a city that watched them play to nobody once and never forgot it.

Ten years to the day, jD sits down with three fans who were there for that room: Gino from Buffalo, Matt from Buffalo, and John from Mississauga. Two of them had never been on a podcast before in their lives. One of them never made it through the doors.

The songs first, because the songs are always first. Gino takes 'Poets', the last one of the main set, the one where Gord stopped and told the room about The Hip's first Hamilton gig - a club, zero people, and an owner who told them nobody gets paid until every song gets sung. So they played another hour to an empty room. Ten years and a lifetime later, Gord looked out at a full arena and, the way Gino heard it, said something close to look at us, look at where we are now. Us, collectively. Hamilton and The Hip.

Matt takes 'Scared', and the line it's been a pleasure doing business with you, and the small jump in the video he was shooting - the moment his buddy behind him lost his knees and fell into his back. John takes 'Courage', because of what it took Gord to get in the van at all. A residency somewhere would have been hard enough. He went across the country instead.

Then the tickets, and three completely different scrambles. Matt's Buffalo crew split the presale up like a heist - one guy on London, one on each Toronto night, Matt on Hamilton - with orders that whoever got in bought all four. Matt was the only one who got into the queue, and he had four seats about ten minutes in. Gino got shut out in the fifteen minutes it took the show to vanish, then his friend Greg found VIP seats hours later and warned him they'd be expensive. Gino's answer: I don't care. Third row on the floor. If it was within a 500-mile radius, you weren't stopping me.

The day itself: a friend on standby in Niagara Falls, U.S., in case one of Matt's four didn't clear the border, a cash-only scalper outside the arena with PDF printouts and a very loose grip on legitimacy, and their buddy Scott laying out most of the money for a pair of those dubious tickets so a friend from Lockport could drive up and slide in during the first song. Gino owns his company, so Gino gave himself the afternoon off, got to Hamilton by mid-afternoon, and ate Portuguese chicken at the Charred Rotisserie House down the road from the barn. We ate like kings. He has been back a few times since.

And then there is John, who was downtown at the Toronto Stock Exchange that Tuesday, letting a vendor in to do a routine job. At 2:30 the vendor crashed the system. Eight hours to bring it back. John is standing on a floor you get onto with retina scans and palm prints, he cannot leave the vendor alone, and his company supplies data to the exchange at thousands of dollars an hour. He had a ticket in his pocket and a family carload heading to Hamilton without him. So he stood there and asked himself the only question he had. What would Gord do? What's the Canadian thing to do? He thought about '38 Years Old' - which is the plate on his car - and the father in that song who turns his own son in because it is the right thing. John stayed at his post. He called his sons and told them to give the ticket away. Every August 16th since has been one of the saddest days of his year.

Inside the building, the two who made it describe the same night from two heights. The small stage, the band pressed in around each other, a band of brothers making life as easy for Gord as they could. Gord finding faces one at a time, holding them, nodding, gesturing, taking what Gino calls little memory snippets for himself. The monitor on the floor by his feet for the words that wouldn't come. Gino has seen this band more than forty times, and he puts Hamilton at the top for sheer energy. Matt's read is sharper still: the energy was all there, the memory just couldn't always match it.

The set list gave Hamilton 'Fifty-Mission Cap', 'Eldorado', and 'At the Hundredth Meridian' early, four from "World Container" as the night's rare record, and the best four of the six "Man Machine Poem" songs that made the tour. 'Poets' to close the main set. 'Gift Shop', 'Don't Wake Daddy', and 'Ahead by a Century' in the first encore. Then 'Fiddler's Green' and 'Twist My Arm' in the second, and a song Gino had never heard live anywhere. Matt has one regret and it is a beer. He went for one during 'Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin' Man', found the concourse narrow and the taps in the basement, and came back up on 'Fireworks' having missed ten minutes he will never get back. So there's that.

Gino's detour is worth the price of admission on its own - Highland Bowl in Rochester, a grass amphitheatre, a downpour with thunder and lightning, the band stopping for maybe ten minutes, Gord calling out to the lovers of music who stayed, and grown adults sliding down the wet hill on their bellies toward the stage. Second best night he ever had with this band. Hamilton was first.

Then the lights. Gino describes an arena that felt like one family at a memorial service, except it wasn't a somber memorial service - it was everybody holding everybody else up while Gord stood there telling them from the stage that it was going to be okay. Half an hour after the last note the set list was sitting within arm's reach, so Gino took it, and they passed it around for photographs. Nobody wanted to leave. Matt walked over to the King George pub with seven other people and found something else entirely. It almost had the feeling of a wake. Nobody wanted another round. Everybody was thankful. Everybody knew.

August 20th finds all three of them in very different rooms. John rigged an aerial in the backyard of his brother's cottage outside Montreal, set both PVRs at home, and asked the local bar in a small French-Canadian town whether they'd be showing it - they had no idea what he was talking about. Don't move that coat hanger outside. Matt spent three hours assembling a children's play kitchen for his two-year-old daughter with the broadcast on, which should have taken one. Gino watched with a dozen guys at a friend's place, where Greg leaned over and said the thing nobody else had thought: doesn't he look nervous? He did. Of course he did.

The landing belongs to John, though. There was no goodbye for him that night, so it came slowly, over days and weeks, like a song fading out instead of ending. And it kept going. He has a nine-year-old granddaughter now who knows the words, and he took her to Chudleigh's in Milton to see the Practically Hip so she could dance to them. Another generation, flying the flag.

THE PANEL

• Gino from Buffalo - forty-plus shows with The Hip, third row on the floor in Hamilton on a VIP ticket his friend Greg found hours after the show sold out, and a plate of Portuguese chicken beforehand he still drives back for. He came home with the set list. He listens to this band every single day.

• Matt from Buffalo - second row of section 120, with a photo from that night still hanging behind him on camera. He ran the Buffalo crew's presale plan, got the only four seats any of them landed, filmed 'Scared' through the moment his friend's knees went, and lost ten minutes of the night to a beer line in the basement.

• John from Mississauga - the one who didn't get in. A crashed system on the Toronto Stock Exchange floor at 2:30 on show day, a ticket handed off to somebody else, and a decision he made by asking what Gord would do. He watched August 20th through a coat hanger aerial at a cottage. His granddaughter is nine and already knows the words.

SOURCES

Set list for August 16, 2016 at FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton (now TD Coliseum) - source: setlist.fm.

