The Tragically Hip Podcast Series podcast

August 17, 2026 Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour - Hamilton

August 16, 2016. The Hip arrived in the Hammer, and three fans who were in the building take jD back inside - ten years to the day.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016. FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, four days out from the end of everything, and The Tragically Hip pulled into a city that watched them play to nobody once and never forgot it.

Ten years to the day, jD sits down with three fans who were there for that room: Gino from Buffalo, Matt from Buffalo, and John from Mississauga. Two of them had never been on a podcast before in their lives. One of them never made it through the doors.

The songs first, because the songs are always first. Gino takes 'Poets', the last one of the main set, the one where Gord stopped and told the room about The Hip's first Hamilton gig - a club, zero people, and an owner who told them nobody gets paid until every song gets sung. So they played another hour to an empty room. Ten years and a lifetime later, Gord looked out at a full arena and, the way Gino heard it, said something close to look at us, look at where we are now. Us, collectively. Hamilton and The Hip.

Matt takes 'Scared', and the line it's been a pleasure doing business with you, and the small jump in the video he was shooting - the moment his buddy behind him lost his knees and fell into his back. John takes 'Courage', because of what it took Gord to get in the van at all. A residency somewhere would have been hard enough. He went across the country instead.

Then the tickets, and three completely different scrambles. Matt's Buffalo crew split the presale up like a heist - one guy on London, one on each Toronto night, Matt on Hamilton - with orders that whoever got in bought all four. Matt was the only one who got into the queue, and he had four seats about ten minutes in. Gino got shut out in the fifteen minutes it took the show to vanish, then his friend Greg found VIP seats hours later and warned him they'd be expensive. Gino's answer: I don't care. Third row on the floor. If it was within a 500-mile radius, you weren't stopping me.

The day itself: a friend on standby in Niagara Falls, U.S., in case one of Matt's four didn't clear the border, a cash-only scalper outside the arena with PDF printouts and a very loose grip on legitimacy, and their buddy Scott laying out most of the money for a pair of those dubious tickets so a friend from Lockport could drive up and slide in during the first song. Gino owns his company, so Gino gave himself the afternoon off, got to Hamilton by mid-afternoon, and ate Portuguese chicken at the Charred Rotisserie House down the road from the barn. We ate like kings. He has been back a few times since.

And then there is John, who was downtown at the Toronto Stock Exchange that Tuesday, letting a vendor in to do a routine job. At 2:30 the vendor crashed the system. Eight hours to bring it back. John is standing on a floor you get onto with retina scans and palm prints, he cannot leave the vendor alone, and his company supplies data to the exchange at thousands of dollars an hour. He had a ticket in his pocket and a family carload heading to Hamilton without him. So he stood there and asked himself the only question he had. What would Gord do? What's the Canadian thing to do? He thought about '38 Years Old' - which is the plate on his car - and the father in that song who turns his own son in because it is the right thing. John stayed at his post. He called his sons and told them to give the ticket away. Every August 16th since has been one of the saddest days of his year.

Inside the building, the two who made it describe the same night from two heights. The small stage, the band pressed in around each other, a band of brothers making life as easy for Gord as they could. Gord finding faces one at a time, holding them, nodding, gesturing, taking what Gino calls little memory snippets for himself. The monitor on the floor by his feet for the words that wouldn't come. Gino has seen this band more than forty times, and he puts Hamilton at the top for sheer energy. Matt's read is sharper still: the energy was all there, the memory just couldn't always match it.

The set list gave Hamilton 'Fifty-Mission Cap', 'Eldorado', and 'At the Hundredth Meridian' early, four from "World Container" as the night's rare record, and the best four of the six "Man Machine Poem" songs that made the tour. 'Poets' to close the main set. 'Gift Shop', 'Don't Wake Daddy', and 'Ahead by a Century' in the first encore. Then 'Fiddler's Green' and 'Twist My Arm' in the second, and a song Gino had never heard live anywhere. Matt has one regret and it is a beer. He went for one during 'Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin' Man', found the concourse narrow and the taps in the basement, and came back up on 'Fireworks' having missed ten minutes he will never get back. So there's that.

Gino's detour is worth the price of admission on its own - Highland Bowl in Rochester, a grass amphitheatre, a downpour with thunder and lightning, the band stopping for maybe ten minutes, Gord calling out to the lovers of music who stayed, and grown adults sliding down the wet hill on their bellies toward the stage. Second best night he ever had with this band. Hamilton was first.

Then the lights. Gino describes an arena that felt like one family at a memorial service, except it wasn't a somber memorial service - it was everybody holding everybody else up while Gord stood there telling them from the stage that it was going to be okay. Half an hour after the last note the set list was sitting within arm's reach, so Gino took it, and they passed it around for photographs. Nobody wanted to leave. Matt walked over to the King George pub with seven other people and found something else entirely. It almost had the feeling of a wake. Nobody wanted another round. Everybody was thankful. Everybody knew.

August 20th finds all three of them in very different rooms. John rigged an aerial in the backyard of his brother's cottage outside Montreal, set both PVRs at home, and asked the local bar in a small French-Canadian town whether they'd be showing it - they had no idea what he was talking about. Don't move that coat hanger outside. Matt spent three hours assembling a children's play kitchen for his two-year-old daughter with the broadcast on, which should have taken one. Gino watched with a dozen guys at a friend's place, where Greg leaned over and said the thing nobody else had thought: doesn't he look nervous? He did. Of course he did.

The landing belongs to John, though. There was no goodbye for him that night, so it came slowly, over days and weeks, like a song fading out instead of ending. And it kept going. He has a nine-year-old granddaughter now who knows the words, and he took her to Chudleigh's in Milton to see the Practically Hip so she could dance to them. Another generation, flying the flag.

THE PANEL

• Gino from Buffalo - forty-plus shows with The Hip, third row on the floor in Hamilton on a VIP ticket his friend Greg found hours after the show sold out, and a plate of Portuguese chicken beforehand he still drives back for. He came home with the set list. He listens to this band every single day.

• Matt from Buffalo - second row of section 120, with a photo from that night still hanging behind him on camera. He ran the Buffalo crew's presale plan, got the only four seats any of them landed, filmed 'Scared' through the moment his friend's knees went, and lost ten minutes of the night to a beer line in the basement.

• John from Mississauga - the one who didn't get in. A crashed system on the Toronto Stock Exchange floor at 2:30 on show day, a ticket handed off to somebody else, and a decision he made by asking what Gord would do. He watched August 20th through a coat hanger aerial at a cottage. His granddaughter is nine and already knows the words.

SOURCES

Set list for August 16, 2016 at FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton (now TD Coliseum) - source: setlist.fm.

THE GATHERING IN KINGSTON

August 20 to 23, 2026, alongside Forever Hip - a mixer at the Merchant Pub, Choir! Choir! Choir! in Springer Market Square, a listening party for "The Tragically Hip Live, July 22 - August 20, 2016", a Long Time Running screening, and a farewell brunch at Morrison's. The CBC broadcast re-airs on the 22nd. Email [email protected] to get on the list. And if you spot a purple shirt or a purple lanyard in Kingston that weekend, that's a safe person to talk to.

GEDFEST TORONTO

Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Raising money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ

Thanks to Gino, Matt, and John, because without them, there's not a show. Next stop: Ottawa.