That Night in Kingston, part 1

Next week marks the 10th anniversary of the Tragically Hip’s final show, held in their hometown in Kingston, after a historic cross-country arena tour. It was the first time in history that a singer of a major rock band had toured with a terminal condition, making the event undeniably morbid — but also celebratory, a unique experience for performer and audience to say farewell, to reckon with mortality, the loss of our collective youth, in real time.

As any Canadian knows, the final show was broadcast live on the CBC, and more than a third of the country tuned in. Watch parties were held in large public spaces, in bars, in backyards.

The band refused to bill it as the “final show.” In fact, I later learned that a hold had been put on a Buffalo venue for later that fall. And it wasn’t Gord Downie’s final show; he played a handful of dates with his Secret Path band that same fall. But it was definitely the end of the Hip, and it was a perfect hometown ending to their career.

(This week’s Toronto live music listings are here.)

I was lucky enough to be in Kingston that night. I had stumbled into a gig as a stringer for the New York Times; a writer there had assembled a story about the whole thing for an American audience, but she couldn’t make the final gig due to a personal commitment. My job was to go and file “colour” on-the-ground reporting to flesh out her piece. I stayed up all night after the concert to do it. I submitted 2,500 words; the New York Times used about 25.

The rest is here.

This is the first of two excerpts from my 2018 book The Never-Ending Present, about that night. It’s an expansion on not just my NYT reporting, but a piece I later filed for Maclean’s. The second is for paid subscribers only, featuring an oral history from various peers and friends of the Hip on what they experienced that night.

The opening epigraph is from one of Gord Downie’s favourite writers:

“If I’m lucky . . . there will be time for me

to bid goodbye to each of my loved ones.

If I’m lucky, they’ll step forward

and I’ll be able to see them one last time

and take that memory with me.

Sure, they might lay eyes on me and want to run away

and howl. But instead, since they love me,

they’ll lift my hand and say, ‘Courage’

or ‘It’s going to be all right . . .’

. . . If I’m unlucky . . ., well, I’ll just

drop over, like that, without any chance

for farewell, or to press anyone’s hand.”

—Raymond Carver, “My Death”

It’s the most gorgeous August day one could hope for. Hot: not too hot. Humid: modified by slight breeze. Sunny: a few clouds. Everyone is excited. Even the security staff are smiling while frisking bags outside the pedestrian-only downtown core. Locals are riding the buses for free today. Tragically Hip music is blasting from every storefront.

I park my car in a municipal parking lot close to the core. The event parking fee for this historic event: $3.15. Ah, Kingston.

The woman who fills the meter just before me is Fran Stanhope, from Raymond, Maine, who has travelled here with her husband, Bob, and seven friends. The Stanhopes, who used to be Deadheads, have seen the Tragically Hip 42 times since 1998. This week, they got tickets to shows in Hamilton and Ottawa and decided to tack on a visit to Kingston to watch the outdoor screen in the band’s hometown. In the past, they’ve seen a few shows in Montreal, but don’t normally see the Hip in Canada. “We knew chances were they weren’t going to do a U.S. tour.”

Tony Ingram of Cornwall, Ontario, is waiting behind me for the parking meter. He first saw the band a mere year into their existence, back in 1985. “They were playing at a stock-car track outside of Ottawa. There were eight bands playing that day. Nobody had ever heard of these guys. They went on at midnight. My wife and I thought, wow, what a great band. When they got on the radio years later, we remembered that they were the band we saw.”

William Walton of Syracuse, N.Y., drove up with his daughter to watch the show in the square. He first heard the band only a few years ago, via a friend from Buffalo—where one can easily pick up Canadian radio signals. “I’ve never seen them in concert before, just on YouTube,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of cancer in our family, so we also came to support Gord. And my brother-in-law is here from Kentucky.”

Down in Market Square, a crowd of what will eventually reach 25,000 people is assembling. A couple with lawn chairs is perched between two storefronts, next to an optician’s office where one can also buy farm-fresh eggs. Moe Peters has lived in Kingston all his 82 years; his wife, Dee, is a relative newbie, with only a mere 66 years in town. They arrived at 10 a.m. to scope out the city’s big day. “Most people, even if they’re our age, are very excited,” says Dee. The Tragically Hip mean more to their children than to the elderly couple, but they live down the street from Gord Sinclair’s parents and met him at a wedding once.