THE GATHERING IN KINGSTON

August 20 to 23, 2026, alongside Forever Hip - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. The CBC broadcast re-airs on the 22nd. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list. And if you spot a purple shirt or a purple lanyard in Kingston that weekend, that's a safe person to talk to.

GEDFEST TORONTO

Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

Thanks to Gino, Matt, and John, because without them, there's not a show. Next stop: Ottawa.

MORE FROM THE TOUR

Winnipeg: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/bf776e9a-c431-41bc-b605-f73fff1155d3

Calgary Night 2: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/98943c27-bdae-4f56-84d4-a57754be7719

SUPPORT THE WORK

The tip jar: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Web: home.tthpods.com | Facebook: community.tthpods.com | Instagram: @tthpods | YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods | Newsletter: subscribe.tthpods.com | Email: jd@tthpods.com

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #WorldContainer #RoadApples #HipFans #TTHPods

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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

August 14, 2016. The last night The Tragically Hip ever played Toronto, and three fans who were in the building take jD back inside - ten years to the day.

Sunday, August 14, 2016. The Air Canada Centre, the last night of a three-night stand, and the last time The Tragically Hip ever played Toronto. Nobody in the building knew that for certain. Everybody in the building knew it anyway.

Ten years to the day, jD steers into uncharted waters (they never do third ones) with three fans who were there: Dave from Thornhill, Jeff from Buffalo, and Jeff from Belleville.

The news first, because the news is always first. Jeff from Buffalo came in from a morning run, read the email, and handed his wife the phone because he could not say the words. Dave was getting into his car at Yonge and Eglinton when his whole body sank (and one friend in the group chat skipped the first paragraph and celebrated the new tour - leave it to friends). Jeff from Belleville read it in the front foyer, flashed hot, and told his kids the only thing he could get out: Gord Downie is not doing well.

Then the tickets. Jeff from Buffalo broke the algorithm by asking for one seat at a time - it kept offering him another, and two shutouts became four tickets. Dave had Kingston floors on his screen for five full minutes before the error message took them away. Jeff from Belleville stared down the spinning wheel of death for half an hour, then went to plan B. Plan B was this show. So there's that.

The day itself: the recording booth outside the ACC that both Jeffs walked past and still regret, a stranger in the beer line who covered the round - "pay it forward, man" - and got the two people behind them too, and Dave breaking his own no-listening-on-show-day rule, blasting The Hip the whole drive down from camp in Haliburton before standing under the marquee, staring at the boys.

Then the set list. 'Blow at High Dough' out of the gate, hitting everybody in the face exactly the way it should. 'Opiated', which Dave still can't quite believe he got. Four songs from "Now For Plan A", the rare record of the night. 'The Last of the Unplucked Gems' filling the room while Gord changed - reflection time, Dave calls it. The 'that night in Toronto' line in 'Bobcaygeon' that Gord missed and the whole building carried. And 'Daredevil' into 'Grace, Too' to close - the close-up on the big screen, everything pouring out of him, down to the last bead of sweat.

Jeff from Buffalo kept notes from that week, and he read them back. Nervous on the QEW. No crying at the show. And one line that says it all: there's no way he's sick, because nobody sick could be that defiant. The whole evening was a magic spell, and it held right up until the house lights came on. Then it broke.

There's a detour into the silver suit (hello, good evening folks, we are the Silver Poets) - armor, magician's misdirection, or just Gord radiating light in a purple hat, depending on which panelist you ask. Jeff from Belleville admits the outfits looked a little cringy in the photos beforehand. Then Gord strutted out. Case closed.

And the thread runs where it always runs - to August 20th. A living room outside Buffalo with the kids and Pearl Jam dedications rolling in. The back of the floor at the Danforth Music Hall. And for Dave, a mystery ticket a few weeks later that turned out to be "Secret Path" at Roy Thomson Hall - which he now teaches to his grade 7 and 8 students every January, when it's cold and grey outside and Chanie Wenjack was about their age.

The landing belongs to Jeff from Buffalo, though: a compromised man put on a show like that, and the rest of us have our health. We all have something terminal. Live like it.

THE PANEL

• Dave from Thornhill - a teacher who got one night away from camp in Haliburton and spent it at the last Toronto Hip show, watched Kingston floors dissolve into an error screen, and turned a mystery ticket into "Secret Path" at Roy Thomson Hall. His debut novel, "The Throwback Academy", arrives this October under the pen name TJ Thompson (Instagram: @tjthompsonbooks).

• Jeff from Buffalo - four kids (including triplets), a ticket system broken one seat at a time, and notes written in 2016 that he read back on air. He writes feature stories for Buffalo Magazine - the newest one is about washed glass on the Lake Erie shore.

• Jeff from Belleville - an hour and forty from home with his wife, Shannon, a plan-B ticket that turned into this episode, and the beer-line story this series will be retelling for a while. His internet fought him all night. He stayed anyway.

SOURCES

Set list for August 14, 2016 at the Air Canada Centre - source: setlist.fm.

SIT IN THE THIRD CHAIR

The finale of Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour films inside the Bathhouse in Bath, Ontario on August 20, 2026 at 1:00 pm - ten years to the day since Kingston. There are three fan chairs, and one of them could be yours. Email jd@tthpods.com by August 15 - the day after this episode drops - with your name, email, phone number, whether you can make it to Bath, and a one-minute video on why it should be you. Travel is on you. The chair is on jD.

GEDFEST TORONTO

Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

THE GATHERING IN KINGSTON

August 20 to 23, 2026, alongside Forever Hip - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list. And if you spot a purple shirt or a purple lanyard in Kingston that weekend, that's a safe person to talk to.

Thanks to Dave, Jeff, and Jeff, because without them, there's not a show. Next stop: Hamilton - the show Dave almost talked himself into.

MORE FROM THE TOUR

Victoria: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/99071e40-9d10-48f8-9b5d-f92416e791c3

Winnipeg: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/bf776e9a-c431-41bc-b605-f73fff1155d3

SUPPORT THE WORK

The tip jar: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Web: home.tthpods.com | Facebook: community.tthpods.com | Instagram: @tthpods | YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods | Newsletter: subscribe.tthpods.com | Email: jd@tthpods.com

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #ManMachinePoem #NowForPlanA #UpToHere #TTHPods

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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August 12, 2016. Night two of three at the Air Canada Centre. The rare record is "In Violet Light", and four fans who were in the building take jD back.

