Episode Details

Episode Description

Ten years to the day, JD travels back to July 30, 2016 and the second of two Edmonton nights on the Man Machine Poem Tour. He's joined by two Edmontonians who were in the building — Kirsten and Chris — for a conversation about scalped tickets and Ticketmaster nightmares, the last concert ever held in Rexall Place, a set list that dug deeper than anyone expected, and the two encores that sent a city home in pieces.

It's a night of firsts and lasts: 'Scared' heard live for the first time and the last time in the same breath, a room full of strangers crying through 'Courage,' and a final 'Bobcaygeon' with the whole barn lit up. Fair warning — the waterworks come up more than once.

Around the Table

• JD — host, Your Hipster's Reflections from the Final Tour
• Kirsten (Edmonton) — roughly 20 Hip shows deep; attended both Edmonton nights and Calgary night one. First saw the band on the third Another Roadside Attraction tour.
• Chris (Edmonton) — about half a dozen shows, going back to an Up to Here–era gig at the old Edmonton Convention Centre. Brought his brother to night two.

In This Episode

The Icebreaker: One Song That Puts You Back in the Room

• Kirsten picks "Scared" — she was up in the stands when the lights came down and the neon tubes took over. The song and the staging landed at exactly the right moment.
• Chris picks "Ahead by a Century," and explains why the line "disappointing news getting me down" hit like a freight train that night. He also names "Scared" as a shock — a deep cut he had never heard live and never expected to.
• A running theme starts here: how far into the catalogue the band was willing to reach on this tour.

Hearing the News, and the Fight for Tickets

• Kirsten on the diagnosis: devastating, and immediately followed by a desperate need to be in the room to honour the band.
• Her Ticketmaster ordeal — bounced three separate times — and a side story about how organizing an unplugged Headstones gig for a Pledge Music drive led to a friendship with Courtney, from the Hip's management side. Shout out to Courtney for the patience and the eventual tickets to Edmonton night one and Calgary night one.
• Chris rewinds much further: his first Hip show at the old Shaw/Edmonton Convention Centre, when his buddy won the last pair of tickets on the radio and took someone else. Chris went down anyway, watched people offer $200 for a $20 ticket, walked back toward the LRT station, and got face value from the fifteenth person he asked.
• The beer jug legend — paying a bouncer $20 to work the beer gardens, selling jugs at a markup, and Gord reaching down, taking a swig from Chris's jug, and hurling it into the crowd.
• The Fully Completely tour show he almost missed: hungover off a flight home from Mexico, picked up at the airport by his dad, who happened to have tickets. They caught it from about song four.
• For the final tour, a coworker — Kathy Thompson, ticket savant — tipped him off about the presale three days early. He landed what he calls the worst seats of his life and has never been happier about bad seats.

Who They Went With

• Kirsten took her friend Natasha to night two, up in section 201; she had been on the floor for night one with her now-wife, who had never seen the Hip before.
• Seeing the tour from two different vantage points meant two different shows — and from the upper level she could suddenly see the teleprompters on stage.
• Chris invited both of the buddies from that very first show — one in Victoria, one living in France — and both had to bow out. His brother got the ticket, and the two of them have a lot of Hip history together.

The Set List