Gord Downie’s type of brain cancer, glioblastoma, is exactly what Dee’s sister died of 12 years earlier. “Her doctor was on the big screen over there earlier, explaining that since then they do have more hope [for these patients]; they can extend life, to a point. It would mean a lot to her for us to be here. We came down because we’ll never see anything like this in our town again. We had the blues festival [in 1999] with what’s-his-face, Aykroyd. That was kinda neat, but not crowds like this.”

A man who identifies only as “Steve from Toronto” is outside the venue looking for tickets. He saw the third Toronto gig and says, “It was everything I wanted in a concert. The band is going out on a high note.” He is prepared to pay “$700 at the most” for a ticket. “Can’t do more than that. I saw a guy selling for $1,500 each.” [2026 note: these numbers now seem quaint.]

While I’m talking to Steve, I hear a small commotion gathering around me. I turn around to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about 10 feet away, having just walked out the back door of the K-Rock Centre, dressed in denim and glad-handing his way down the street. In the most Canadian thing I see all day, the crowd immediately forms two lines so he can pass easily. I follow the hubbub back downtown for a while, because, hey, I’ve never seen a prime minister up close before.

Walking back to the venue, I encounter three guys with matching homemade Hip shirts. Keith Johnson of Austin, Texas, drove up with his two brothers—Jeff of Oklahoma City, Jerome from Temple, Texas. Keith’s fandom stemmed from a random discovery: he listens to a tech podcast from Canada that played a Hip song as an outro on one episode. Texas fans are not that rare, of course: the brothers Johnson saw the Tragically Hip at the 1,000-capacity club Emo’s on a recent tour.

What’s with all the Americans here? Maybe they do look different than Canadians, which is why I end up approaching so many of them. Lucas Murray is from Philadelphia and is here because “you have to pay homage to a guy who’s given so much to a generation.” Wait, what generation? How many of his Philly friends have heard the Hip? Murray was exposed in 2002, via a roommate from Halifax—“and from being in hockey locker rooms, where they were the soundtrack.” Murray went to see the Hip every time they played Philly. “The friends I have up here [in Canada] are always jealous of the shows that I go to, because [the Hip] will play to 17,000 people in Toronto, but in Philadelphia, at the Theatre of the Living Arts, they’ll play to 200 people. At the show was me, my two buddies, half the women from the Princeton hockey team, and some guys from the AHL [Lehigh Valley] Phantoms and [Hershey] Bears. Afterwards, the band came out and just sat at the bar and drank with us and showed a genuine appreciation for who we were.”

Inside the venue, I have to prompt the woman at the will-call to ask me for ID. I’m seated next to Keeley Renwick, a native of Kingston now living in Toronto. I ask him if he knew the band way back when. “Oh yeah, went to the same high school.” Kingston Collegiate? “Yeah, they were a bit older than me though. One of their fathers taught me.” So when was the first time you saw the Tragically Hip? “At KCVI.” Wait, you mean when they were still the Slinks or the Rodents, punk bands playing in the cafeteria? “Yep, they were exciting.” What songs were they covering back then? “No idea, but they were great even then.” How many times have you seen them? “Eight. But this trumps everything. This is Kingston bowing down to the Hip and saying, thank you.”

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The mood in the arena is electric. People are in their seats and standing and cheering a good 20 minutes before the band goes on stage. There is a spontaneous yet inevitable round of “O Canada.” There is a large banner that reads, “Thank you Prime Minister Downie.”

The PA system plays Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall.”

At 8:30 p.m. sharp, our hosts arrive. The first song is “Fifty Mission Cap,” a song about Canadian hero who mysteriously disappears without a trace, on a late August day in Ontario. Gord Downie is making a heroic and very conscious decision not to disappear. His facial expression seems to be saying, “Can you believe it? He disappeared!” In 2000, Downie told me the Barilko story is “almost the greatest example of being struck down in your prime. You do something great and unique, and then when you’re not paying attention: boom.”

The band is stationary, workmanlike, stoic. The change in Downie’s voice is immediately apparent: it’s gruff, slightly wavering, occasionally struggling with pitch. No one cares. Downie remains within one square metre. Paul Langlois and Rob Baker are dressed in white; they look like angels framing the two sides of the stage.

