Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Kingston

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.

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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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