Friday, August 12, 2016. The Air Canada Centre, night two of three - the middle child of the Toronto stand, the night Patrick calls the forgotten one. Which is a strange thing to call a show Steve ranks, out of the 32 Hip shows he saw, as the best one. Not the biggest. Not the saddest. The best.

Ten years to the day, jD sits down with four fans who were in the building - Brian from Buffalo, Steve from Toronto, Patrick from Newmarket, and Katrusia from Hamilton. (He was there too. He'll get into that another time.)

Brian opens with something he says he has never told anyone - not on the Hipbase, not even his wife. He heard the rumour about Gord months before the announcement, and spent that winter connecting dots he did not want to connect. Katrusia heard the news on CBC, which felt fitting. Patrick read the email in a newsroom, surrounded by people who suddenly had to cover the story he was living.

The ticket tales alone are worth the price of admission (which, for this panel, was face value across the board - a point of pride). A friend in House of Blues accounting. A table in the Air Canada Club. Steve watching night one from the gondola - a bird's eye view of a bird's eye view - and securing his night two seat from a location he is brave enough to name on the record. So there's that.

Then the set list. 'Courage' into 'Locked in the Trunk of a Car' into 'Eldorado' to open. 'Membership', the white whale, finally landed for two of the four. 'Throwing Off Glass', live, in 2016. 'What Blue' making its case as the best of the final stretch. 'Grace, Too' carrying more weight than anyone was ready for. And 'Ahead by a Century' to close - a strange choice until it wasn't, with every person in the building on their feet, singing every word.

The panel follows the thread to August 20th - two bottles of wine and a laptop in a Buffalo living room, a three-hour detour to stand alone under the Bobcaygeon sign, pizza in residence and pints at the Brass in Kingston - and lands where this series keeps landing. You never regret the shows you see. You regret the ones you miss.

(Also, one of these panelists played a living-room concert for a baby who has not arrived yet, and the first song was 'Wheat Kings'. You'll hear it.)

THE PANEL

• Brian from Buffalo - 54 Hip shows, a "Phantom Power" diehard, and a teacher who crossed the border for this band for years. 'Membership' was the last "Phantom Power" song he had never heard live. Not anymore.

• Steve from Toronto - 32 Hip shows, engaged that Canada Day, and proof that "In Violet Light" belongs to Kingston in the summer of 2002. He calls this the best Hip show he ever saw.

• Patrick from Newmarket - five of the final six shows, every ticket at face value, a journalist brain that deletes nothing, and a 25-year chase for 'The Luxury' that ended on night one of this stand.

• Katrusia from Hamilton - a deadhead family (buy and sell for face only), four shows on this tour, and a 2009 wedding themed to 'That Night in Toronto'. She got 'Bobcaygeon' at this one, standing next to the man she married.

SOURCES

Set list for August 12, 2016 at the Air Canada Centre - source: setlist.fm.

SIT IN THE THIRD CHAIR

The finale of Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour films inside the Bathhouse in Bath, Ontario on August 20, 2026 at 1:00 pm - ten years to the day since Kingston. There are three fan chairs, and one of them could be yours. Email jd@tthpods.com by August 15 with your name, email, phone number, whether you can make it to Bath, and a one-minute video on why it should be you. Travel is on you. The chair is on jD.

GEDFEST TORONTO

Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

THE GATHERING IN KINGSTON

August 20 to 23, 2026, alongside Forever Hip - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list.

Thanks to Brian, Steve, Patrick, and Katrusia, because without them, there's not a show. Next stop: Toronto Night 3 - the night the concourse became a puddle.

MORE FROM THE TOUR

Winnipeg: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/bf776e9a-c431-41bc-b605-f73fff1155d3

Calgary Night 2: https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/98943c27-bdae-4f56-84d4-a57754be7719

SUPPORT THE WORK

The tip jar: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Web: home.tthpods.com | Facebook: community.tthpods.com | Instagram: @tthpods | YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods | Newsletter: subscribe.tthpods.com | Email: jd@tthpods.com

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #ManMachinePoem #InVioletLight #HipFans #TTHPods

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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Tragically Hip Day in Toronto. 'The Luxury' out of the gate, a tour debut in the encore, and a family of four in seats a text message unlocked.

Description

August 10th, 2016. The Air Canada Centre - the first of three Toronto nights on the Man Machine Poem Tour, and the day Ernie from Denville, New Jersey woke up in his hotel room, flipped on the news, and heard the mayor declare it Tragically Hip Day before he had even gotten out of bed. He had flown up alone for his first-ever Canadian show, eleven club nights deep. The city was already celebrating.

Then the lights come up and it is 'The Luxury'. Ernie had waited eleven shows to hear it. Jeff from Vaughan, following this band since 1992, can count the times he has heard it live on one hand. Two songs later comes 'Fiddler's Green', and Scott from Huntsville is looking at grown men crying as far as he can see, understanding exactly how the night is going to go. Third song in. They could do whatever they wanted.

The roads in are half the story. Everybody got the same email on the Tuesday morning after the May long weekend - the news of Gord Downie's diagnosis, and a tour nobody knew how to feel about. Scott locked down Kingston hotel rooms before tickets even went on sale, then sweated out the Ticketmaster scramble for four Toronto seats - the morning after watching John Mann and Spirit of the West play a fundraiser at the Horseshoe Tavern, two Canadian heartbreaks stacked onto one walk home. Jeff sent a hockey dad four paragraphs about his life following The Hip, hoping to bring his wife and two kids, and got the answer every fan dreams about: they're yours. Which is how, during 'Fifty-Mission Cap', with Bill Barilko's banner up in the rafters, Jeff came to be filming a verse and then swinging the camera around to catch both his kids singing it back.

There is a lot of night in here. 'Nautical Disaster' landing in the first encore as a tour debut (confirmed via setlist.fm, and backed by the notebook Ernie filled out that same evening). The crowd carrying the Toronto line in 'Bobcaygeon', the way Scott remembers it. The “Phantom Power” pair that closed the building down. And then the back half of the conversation jumps ahead to August 20th - Scott behind the stage in Kingston, not breathing until the scanner turned his print-off ticket green, Jeff front row in front of Robby Baker for show number 93, and Ernie back in New Jersey with the Kingston broadcast on the big screen and his son beside him.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Scott sums up the entire summer in one sentence: “I've never been so excited for something I didn't want to happen.” So there's that.