“Courage” has become an anthem this summer, if only for the titular word alone. Is it coming at the worst time? Or the best time? If it doesn’t come at all, does it really not matter? Did this song ever actually make any sense? Downie unzips his metallic jacket right before the third verse, the one from a Hugh McLennan book about a man who chooses principle over his personal life by leaving his wife and daughter behind to fight a foreign war against fascism. Beneath Downie’s jacket is the Jaws T-Shirt, the signifier of the dark Canuck.

“Wheat Kings” is a song about a man condemned to a fate he didn’t deserve, about the strength of a family who believed in him. It’s a song partly set in a high school with pictures of prime ministers past. It’s being performed with a sitting prime minister in attendance, at a venue two kilometres away from the high school where this band met, a high school founded in 1792, a high school attended by the first prime minister of Canada. Downie digs into his vocal performance here, giving the song a ferocity it does not normally require. Tonight, it does.

The one and only sign of the night where things seem somewhat amiss is in “Hundredth Meridian,” when, during the bridge, Downie stumbles and, ironically, misses the key line: “It would seem to me I remember every single fuckin’ thing I know.”

Downie had once said, “The idea of ‘remembering every single fucking thing I know’ was interesting to me. Of course, to remember everything would be a curse. The way I understand it, when we forget what we read, culture begins. I wanted ‘Hundredth Meridian’ to seem a cursed person’s lament.” The curse is lifted by the next part of the song, the half-rapped verse about “if I die in vanity,” in which he demands that Ry Cooder sing his eulogy, in which there are “whispers of disease and acts of enormity.”

Next: four songs from the new Man Machine Poem. My seatmate decides to go get another beer, because no beer will be sold after 9:45 p.m. Meanwhile the band plays the single “In a World Possessed by the Human Mind,” a song I missed at the Air Canada Centre show in Toronto because I spent 80 minutes in a will-call line—80 minutes that included the first 30 minutes of the show.

Onwards, more new songs: “What Blue” and “Tired as Fuck,” the latter with the line, “I want to stop so much I don’t want to stop.” Gordie, baby, we know exactly what you mean. But the man is a machine.

Hence: “Machine,” the first verse of which he sings an octave lower than the recording; never in my life did I expect Gord Downie to try and sing like Stephin Merritt. Any trace of pitchiness in his voice is now gone; the singer is in full command. Gord Sinclair’s bass line wouldn’t sound out of place on the Cure’s Disintegration. This song deserved to be a long-running live staple in the Hip’s set. It will only ever have been played live in the summer of 2016.

Then there’s a break, 35 minutes into the set. The stage is reconfigured; the band’s stations are now spread out. The audience watches four minutes of nighttime thunderstorms over a lake in the Canadian Shield, forced to contemplate nature’s fury, its potential destruction, singling out isolated locations at random.

When the band returns, Downie is in a purple suit. We’ve lost Prince this year, but Downie is still here. Until this point, he’s spent a lot of time on stage right, beside Paul, his oldest friend, facing the side of the arena where family and friends are seated.

Every set list on this tour has featured a wild card: songs from an album from the 2000s, an era when the band entered a slow commercial decline, a.k.a. the songs most fans probably aren’t that excited about hearing.

Tonight it is 2000’s Music @ Work, which starts with the rousing title track (“The night’s so long it hurts”). On “Lake Fever” he sings, “I want to break the hearts of everyone.” Before “Toronto #4” (“You were far more unifying than you know”), he addresses his mother in the audience: “Okay, Lorna. This is someone we know.” It’s a song written about his late grandmother. This chapter concludes with “Putting Down” (“You’d practically kill not to be afraid / I’m starting to choke on the things I say”). The choice of these songs could not have been a coincidence.

Then we’re back to the classics, this time from 1991’s Road Apples. “Twist My Arm”: “Martyrs don’t do much for me / though I enjoy them vicariously.” Downie adopts a simian swagger, one of his oldest moves, and mimes throwing salt over his shoulder for good luck.

Another disappearance in “Three Pistols,” this time a reference to Tom Thomson. “Your country seems to be very famous for its disappearances,” Downie said in 1992, introducing this song at Massey Hall. The song also features a line that once made me want to co-write a book called Have Not Been the Same, about the incredibly fertile creative period that spawned this band and many of their peers: “Bring on a brand new renaissance / because I think I’m ready / I’ve been shaking all night long / but my hands are steady.”

