Tragically Hip frontman Gord Dowwnie has terminal brain cancer the band has announced one last tour of Canada only ,today. This band wrote sound track of Canada for last thirty years. I will be spending summer going to as many shows as I can. This guy is one of the best frontman in the business .I don,t say that just because he,s about to die. I have seen all the great bands ,my best freind ran sky dome for twenty years . Seen lots of concerts up close ,Acdc front row centre,stones in first twenty row at lest 10 times. Mick Jagger has nothing on this guy "Said hey Gordy baby know exactly what you mean....she said.....New Orleans is sinking man ,and I don,t won,t too swim"
Went to three shows on last tour, will feel blessed to make one this time. Need to say goodbye, seen Gord and boys couple dozen times since that first night in Toronto in 1989.
TwoCanucks wrote:Went to three shows on last tour, will feel blessed to make one this time. Need to say goodbye, seen Gord and boys couple dozen times since that first night in Toronto in 1989.
"That night in Toronto ,when I saw the constalation reveal it Self one star at a time" bobgagen dreaming
macky wrote:This guy is one of the best frontman in the business .I don,t say that just because he,s about to die. I have seen all the great bands ,my best freind ran sky dome for twenty years .
Seen Freddie play maple leaf garden in 1982,like I said I,ve seen them all by the by seen your band 'lunatic on the grass ' five times ,all the way back too Animals tour....Oh! The flying pigs on mushrooms ,seems like yesterday
Big problem with ticket sales ,scalpers resaleing for big mark up. Advance sales impossible to get tickets. This has started ground swell to have there last show be on are national broad caster the CBC. The show will be in Kingston Ontario there home town. "Late breaking story on the CBC, A nation whisper,s,"we always knew that he,d go free" Twenty years for nothing, well,that,s nothing new. Besides, no one,s interested in something you didm,t do Wheat Kings and pretty things .Wait and see what tomorrow brings. Man I love these guy,s
I had floors for kingston and timed out while processing CC...arrrrrrgh. Got floors centre 12th row for hamilton for $300 total very happy. Got the hamilton tix at 10:12 am on the ticketmaster app with much persistance
TwoCanucks wrote:I had floors for kingston and timed out while processing CC...arrrrrrgh. Got floors centre 12th row for hamilton for $300 total very happy. Got the hamilton tix at 10:12 am on the ticketmaster app with much persistance
Nice ...I,m praying they do a bunch of nights at Massey Hall...fingers crossed
It,s been announced ,hips final show with be broadcast on CBC radio ,tv and streamed live Aug. 20th. My nation will all be in party mode ,please no calls we will be busy "Courage couldn't,come at a worse time"
macky wrote:It,s been announced ,hips final show with be broadcast on CBC radio ,tv and streamed live Aug. 20th. My nation will all be in party mode ,please no calls we will be busy "Courage couldn't,come at a worse time"
Gord Downie, Frontman for the Tragically Hip, in His Final Act
By MELENA RYZIK
AUG. 21, 2016
Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip’s frontman, in Kingston, Ontario.
Credit David Bastedo
In an unparalleled moment of national pride laced with sorrow, Canada stopped for a few hours on Saturday night to venerate the Tragically Hip, the band that for many has come closest to defining that country’s cultural identity.
“Thank you,” Gord Downie, the Hip’s frontman, told the crowd from a stage in Kingston, Ontario, “for keeping me pushing, and keeping me pushing.” In late May, Mr. Downie, 52, revealed that he had terminal brain cancer. Far from retreating, the band instead planned a short summer tour, by turns jubilant and wrenching, that has transfixed much of Canada for the last month.
Kingston, the group’s hometown, was the last stop.
Mr. Downie arrived onstage at the Rogers K-Rock arena — on The Tragically Hip Way — in a suit and jauntily feathered hat, and, with his four bandmates of over 30 years, tore through a three-hour set of blues-rock hits and lyrical deep cuts. The mood was triumphal: The concert started after a spontaneous audience rendition of “O Canada” and ended with three encores.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said he had been a fan since high school, was there, in a black Tragically Hip T-shirt. “This is a moment that’s going to be extremely powerful for all Canadians, I know,” he said in a live interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before the show. “Gord and the Tragically Hip are an inevitable and essential part of what we are and who we are as a country. And tonight we get to say thanks, and we get to celebrate that.”
With a nationally televised live stream on Saturday, people gathered to witness what could be Mr. Downie’s last major outing with the Hip, a rock act that is “our Stones, our Hendrix, our Zeppelin, our Bob Dylan, all wrapped up in one awesome band,” as one Kingston fan, Wes Guidry, put it.
Fans watch a live stream of the Tragically Hip concert on Saturday night.
Credit J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times
There were viewing events in hockey arenas, town squares, clubs and restaurants from the Yukon to Nova Scotia, and in United States towns near the border, like Plattsburgh, N.Y. “Dear World,” the Toronto police wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning. “Please be advised that Canada will be closed tonight at 8:30 p.m. Have a #TragicallyHip day.”
In terms of national attention, the Kingston concert was “analogous to the Super Bowl,” said Randy Lennox, president of broadcasting and content for Bell Media, a major Canadian broadcaster.
Mr. Lennox, who previously ran Universal Canada, the Tragically Hip’s label, and who has known the band members since 1988, said that Mr. Downie is to Canada what Bono is to Ireland. “This is indigenous, this is a band that is our soul,” he said. (Mr. Downie has declined interview requests.)
