Peter Garrett performing with Midnight Oil.
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It’s hardly a shock the Hip’s latest album got the most attention on the tour. The band flirted with success south of our border when they appeared on Saturday Night Live in ’95 and Woodstock ’99. Midnight Oil have since announced plans to reunite.
Join hundreds of Hip fans at the Danforth Music Hall (147 Danforth) where the concert will be shown on a big screen.
“I’m sure the band will figure out what they will want to do with the concert afterwards”. And while I have never met him and can not pretend to know what he and his loved ones are going through, I know that this cancer (any cancer, really) brings about a fresh kind of hell for all involved. We ate and joked and danced and got high. The public statement on the singer’s illness was accompanied with news of the tour. I have done a lot of events and you struggle with this and that, but everyone has been super keen to make it happen.
Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip sings during the Concert for Toronto at Skydome in Toronto Saturday June 21, 2003. We came home one morning in the wreckage of our lives to find he’d left something for us on our doorstep. And I have to agree with my buddy Ram Amarnath, a fellow prairie kid who’s also now living in Toronto: Downie remains “the ultimate showman – not in a rehearsed, flashy Bono way”. To send out a last ovation to people we care about. But with the Hip, we were given the chance to cheer them not through museum glass, but in the hot thrall of the moment.
Paterson is also urging spectators to take free public transit to the downtown, rather than face nearly certain traffic gridlock. The Hip had spoken out about that. Those experiences are special and rare. “But the band is really your band no matter where you live in Canada”. We were able to point to them – point to Gord, whose courage as a performer will be forever burnt into our imagination – as they deadheaded across the country. I have no doubt that their legacy will be deeply felt in Canada.
My musical library was largely based on what local radio stations played, and so that meant a healthy dose of The Tragically Hip.
Yet how many people will watch is anybody’s guess at this point. But rather wrapped in lamentations, the album is a solid rock album, with Downie taking aggressive lyrical shots at the deployment of soldiers overseas (“Heaven Is A Better Place Today”) and the man responsible: George W. Bush (“Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park”). She calls it the “most Canadian thing” she’s ever taken part in.
“He kinda looked at me amusing”, Zimmer remembers.
Zimmer explains that he apologized to Fay about the band being booed off the stage. He also talked to me about his concern for the women in the audience getting jostled by testosterone-heads. You don’t entirely manage it; it manages you. For all of their commercial proportions, the Tragically Hip weren’t a commercial band.
Super fan Stephen Dame, who runs the Hip resource website A Museum After Dark, said fans should be satisfied just seeing the Hip in concert. How fitting to be seeing this last tour together 20 years later.
I had a beer with them and wished them continued success. But I know this: During my darkest times, a time of loss, he was there for me and my wife.
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Now and Then will be on display until September 19. It’s wonderful that he’s been willing to go on this last tour and I’m not sure how anyone could lift that heavy a weight.