Downie stops to explain a part of his wardrobe. “In the glowing days of the band, with the help of a good friend, we invented a scarf made of two socks. A singer needs to keep his or her voice always warm. It only took me 28 years to figure that out. Thank you. Thank you people, for keeping me pushing, for keeping me pushing. You here, Char?”

He’s looking for his eldest sister, the one for whom September 17 is Mother’s Day: that’s when, in 1989, she lost her five-year-old son to a congenital heart condition. Downie wrote “Fiddler’s Green” for her. The song that was too painful to perform live until 2006. This is a night for facing pain. Fans dissected every moment of this tour, looking for signs of frailty; many thought they saw it in a clip of “Grace Too” in Toronto that went viral. Others argued Downie was performing a character, and/or mirroring what he was seeing in the audience.

That’s all up for debate. But performing this song, on this night, in this town, is the first time visible emotion undeniably crosses Downie’s face. He wipes away tears and a runny nose in between lines. His delivery never falters, however. If the cameras weren’t offering close-ups, we’d have no window into this moment except in our imaginations.

But wipe away those tears, here comes “Little Bones.” The crowd goes apeshit in ways I’ve only ever seen when Bruce Springsteen breaks into “Born to Run.” Downie exits the stage while the band jams the outro and then goes into the largely instrumental “Last of the Unplucked Gems,” a trippy slow burn. Downie returns to complete the song, ending it with a falsetto wolf call.

In a town that still vividly remembers the January 1998 ice storm, they cheer for “Something On,” from Phantom Power (“Outside there’s hectic action / the ice is covering the trees”). Then “Poets,” one of the most beloved rockers in the catalogue. Rob Baker delivers perhaps his best solo of the night.

In “Bobcaygeon,” the audience sings the bridge, after Downie drops it—only the second mistake he makes all night. The set closes with the (explosive!) “Fireworks,” during which Downie changes a line to read, sarcastically: “Isn’t it amazing what we can accomplish when we don’t let First Nations get in our way?”

The band takes bows, embrace and kiss each other and leave the stage. This is normally the part of this show where Downie stands and addresses the audience silently, looking people in the eye and waving goodbye. It usually lasts several minutes. Tonight it merely lasts one, before he picks up the mic.

“Thank you, we all appreciate it,” he tells his neighbours. “We started here, as you know. We opened up to 13 people. Then our next show we had 28. The next Kingston show after that, we had six.” Pause. “This is my favourite gag to do on this trip.” Laughs.

“We played here a thousand times, played all the rooms. Really glad to be here in Kingston, we could play the university, and we could play for the bikers. Our idea was that everybody is invited, everybody is involved. We tried to write that way, we tried to think that way. We went through a period there where we had to work very hard to get the girls to come. Because the guys were just scrapping and being really weird. Somehow, we got the girls to come back. And thank you—whoever did that. Whoever was the cause of that one. On behalf of the boys and the men and women of our crew, thank you for a great tour and a great show.” Starts to choke. “We enjoyed the hell out of it. Now we’re going to go in the back and pretend we’ve left and you’re going to cheer and then we’ll come out and play.

First encore: “New Orleans Is Sinking,” a song about not wanting to surrender to the forces of nature, about trying to stay afloat in disaster. The band looks and sounds a bit tired, perhaps emotional. Someone in the crowd throws up an inflatable killer whale. “New Orleans” was always a point in the show where Downie would improvise, either with a surreal rant or by working out a new song. But there is no improv tonight—because there are no new songs. There will be no new songs. Just the hits, boys, just the hits.

“They blocked off most of Main Street for your faith parade,” sings Downie on “Boots or Hearts.” They most certainly did: I hope the 25,000 people watching the show around the corner in Market Square got a charge out of that, as with the line: “I left myself on her answering machine / Said, ‘I’m back in town tonight.’” The hometown crowd inside K-Rock Centre, gathered for this most unusual and emotional occasion, grasped on to one line with particular gusto: “We’d probably only agree on one thing anyway / that’s: what the hell is happening here?”

On the night when they actually are shooting a movie in his hometown, Gord Downie changes the opening to “Blow at High Dough”: “They shot a movie once, some kind of Elvis thing / everybody was in it / just to hear me sing.” No mention of “in my hometown.” Maybe that was a fuck-up. More likely, the contrarian singer omitted it on purpose.

Rob Baker once said that his favourite part of any Hip show was during this song, when the whole band kicks in after the opening. Tonight, he has a look of immense satisfaction at that moment, enjoying it for the last time.