The panel

• Ernie from Denville, New Jersey - eleven Hip shows in clubs from New York City to Syracuse before this one, his first in Canada and his first in an arena, solo in section 313 and never once feeling alone. His daughter has since become one of The Hip's biggest listeners on Apple Music. He also made a horror movie, We Can't Leave, streaming on Amazon Prime (sequel already in the hopper).
• Scott from Huntsville - travels to Hip shows with his wife and his oldest concert buddy, and hit Toronto Nights 1 and 3 plus Kingston on the final tour, where his kids texted mid-show to check on him. He chairs the Huntsville Festival of the Arts, a year-round festival bringing Canadian acts to Muskoka - huntsvillefestivalofthearts.com.
• Jeff from Vaughan - following The Hip since 1992, with Kingston set to be show number 93. He did London, multiple Toronto nights, Hamilton, and Kingston on the final run in a custom “Live Between Us” shirt, and brought his wife and both kids to Toronto Night 1. David Bastedo photographed the four of them in their row and sent it to him after the show.

Come say hi

• The Gathering in Kingston, August 20th to 23rd - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for “The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016”, a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list.
• GEDfest Toronto - Saturday, October 17th at the Horseshoe Tavern with Grace, 2, raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Yes, the same room John Mann played the night before the on-sale. That building keeps showing up. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

Closing

Thanks to Ernie, Scott, and Jeff for bringing August 10th back - the flag, the notebook, the kids checking in on their dads. The Tragically Hip play the same building two nights later. Toronto Night 2, August 12th, brand new panel. We go again.

More from the series

• Victoria, where the final tour began: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/99071e40-9d10-48f8-9b5d-f92416e791c3
• Calgary Night 1, from earlier on the run: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/2937266e-6c5a-4435-87a8-dcc35b478f37

Community

Facebook community: community.tthpods.com

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YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods

Yer Letter: subscribe.tthpods.com

Email: jd@tthpods.com

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#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #ManMachinePoem #DayForNight #PhantomPower #TTHPods

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Never a single. Never an opener. Played 164 times anyway. Toots, Tyler, and Chris go looking for the spy novel inside 'Pigeon Camera'.

The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream takes on 'Pigeon Camera', track four on "Fully Completely". Gord introduced it in Hamburg in 1992 as a spy novel and never handed out the decoder ring, so the panel goes looking - the claves and castanets in the mix, the Charlottetown Accord landing the same month as the record, and the boots burned with no contingency plan. Live numbers courtesy of Hipbase and setlist.fm.

Next week the shuffle stays on the record: 'Emperor Penguin'. New panel, new poll, the whole nine yards.

Enter the Yer Hipstories finale at the Bathhouse (email by August 15): jd@tthpods.com

Listen: home.tthpods.com

The Gathering in Kingston, August 20-23: jd@tthpods.com

GEDfest Toronto tickets, October 17: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

Support: buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Community: community.tthpods.com

Instagram: instagram.com/tthpods

Newsletter: subscribe.tthpods.com

Email: jd@tthpods.com

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #FullyCompletely #TTHOnShuffle #TTHPods #HipFans

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Three fans - one in the penalty box, one in the last row, one from down the street - relive the night The Hip said goodbye to London.

Description

August 8th, 2016. Budweiser Gardens, London, Ontario - show nine of the Man Machine Poem Tour, and the last night The Tragically Hip would ever play that city. The lights drop, the band walks out, and the first song is 'Opiated'. Wade had more than 40 Hip shows under his belt and had never heard them open with it. Not once. That kind of night.

This one is a full table - three Hipstories from three corners of the map. Dave from St. Louis made the 13-hour drive one week after hernia surgery, found two tickets through a fellow fan on the Facebook forum after a StubHub snafu, called ahead about a wheelchair, and walked out with penalty box seats 15 rows from the stage. Treated, in his words, like royalty. Dan from Buffalo rode in with his brother Matt - the same brother who took him to his first Hip show at the Aud in 1995 - on the way to London, Hamilton, and eventually Kingston. And Wade from London didn't have to travel at all. His city, his buddies up from Leamington, dinner on a patio two blocks from the arena with The Hip on the speakers.

The panel walks the whole night. The pause after "I'll die before I quit" in 'It Can't Be Nashville Every Night', and the roar that filled it. "It's been a pleasure doing business with you" landing like a ton of bricks in 'Scared'. 'Pigeon Camera' in the first encore, and Wade suddenly finding dust in the air. The four-songs-per-album architecture of the set, the rarely played "In Between Evolution" material, and the 'Little Bones' that was planned for the night and never came - Gord stepping to the mic instead to thank London and remember the first time The Hip played there, when nine people showed up. Why no 'Little Bones'? The way Dave heard it, it had everything to do with keeping Johnny Fay healthy. So there's that.

Then the ride home. A living wake that turned into a celebration, a 12-round boxing match where everybody came out a winner, and two separate no-tickets pacts - one made in London, one in Buffalo - that would carry all three of these guys to Kingston on August 20th. But that's a story the episode tells better.

(Setlist details confirmed via setlist.fm - right down to the extended 'Daredevil' outro Dave remembered correctly.)

The panel

• Dave from St. Louis - a diehard from the middle of America who has chased The Hip through Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas, and who streamed the Kingston broadcast with friends from his living room on August 20th, 2016.
• Dan from Buffalo - first show at the Aud in 1995, three stops on the final tour, 28th in line the morning Kingston released 200 tickets, and visible in Long Time Running during 'Courage', singing in the front row of the penalty box.
• Wade from London - 40 plus shows, from a bouncer-assisted first night at Royal Oak at 17 to Budweiser Gardens, introduced to the band by the cassettes his brother brought home from Western on laundry weekends.

Come say hi

• The Gathering in Kingston, August 20th to 23rd - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. Email jd@tthpods.com to get on the list.
• GEDfest Toronto - Saturday, October 17th at the Horseshoe Tavern with Grace, 2, raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: gedfest. ca
• Grace, 2 in London - Friday, August 21st at London Music Hall, playing this very setlist front to back. Wade's plug, and a good one.

Closing

Thanks to Dave, Dan, and Wade for bringing August 8th back to life - the wheelchair, the pacts, and the dust in the air. The reflections roll on down the 401 next time.

