The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream: World Container

October 15th, 2006, was the first night 'World Container' was played live. By The Hip Handbook's count, it was never once an opener.

It's the last song on "World Container," the record Bob Rock produced (per Jeff on the stream), and it didn't crack the top forty of the TTHTop40 Countdown. By that same Handbook count, The Tragically Hip played it live 94 times. The poll in the Facebook group pulled over a hundred votes, with more than 80 percent on the top two answers, and the question it started with is still the right one: what is a world container?

**Jeff from Newmarket**, **Adam from Tampa**, and **Glynn from Melbourne** each come at it from a different direction. Jeff says it was the last big record by The Hip he actively picked up, which makes it a goodbye of sorts. Adam has kept the record in his bottom three (only because the rest are so strong), then listened to this one fifteen times and heard a Rolling Stones song. Glynn ignored it for years, got sent back by an episode of Fully & Completely: redux, and has an elevator pitch that jD pinned to the wall. Three fans, three answers, no overlap.

Then the lyric sheet comes out. One line in the first verse stops the table cold, and nobody agrees on why it's there. Glynn counts twenty-three words you could talk about for a very long time. Adam goes looking for how the song got written, and the answer starts with a piece of paper.

**WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE**

• The icebreaker: a song by The Hip that says Halloween. Jeff goes for 'Thugs,' Glynn for 'The Dire Wolf,' and Adam hears kids at the door in 'Gift Shop.' The chat brings 'Scared' and 'Locked in the Trunk of a Car.'

• The Hip Handbook's On This Day turns up four shows for October 28th, and jD's seat at Massey Hall in 2000 comes with a pole.

• Adam on the Rolling Stones song he didn't get as a kid, and the fifteen listens it took to hear it here.

• Jeff on four chords, a rhythm that won't sit on the grid, and a song about a container that can't hold its own lyrics.

• How it started, via This Is Our Life: a poem on a piece of paper and a guitar part Rob already had.

• Glynn on a tour bus after the show, and why every night starts to blur into one.

• The new closing question: would you play it for someone who doesn't know The Hip? Adam needs a sophisticated friend. Jeff needs a musical one. Glynn's answer is shorter.

• Next week the wheel lands on 'Thugs,' from "Day for Night."

"I build a story from those 23 words and it grows and grows inside your head." - **Glynn from Melbourne**

"He very rarely will talk or explain a song, because then that's like the magician who explains how the trick works." - **Jeff from Newmarket**

**THE PANEL**

• **Jeff from Newmarket**. Back again, originally out of Belleville, and playing guitar, bass, and vocals in a cover band with a January 16th date at the Monarch in Toronto. Says he was the bass player in the musical David Hein wrote before "Come From Away." Hears the song differently twenty years on.

• **Adam from Tampa**. Back again (by jD's count, the fourth or fifth time). Got the record around 2017, the vinyl in 2021, and found this song among his five favourites on it in his own notes. Had a kind word at the end for It's A Good Life, the five-episode series on the making of the musical.

• **Glynn from Melbourne**. Back after 'Just as Well,' and joined from Melbourne, where it was still morning. Ignored the record for years until a Fully & Completely: redux episode sent him back, and it now sits in his top five. A photographer who leads photo tours around the world, he says he's the only Glynn Lavender in the world, so look him up.

Big thanks to Jeff, Adam, and Glynn, and to a chat that was electric all night. Twenty years on, 'World Container' still ends the record and starts an argument, and it's a good way to hear The Tragically Hip and Gord Downie fresh. Go put it on.

**THE TRAGICALLY HIP ALBUM COUNTDOWN**

A new show for 2027, and you set the order. Rate all fifteen records by The Hip before November 30, and the countdown starts Monday, January 4, at 8pm ET on YouTube. Ballot: forms.gle/KdMfMuApxGb4Nf5w7

**THE HIP HANDBOOK**

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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

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

'Poets': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/339c232a-4700-404b-a533-779a14e1cf45

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