Episode Details

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 messa