A decade after The Tragically Hip’s final tour, Canada returns to Kingston

The Tragically Hip perform during their final tour in 2016. The band's farewell run is being revisited with a new 29-song live album and a national rebroadcast of its final Kingston concert on Aug. 22.

Photo: David Bastedo

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Ten years after The Tragically Hip crossed Canada on a tour that became a national goodbye, the music from those final weeks is being heard again.

The Kingston, Ont., band released Live July 22 – August 20, 2016 on Friday, Aug. 21, a 29-song collection assembled from performances on its 15-date Man Machine Poem tour.

One day later, Canadians will get another chance to watch the concert that closed it.

CBC is rebroadcasting The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration on Saturday, Aug. 22, marking a decade since the band's final concert in its hometown of Kingston on Aug. 20, 2016.

The commercial-free broadcast will air on CBC television and radio at 7 p.m. local time. In B.C., that means 7 p.m. Pacific. CBC Gem and CBC Music's YouTube channel will begin streaming the program nationally at 7 p.m. Eastern, or 4 p.m. Pacific.

Before the concert, CBC will show A Beautiful Thing, a new short film directed by Gord Downie's brother, filmmaker Mike Downie. Universal Music Canada says the film includes previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage from the final tour, along with Canadians reflecting on what The Hip and the Kingston concert meant to them.

An estimated 11.7 million people watched or listened to the original broadcast in 2016 — roughly one-third of Canada's population.

The band had announced earlier that year that Downie had been diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. He died in October 2017 at age 53.

The tour began in B.C.

For Western Canadian fans, the title of the new album carries a local connection.

July 22 wasn't an arbitrary starting point. The farewell tour opened in Victoria on July 22, 2016, before moving to Vancouver for concerts on July 24 and 26.

From there, The Hip travelled east, playing two shows each in Edmonton and Calgary before continuing through Winnipeg and Ontario and eventually reaching Kingston.

The 29 tracks on the new album are drawn from stops along that route, although none of the three B.C. performances made the final collection.

Alberta is better represented.

“In View,” “Yer Not the Ocean” and “Bobcaygeon” were recorded in Calgary, while “Flamenco” and “Fifty-Mission Cap” come from Edmonton performances.

Other songs were selected from Winnipeg, London, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa and Kingston, making the album less a recording of one farewell concert than a document of the tour as it moved across Canada.

The collection was mixed and mastered in Dolby Atmos by longtime Tragically Hip audio engineer Mark Vreeken. It is available digitally, as a three-LP vinyl edition and as a two-CD set.

Revisiting those recordings has not necessarily been easy for the surviving members of the band.

In a Canadian Press interview published ahead of the anniversary, bassist Gord Sinclair said he initially found listening back to the tour too emotional. When he eventually heard the finished collection, he was struck by how strong the performances still sounded despite everything happening around the band.

“I wish it could have gone forever,” Sinclair told The Canadian Press.

The Hip are still on the charts

Ten years after the final tour, Canadians also haven't stopped listening.

Universal Music Canada says the band's 2005 greatest-hits collection Yer Favourites has now spent 400 weeks on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart.

The double album includes many of the songs that became inseparable from The Hip's live shows, among them “Ahead by a Century,” “Bobcaygeon,” “Courage (For Hugh MacLennan),” “New Orleans Is Sinking,” “Wheat Kings” and “Fifty-Mission Cap.”

The milestone comes during a year filled with reminders of the band's enduring place in Canadian music.

On Sept. 26, The Tragically Hip will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame at Massey Hall in Toronto alongside Feist, Roch Voisine and Loverboy songwriters Mike Reno and Paul Dean.

The Hall of Fame is recognizing all five members of The Hip — Rob Baker, Gord Downie, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois and Gord Sinclair — for the songwriting that helped turn the band into one of Canada's most enduring musical acts.

For now, though, the focus returns to those four weeks in the summer of 2016.

The tour started on Canada's West Coast, travelled through arenas across the country and ended at home in Kingston. A decade later, the new record lets listeners hear pieces of that entire journey, while Saturday night's broadcast returns to the place where it ended.

For Canadians who watched the first time, it may feel less like discovering an old concert than revisiting a night they still remember exactly where they were.