More from the series

Victoria, where the final tour began: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/99071e40-9d10-48f8-9b5d-f92416e791c3

Calgary Night 1, the latest stop: redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/2937266e-6c5a-4435-87a8-dcc35b478f37

Community

Facebook community: community.tthpods.com

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Email: jd@tthpods.com

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#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #ManMachinePoem #HipFans #TTHPods #CanadianMusic

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The review ran with no star rating. Infinite stars out of five. Four fans who were inside the MTS Centre explain why that was the only honest math.

Episode summary

August 5th, 2016. A Friday night, show eight of the Man Machine Poem Tour, and the MTS Centre sits smack in the middle of downtown Winnipeg with no room to breathe. The Tragically Hip open with four straight from "Fully Completely", and the second song is 'Pigeon Camera' - a tour debut nobody in the building saw coming. Ten years on, four fans who were there pass the night around the table with jD.

Nicole from Winnipeg raised three daughters on this music and lived her whole life in Thunder Bay before Winnipeg claimed her. She loaded two teenagers into the car and drove eight hours west so her girls could finally see the band she had been singing to them since the car seat. Somewhere in the causeway, the opening notes of 'At the Hundredth Meridian' hit, and the cranky seventeen-year-old looked at her mother and got it.

Kim from Cambridge has 41 Hip shows on her card, and Winnipeg came with a bonus night. Same hotel as the band, a waiter's tip to come back to the bar later, a hundred-dollar bar tab worth of nerve, and then a gracious Rob Baker outside the bathroom, a sit-down with Gord Downie's bus driver, and a photo with Gord Sinclair. The guitar picks Bernie Breen handed over are framed with her tour poster.

Dave from Montreal got the email on a beach in Crete, day two of a vacation that never recovered. He went to seven shows on the final tour, and this one meant the most - August 5th was the one-year anniversary of his mother's passing. He landed from Calgary on a WestJet flight full of Hip fans, caught the band's tweet about seats beside the stage, and cabbed straight from the airport to the box office. In the hotel lobby he told Paul Langlois that 'Three Pistols' had dodged him for 65 shows. "I can promise you you're going to hear it," Paul said.

Alicia from Winnipeg heard the news before almost anybody, because breaking news was her job - she was the editor at Metro Winnipeg. She reviewed the show on deadline, one ticket, scribbling in a row of stunned critics, and filed it with no star rating at all. Infinite stars out of five. You can't score a goodbye.

They talk about the four-song "Now for Plan A" block and what it asked of the room. About Gord Downie stopping the show to thank the Winnipeg people who built the band an audience, and a local music writer's phone detonating in real time. About the scream at the end of 'New Orleans Is Sinking' that shut an entire arena up, Kim's Periscope stream that died the moment 'Springtime in Vienna' made holding a phone still impossible, and the moment Dave realized the rants were gone - no workshopping, because there was nothing coming next. And about August 20th, which found them in a second row in Kingston, a basement watch party, and a raucous Thunder Bay bar called The Foundry.

Nobody at this table claims the full picture. They just know what that room felt like, and ten years has not dulled it. This is the Winnipeg night, told back by the people who lived it.

Key takeaways

• 'Pigeon Camera' and 'Streets Ahead' were both tour debuts that night, and the setlist held five songs from "Road Apples" and nothing from "Day for Night" - Calgary got that block two nights earlier (source: setlist.fm).

• Kim from Cambridge spent the night before the show in the band's hotel bar. Rob Baker was gracious, a bus driver made the introductions, Gord Sinclair posed for photos, and Bernie Breen handed out guitar picks.

• Dave from Montreal traded up to seats beside the stage the day of the show off a band tweet, then put his spare pair on StubHub at face value. He did it again in Hamilton and Ottawa. Ten years later, he is finally telling that secret.

• Gord stopped the Winnipeg show to thank the local supporters who built the band an audience there - the panel can only remember it happening one other place, Hamilton. One Winnipeg music writer's phone exploded on the spot.

• The night before the show, a Winnipeg lawyer fighting the same brain cancer threw a fundraiser - and the man Nicole from Winnipeg would marry years later was onstage in the band that played it.

• Alicia from Winnipeg filed her Metro Winnipeg review as infinite stars out of five, and a Winnipeg Free Press reviewer independently refused to put a number on it too. https://web.archive.org/web/20160807202054/http://www.metronews.ca/news/winnipeg/2016/08/06/review-at-the-hundredth-meridian-tragically-hip.html

Quotes

“I always thought we had more time.”

Nicole from Winnipeg

“I said, infinite stars out of five, because there's no way to do it, whether you're a Hip fan or not.”

Alicia from Winnipeg

“When he stepped out in that green suit and just commanded that stage, it ended all of that. All of those nerves that I had before the show, they were gone in the first few notes.”

Kim from Cambridge

“I just had this moment of heartbreak of, oh, he's not workshopping because there's nothing coming next.”

Dave from Montreal

“If he saw me, I wanted him to know that Dave from Montreal was staring back at him.”

Dave from Montreal

Guest information

• Nicole from Winnipeg - Thunder Bay born and raised, Winnipeg for the last six years. Raised three daughters on The Hip, and two of them made the 2016 drive with her. Her husband plays in Retro Radio, a Winnipeg classic rock band, and their love story runs through this music.

• Kim from Cambridge - 41 Hip shows, Kingston included, second row, in a shirt she made herself. Drove out in a new Jeep with her cousin, camping at Pancake Bay and Sleeping Giant on the way. Keeper of feathers, tour-suit leather patches, and a Six String Nation story.

• Dave from Montreal - Montreal journalist. Seven shows on the Man Machine Poem Tour, 65 Hip shows deep by that August. Wrote a pre-tour love letter in the National Post and a Rover essay on cover bands. A book is on the way, and that is all he will say for now.

• Alicia from Winnipeg - journalist and then-editor at Metro Winnipeg, who reviewed the show that night. On weekends she fronts Whoopsie Daisy, a Winnipeg classic rock cover band, where 'New Orleans Is Sinking' gets the rage out the healthy way.  https://whoopsiedacey.wordpress.com/

Resources, links and references

• setlist.fm - the full Winnipeg, August 5 2016 setlist, including both tour debuts.

• David Bastedo - The Tragically Hip's official concert photographer. His Winnipeg crowd shot is the one Dave found himself inside.