The band again takes bows and starts to leave the stage. Downie remains.

“Thank you to this fine building. To the fine community. To the men and women behind the show. Helping us put on the show. Thank you to the prime minister for coming to our show. It really means a lot to all of us. But mostly, thank you everybody, thank you very much.”

It looks like Downie will now do his extended goodbye. Instead, he delivers a speech that shakes the nation.

“There are problems in this country. I met the m—, I was going to say the mayor, I meant the prime minister. He’s going to be looking good for at least 12 more years. I don’t know if they’ll let him go beyond that. [2026 update: he lasted eight.] But he’ll do it. We’re in good hands, folks. Real good hands. He cares about the people up north, people we’ve been trained to ignore, trained our entire lives not to hear a word about what’s going on up there. What’s going on up there ain’t good, maybe worse than it’s ever been. So it’s not all on him to improve. We’re going to get it fixed. We got the guy to do it, to start, to help. Thanks for listening to that. Thanks for listening, period. Have a nice life.”

The show could have ended there, and been perfect.

But now it’s time to get dark.

From Day for Night, a haunting “Nautical Disaster,” a devastating “Scared” (“I can make you scared / It’s kinda what I do”) and a triumphant and cathartic “Grace Too.” During the song’s outro, he reclines on the mic stand, sensually, before jumping up to bark the “him, here, now” part. He starts play acting, but then, seemingly prompted by seeing someone in the audience, he soon succumbs to a quivering lip and unmistakable sobbing. He breaks to deliver three final screams in time with the music, before dropping the mic and surrendering entirely to the moment: rubbing his eyes, crossing his arms, weeping. The audience is biting their nails. Frankly, they’re worried for his life, unsure what is emotional or physical anguish—or both. Then the pro impulse kicks back in again: sensing the song’s impending conclusion, Downie snaps out of it, places the mic back on the stand and takes a bow.

Seconds later he’s laughing with Rob Baker, pointing out people in the crowd, kissing Gord Sinclair. The band is waving and taking bows, looking exhausted. Downie kisses and embraces Fay. Fay carries him down the back steps.

That’s it, right?

Not a chance. A third encore opens with the rarely performed “Locked in the Trunk of a Car.” The singer who was recently inside an MRI machine is now heard howling, “Let me out!” Penultimate pleasure “Gift Shop” is lovely, but ghostly, a song about looking down on the world from above.

The last song is not one for the diehard fans, is not worthy of the wild speculation that preceded it. It is the Hip’s biggest radio hit, “Ahead by a Century,” an acoustic-based pop song about childhood innocence, a song that is to a later generation of Canadians what Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” was to Baby Boomers, a song that has had gymnasiums full of Canadian children united in song, a song with the lyric that has been quoted endlessly during this tour, in every review, on T-shirts, even inscribed on Gord Downie’s boots: “No dress rehearsal, this is our life.”

Over Baker’s extended guitar solo on the outro, Downie is repeatedly striking poses, ending each with a ta-da moment that begs approval, before he stops, shrugs dismissively and then tries another one, even more grandiose. He looks like he’s performing a figure-skating finale, a vogue dance, a ballerina’s final pose. He’s walking like a matador. He’s workshopping his grand exit in front of our eyes. “You like this one? How about this one?” he seems to be saying.

Finally, he starts framing the audience like a director or cinematographer would, holding out two L-formations with his thumb and forefinger, documenting these final minutes. Then he mimes painting on a canvas, first facing the audience, then his brothers on stage. Capture this. Make it last. Put it in a frame. These days in frames.

The song ends. It feels like the end of a century. Bows are taken. Kisses exchanged.

“You’re wonderful. Thank you for that.” Those are Gord Downie’s last words onstage as a member of the Tragically Hip.

That night in Kingston, the humidity gave way to a massive windstorm. Rain fell through the night, in real time, while we all went back to our homes or hotel rooms to drink, to discuss, to reflect, to write.

Canadians are a stoic bunch, imbued with optimism. Both inside and outside the venue, there are tears, yes. But tonight, many are holding out hope that this is not the last time. People travelled from down the street and across the continent not necessarily because they even liked the Tragically Hip, but because they wanted to “be there for Gord.” To bear witness. To be a part of the never-ending present.

Up next: I asked the band’s peers where they were and what they were doing on August 20, 2016.