Since its first studio album in 1989, the Hip, as the band is widely known, has risen from a riff-driven bar band to one whose dense lyrics, touching on hockey players and heroes of the Canadian wilderness, now invite close reading — “a proletarian group with an intellectual sensibility,” as the Canadian cultural essayist and novelist Stephen Marche wrote in The New Yorker. “Small-town hockey fans howl their biggest anthems in parking lots after games; assistant professors of Canadian literature listen to their later work while jogging.”
Though they’ve had a few legs up — in 1995 Dan Aykroyd, a longtime fan and fellow Canadian, brought them to play on “Saturday Night Live” — their success never translated south. But being a uniquely Canadian phenomenon (they’re on a stamp) has endeared them even further at home.
“We’re a country that hasn’t really embraced its history just yet,” said the musician Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene. “We’re still trying to figure out what makes us Canadian, and we have one of the loudest neighbors in the world, so this band helped a country, and Gord helped people lyrically, slowly start to try to define themselves.”
The Tragically Hip played an triumphal show on Saturday to a hometown crowd of 6,000, with millions more watching a nationally televised live stream of the performance.
Credit Mike Homer
With Dave Hamelin, Mr. Drew was a producer on the Hip’s most recent album, “Man Machine Poem,” which was recorded, he said, before Mr. Downie’s December cancer diagnosis, and released in June, shortly after the band announced it.
In the studio, Mr. Drew said, he saw the fluidity of three decades of musicianship among the Hip’s other members: the bassist Gord Sinclair, the guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, and the drummer Johnny Fay. “I saw them write a song in three minutes once,” he said. “It blew my mind.”
And Mr. Downie was as open and gung-ho as a novice. “He would be pacing around, saying, ‘Let’s go as far as we can,’” Mr. Drew said.
More than 15,000 fans packed the Market Square area of downtown Kingston, Ontario, to watch a live stream of the Tragically Hip’s concert.
Credit J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times
“Gord pushes you to be your best,” he added. “That’s why people come to his shows and sing their guts out, because they feel like their best selves.”
The Hip has had a deep impact on the Canadian musical scene. Allan Reid, president and chief executive of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Juno Awards, the Canadian Grammys, called the Hip “the best rock band this country has ever seen.” (The band has earned 14 Junos.)
Geddy Lee, frontman for Rush, for whom the Hip once opened, praised them in an email for their “blues based, sinewy, guitar rock combined with Gord’s original poetic style of lyrics.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who said he had been a fan since high school, made his way into the concert.
Credit J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times
He attended one of their Toronto shows this month — “an incredibly heartfelt and moving experience,” he said, “one I shall never forget.”
And band members continue to mentor younger acts, like Arkells, which opened for them recently. “There’s a Gord line I love,” from the record “Now for Plan A,” the Arkells singer, Max Kerman, wrote in an email: “‘We don’t want to do it. We want to be it.’ Gord committed himself to a life of music and performance art in an incredibly profound way.”
At a Pearl Jam concert in Wrigley Field in Chicago on Saturday, Eddie Vedder dedicated the song “Light Years” to the Hip.
Fans scrawled messages to the band on a giant Canadian flag outside Rogers K-Rock Center in Kingston.
Credit J. Adam Huggins for The New York Times
“Their poetry is staggering,” said Sarah Polley, the Canadian actress and filmmaker, who covered the Hip’s song “Courage” for her 1997 film, “The Sweet Hereafter.” “They are the soundtrack of this country in so many ways.”
Ms. Polley was also at one of their recent Toronto shows.
“It’s been such a gift that they’ve let us say thank you with this tour,” she said in an email. “I bought a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday and the guy serving me started talking about them and the two of us just stood there and wept together without apology or embarrassment.”
The tour has also become a fund-raising mission: Mr. Downie, whose cancer, glioblastoma, is not curable, started a brain cancer research fund at the Sunnybrook Foundation, a health center affiliated with the University of Toronto, and the Canadian Cancer Society was also expecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations this weekend, a spokeswoman said.
“The gesture and the courageousness of doing what they were doing wasn’t lost on anyone,” said Mr. Drew, who was at shows in Toronto and Kingston. Though Mr. Downie relied on teleprompters for help with lyrics, and was not as kinetic as in the past, the performances “were exceptional,” Mr. Drew said. “The detail, the care — they were there and they were present. They pushed themselves.”
In the final moments of many of their recent shows, Mr. Downie has been alone onstage, looking out into a roaring audience. “It’s an implicit goodbye, without being overt,” Mr. Lennox, the media executive and Mr. Downie’s longtime friend, said.
But at the end of their show in Kingston, for their much-wondered about final song, the Hip simply played one of their biggest hits, “Ahead by a Century,” a 1996 acoustic-based pop song about childhood innocence, beloved and performed by gymnasiums full of Canadian schoolchildren for years.
the band has announced one last tour of Canada only ,today. This band wrote sound track of Canada for last thirty years. I will be spending summer going to as many shows as I can. This guy is one of the best frontman in the business .I don,t say that just because he,s about to die. I have seen all the great bands ,my best freind ran sky dome for twenty years . Seen lots of concerts up close ,Acdc front row centre,stones in first twenty row at lest 10 times. Mick Jagger has nothing on this guy 
"Said hey Gordy baby know exactly what you mean....she said.....New Orleans is sinking man ,and I don,t won,t too swim" 
Rock N Roll heaven will be rocking when we all get there 
Wheat Kings and pretty things .Wait and see what tomorrow brings. Man I love these guy,s 