• Dave's pre-tour love letter in the National Post. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/music/the-tragically-hip-gord-downie

• Dave's Rover essay on cover bands, The Strictly Hip, and letting the music live on. https://therover.ca/searching-for-the-tragically-hip/

• The bands keeping the music live, named on mic: Killer Whale Tank (Winnipeg), The Incredibly Hip (Brandon), The Hip Experience (on tour across Canada), The Strictly Hip (Buffalo), and Whoopsie Daisy.

• "Secret Path" and The Downie Wenjack Fund - the work Nicole's daughter carries forward from the final tour.

Calls to action

Meet us in Kingston. The Gathering runs August 20 to 23 - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a first listen of "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016" the day it drops, a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's on the way out of town. Get on the list. email jd@tthpods.com

GEDfest comes to Toronto. October 17th, the anniversary of Gord's passing, at the Horseshoe Tavern with Grace, 2. Nine years running, over $750,000 raised, and this year it is for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. gedfest.ca

Buy jD a coffee. Editing four loquacious guests is a labour of love. Tips only, no guilt. So there's that. [hyperlink: Buy jD a coffee - buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Related episodes

• Yer Hipstories - Edmonton 2, July 30, 2016 https://kite.link/Edmonton2

• Yer Hipstories - Victoria, July 22 2016 https://kite.link/Victoria

• Now for Plan A - Redux https://kite.link/nowforplana

Closing paragraph

Nicole, thank you for the sixteen-hour round trip and for the image of a two-year-old singing 'Boots or Hearts' from a car seat. Kim, thank you for holding your nerve at that hotel bar until it turned into guitar picks. Dave, thank you for bringing your mom into the room with you, and for owning every emotion Gord taught you to own. Alicia, thank you for infinite stars out of five, the only rating system this series recognizes.

The band takes an extra day off, then it is Ontario the rest of the way home. Come back on August 8th for London, August 8 2016 - new building, new panel, and the home stretch beginning. If you were in one of these rooms, leave yer Hipstory. This series is stitched together from them.

Socials and community

• Facebook: facebook.com/groups/tthpods

• Instagram: @tthpods]

• YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods]

• Email: jd@tthpods.com]

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #ManMachinePoem #FullyCompletely #RoadApples #NowForPlanA

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The band took their bow. The house lights came up, and nobody in the Saddledome moved. This is the night the ovation would not stop.

Episode summary

August 3rd, 2016. A Wednesday. Two nights after the first Calgary show, The Tragically Hip walked back into the Scotiabank Saddledome and played the city goodbye. Ten years on, three fans who were in the building pass the night around the table with jD.

Spencer from Calgary is back from the night one episode. This was his third show of the Man Machine Poem Tour and the last time he saw the band live, and he spent it with Alan and Chantel, old friends from ten years of Hitmen games and Saddledome nights. His friend Al's text said it best: heavy but celebratory, like we all knew what was happening but we chose to live in the moment.

Julie from Calgary hadn't seen The Hip since 1997. The tickets were a first date anniversary present. She and Keith from Calgary went with her parents, still dating, married the next year, and 'Ahead by a Century' was the wedding song.

They talk about the word glioblastoma and where it landed in Julie's family. About Spencer's Periscope vigil in a Calgary bar the night the tour opened in Victoria. About 'Scared' with the lights up, the Jaws shirt, and an ovation that went on so long Gord Downie just stood there in the house lights, telling Calgary it was beautiful.

Nobody here claims to be the expert. They were in the room, and ten years later two of them run a charity festival because of it. That part comes up too.

Key takeaways

• The tickets were a first date anniversary present. Keith and Julie were still dating at the show, married the next year, and 'Ahead by a Century' was their wedding song. Spencer had it at his wedding too.

• Spencer watched the Victoria opener through a stranger's Periscope stream in a Calgary bar, and only breathed again once Gord got through the first song.

• The middle of the set was an "In Violet Light" collector's run: 'Use It Up' (first since 2006), 'It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken' (tour debut), 'Throwing Off Glass' (first since 2009), and 'The Dire Wolf' (tour debut). Verified against setlist.fm, cross-referenced with Hipbase.

• Julie marks 'Scared' as the moment the night turned - lights up, arms around strangers, the first cracks showing.

• The morning the news broke, Keith wore The Hip under his suit to client meetings at the bank, and decided anyone put off by it was not his kind of client anyway.

• GEDfest exists because of this show. Julie and Keith founded it after the tour, it turns nine this year, and Spencer signed on as an ambassador before the episode was over.

Quotes

"Everyone just became one. And for one night, there's very few nights in your life where everybody is connected, positive, happy, loving, sad. You could have hugged anyone in there. You could have kissed anyone in there. It would have been accepted."

- Julie from Calgary

"This might sound like hyperbole, but in a lot of ways that show changed my life."

- Keith from Calgary

Guest information

• Spencer from Calgary - back from night one. Three shows on the final tour, and this was the last time he saw The Hip live. His daughter's name is Grace. Draw your own conclusions.

• Julie from Calgary - GEDfest co-founder. Had not seen The Hip since 1997. Her first podcast, ever. She did great.

• Keith from Calgary - GEDfest co-founder. Still has the paper tickets. The poster is framed on the wall.

Resources, links and references

• setlist.fm - the full Calgary, August 3 2016 setlist, including both tour debuts and the ten year gap on 'Use It Up'.

• Hipbase - primary source for The Tragically Hip setlists and discography, cross-referenced against setlist.fm.

• GEDfest - live music for the life and legacy of Gord Edgar Downie, with proceeds to cancer charities across Canada. gedfest.ca]

• Helping Families Handle Cancer - the Calgary charity Spencer's sister runs for families whose child is going through cancer.

• Lilliput Hats - Karyn Ruiz's Toronto shop, where the hats Keith remembers came from.

Related past episodes:

• Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Vancover Night 1 https://kite.link/Vancouver1.

• Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Victoria, July 22 2016 - the opening night Spencer watched through a stranger's phone. https://kite.link/Victoria

• Fully & Completely: redux - Man Machine Poem - the record behind the four song block.https://kite.link/MMPredux

Things to know

Give the anniversary somewhere to go. GEDfest plays Toronto for the first time - Saturday, October 17th, the anniversary of Gord's passing, at the Horseshoe Tavern with Grace, 2. Every dollar raised goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Julie and Keith built this festival out of the night you just heard about. Tickets are on sale now. So there's that. [hyperlink: Grab tickets - GEDfest.ca

Come home to Kingston. The Gathering runs August 20th to 23rd - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party, a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. If you're making the trip, get on the list. [hyperlink: Email jd@tthpods.com]

Buy jD a coffee

Editing is hard. Help keep the battery charged and buy jD a coffee. Tips only, no guilt. [hyperlink: Buy jD a coffee - buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40

Closing paragraph

Julie, thank you for doing your first podcast ever and for the bubble of love. Keith, thank you for the postcard: the whole dome on its feet, lights up, nobody leaving. Spencer, thank you for coming back, and for signing up as a GEDfest ambassador live on mic. That is how this community works. In a couple of days the tour crosses the Rockies - Winnipeg, August 5 2016, with a brand new panel. The Tragically Hip Podcast Series keeps heading east, all the way home.

Socials and community

• Facebook: facebook.com/groups/tthpods

• Instagram: @tthpods

• YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods

• Email: jd@tthpods.com

#TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #GordonEdgarDownie #ManMachinePoem #InVioletLight #HipFans

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Episode Description

Number 31 on the countdown. First zoo animal on Prozac. JD is joined by Duxoop from Toledo — broadcasting from the actual birthplace of Gus the polar bear — plus Andrew from Winnipeg and Dave from Montreal to dig into one of the most quietly beloved songs in the Hip catalogue.

The panel gets into the Adam Kasper production that makes In Between Evolution sound the way it does, Rob Baker's untouchable outro solo, the Hip Museum's wonderfully unhinged George W. Bush theory, and the wordplay hiding in plain sight — because it was never what's troubling Gus. It's what's troubling us.

Fair warning: this one gets emotional. Duxoop tells us what the lyrics did to him last year from a nursing home wheelchair, and Dave tells us about his friend Al — nickname Gus — and the cover band he's fronting at Al's memorial this Friday. Then the whole thing derails beautifully into a full inventory of every animal in the Hip discography.

Explicit language. Recorded live on YouTube.

On the Panel

• JD — host
• Duxoop from Toledo — self-described part polar bear; born-in-Toledo credentials, same as Gus
• Andrew from Winnipeg — arrived with facts and a News Radio shirt; host of Soup Full of Radio
• Dave from Montreal — saw the Hip in Central Park; frontman of brand-new Hip cover band Colonel Mustard

Tale of the Tape

Pulled from The Hip Handbook, which amalgamates HipBase and setlist.fm data.

Album

In Between Evolution (2004)

Producer

Adam Kasper, recorded in Seattle

Single

Third single from the record

Countdown position

No. 31 on the Top 40

Times played live

327

First played

October 27, 2003

Last played

August 18, 2016 — the Ottawa show

As an opener

Once

As an encore

Five times

Poll Results

Love it

52%

Like it

36%

Tolerate it

10%

Skip it

1%

Never heard of it

1%

Possibly the most varied — and most indecisive — poll spread of the series so far. Duxoop's verdict: "That's crazy to me. These numbers should be way more lopsided toward the top."

Live Version Featured

Ottawa, 2004 — the Grey Cup halftime show. Andrew remembers watching it live and everyone around him asking why the band was opening the biggest gig of the year with a brand-new song. (They went into Courage right after.)

What We Talked About

The Album That Everyone Slept On

• In Between Evolution debuted at No. 1 in Canada on roughly 22,500 first-week copies — then got knocked off the top by Avril Lavigne's new album.
• Certified platinum in Canada that September. Dave notes it was one of the last Hip records to move real units.
• Where does this song sit in the career arc? The panel lands on "the end of the middle" rather than the dawn of the final third.
• Andrew's take: Gus is the first song on the record that sounds like the Hip you already knew — you lean back in the chair. Heaven Is a Better Place Today, Summer's Killing Us and Vaccination Scar are louder neighbours, so Gus hides in the first five.

Adam Kasper and the Seattle Sound

• Andrew looked up Kasper's credits and it clicked: Soundgarden's Down on the Upside, Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, Pearl Jam's self-titled (the avocado one), Foo Fighters' One by One.
• Same studio was hosting the Big Fish and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtracks around the time this record was being made.
• The panel agrees Gus has a "weirdly familiar, warm Hip sound" — it could have sat on Day for Night with different production, or on Music at Work. Maybe it was on the shelf a while.

Rob Baker's Outro

• Universal agreement: whichever live version you pull up, Baker is on fire. "A real showcase for him."
• Dave's sharpest observation of the night — Gord never rants over this solo the way he does over others. It always gets its space, and that may be the only ad-lib that separates the live song from the record.

Gus Himself

• Born 1985 at the Toledo Zoo, died August 27, 2013. A 700-pound icon of the Central Park Zoo, seen by over 20 million visitors.
• Began swimming obsessively — up to 12 hours a day — in the 1990s. Reporters called him neurotic, depressed and flaky, and he became a symbol of the stress of living in New York.
• The first zoo animal in history to be treated with Prozac. Also got a jacuzzi and, at one point, two girlfriends. Duxoop: "Why is he the one on Prozac and not me?"
• Gord wrote the song in 2004, nine years before Gus died — so this wasn't an obituary. He'd seen the bear and then done the second-sourcing, as Gord always did.
• There's a children's book called What's Worrying Gus? The True Story of a Big City Bear. On Amazon, the cover has Gus on a therapist's couch.

The Toledo Connection

• The Hip played the Toledo Zoo twice in the '90s — where Gus was born.
• When they played Toledo in 2004, Gus was the show opener. The stats say it only ever opened once, so that was absolutely on purpose.

The Bush Theory

• The Hip Museum reads Gus as partly about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. Andrew read the paragraph aloud; it describes the two as "lovable, loutish, and incredibly accomplished guys… not bad for a pair of dudes with limited mental capacity."
• JD's verdict: lots of love for the Hip Museum, but that one's a reach.

Gus / Us

• Dave's thesis: he doesn't hear a bear at all. "It's not what's troubling Gus. It's what's troubling us." He's been on that line for twenty years.
• JD points out the Gordism that makes it work — dropping the G, so "troublin' us" and "troubling Gus" are phonetically the same thing.
• Duxoop extends it: we've all watched a zoo animal pace or swim figure eights, and that should be troubling us.
• On the lyrics generally: Gord's word-smithery rewards straining to hear it, and the panel confesses to mumbling through parts for two decades. Compared to Nautical Disaster — all story, no chorus, no pattern — Gus is manageable, but only just.

Duxoop's Story

Last year, when the countdown hit No. 31, Duxoop was three months into a nursing home stay with medical issues. Twenty-odd years earlier he'd started going to karaoke — big, scary-looking, socially awkward, mistaken for the bouncer. Now he was in his 60s, in a wheelchair, and the line landed like a ton of bricks: old and grey, and no one's afraid anymore.

He sang it at the nursing home. "I don't think I've ever sung a Hip song with more feeling than I do with Gus." Grace, Too he can't fake — he feels like a schmuck trying to match Gord's intensity. Gus he doesn't fake.

And after a week of thinking about it for this episode, he made a bold statement: Gus is now his favourite Tragically Hip song, over Grace, Too.

Dave's Story — Al, Gus, and Colonel Mustard

• Dave's friend Al Morton died suddenly last November. They bonded over the Hip and golf at Dave's club. Al's nickname was Gus.
• In their fantasy football pick'em league, Al's picks stayed on the board for the rest of the NFL season. "A real lump in my throat."
• Al's memorial is this Friday at the Dunany Country Club in Wentworth, Quebec — halfway between Ottawa and Montreal. Ashes scattered around the course in the morning; speeches and a gathering at night, billed as his "after par-ty."
• The family asked for seven or eight Hip songs. Dave and friends have twenty ready, after two nights jamming at his buddy Chris's place. He made them learn Gus — he couldn't imagine doing a show for Al without it.
• The band is named Colonel Mustard, after Al's imported 1970s Mercedes. Wentworth, Quebec's Tragically Hip cover band. Dave waited 45 years to do this.
• His approach: very much not trying to be Gord. "I'm just trying to sing it with my truth."
• Hardest songs to sing so far — Fireworks (the National Fitness Program cadence) and Fully Completely (Gord's offbeat entrance in the middle section). Bassist John Roy has been cueing him in.
• Also on the setlist: Grace Too, Wheat Kings, The Good Life, Three Pistols.

One Bucket

• Dave loves the way Gord says "whippoorwill" — audible in the Grey Cup version JD played. He'll be attempting it Friday.
• "Used to be enough to make every bird stop singing." There's a lot of beauty in this song.
• Dave also went to bat for Sharks as an all-time Hip song — lyrically perfect, everyone gets to shine — while fully admitting he's a party of one on that.

The Countdown Neighbours

No. 30 The Darkest One · No. 31 Gus · No. 32 Emperor Penguin — with Pigeon Camera at No. 28. As JD put it: their arctic phase.

The Animal Album (An Idea That Got Away From Everyone)

Duxoop floated it — Weird Al did a food album and a TV album, so why not a Tragically Hip animal album? The panel then attempted a full inventory:

• Emperor Penguin · Pigeon Camera · Dire Wolf · Problem Bears · Thompson Girl (polar bear reference) · The Bear on Music at Work
• Tiger the Lion · The Luxury (zoo lion) · Little Bones (a teeny tiny little cat) · Sled Dogs After Dinner
• Wheat Kings (loon at the beginning) · Bumblebee · Leave ("in this contest, a concave nest") · Sharks · Piano Spider · I'm a Werewolf, Baby · the killer whale tank one on the box set

Verdict: someone needs to make this playlist.

Quotable Moments

"It's not what's troubling Gus. It's what's troubling us. And that's just the best." — Dave from Montreal

"Gord Downie sells the fuck out of this song. He sells the flakiness of the bear. He sells the confusion of the person watching it being like, why aren't you like a real bear?" — Dave from Montreal

"It's funny — we're happy to hear a song about a sad animal." — Andrew from Winnipeg

"Gus is like you're leaning back in your chair and relaxing a bit." — Andrew from Winnipeg

"Grace, Too I feel like I'm faking it. Gus, man, I don't fake that one." — Duxoop from Toledo

"It's up to us now to keep these songs alive." — Dave from Montreal

"I live for that rare occasion where somebody goes, who was that song by? I got to look up that artist — and I get to make a new Hip fan." — Duxoop from Toledo

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Hip Handbook — free Top 40 breakdown with episode links: thehiphandbook.tthpods.com
• HipBase and setlist.fm — live-stat sources behind the Tale of the Tape
• The Hip Museum — source of the Gus / George W. Bush reading
• What's Worrying Gus? The True Story of a Big City Bear — the children's book
• Hipeponymous — where the Summer's Killing Us video ended up
• Adam Kasper's discography — Down on the Upside, Songs for the Deaf, Pearl Jam, One by One

Plugs & Housekeeping

Duxoop from Toledo

A friend of Duxoop's was hit hard by the death of Glen Hansard, who was killed in a motorcycle crash outside Dublin on July 29, 2026, at 56. There's a local Toledo tribute on Friday collecting donations for the Dublin Simon Community, the homelessness charity Hansard cared deeply about. Duxoop, who was himself homeless for a couple of years recently: "I would definitely promote that."

Andrew from Winnipeg

• Soup Full of Radio — weekly on UMFM in Winnipeg. Every episode is the next letter of the alphabet. Next week: songs starting with "the." The week after: all covers, all Tom Jones covering other people.
• Head Full of Radio — the podcast, where Andrew plays Radiohead to a guy who's never heard it. Google "Soup Full of Radio" and you'll find both.

Dave from Montreal

• Google him for his Hip-related writing; Instagram @DaveKaufman1
• Dave used his plug to point people at JD's buy-me-a-coffee instead — noting how many unpaid hours go into this and how much the shows are worth to him. JD's reiteration: this stuff is free forever, don't worry if you can't swing it.

The Gathering — Kingston

• Registration deadline is Friday for all activities. (If you're hearing this on the podcast feed, you've likely missed it.)
• Three days in Kingston for the 10th anniversary of the Hip's final show: a brunch, an album listening party, a first-day mixer, and hotel blocks. Come for one day or all three.
• On the 22nd, the national celebration screens in Springer Market Square — side by side with other fans, the way everyone watched it ten years ago.
• Live stream of the final episode of Your Hipstories: Reflections from the Final Tour. Location to be announced in the coming weeks.
• Panel call-out: three spots on that final panel go to people who submit a video under one minute explaining why they should be on it, by sharing their favourite memory of August 20th.
• 120 people signed up so far. Kingston is finally embracing and showcasing this band — the banners are up, and JD hopes they're permanent.

Next Week

Pigeon Camera. Brand new panel, brand new song, a biggie. Live on YouTube, Wednesday at 8 o'clock.

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