Episode Details

August 20th, 2016. Kingston. Thirteen songs into the last set The Tragically Hip ever played, and 'Putting Down' made the cut.

Track four on "Music @ Work" (2000), the second of two records Steve Berlin made with the boys, and the one that took home the 2001 Juno for Best Rock Album (per Wikipedia and Discogs, still owed a HipMuseum or This Is Our Life cross-check). It sits at 143 out of 169 on the TTHTop40 Countdown, a deep cut by that measure alone. Then the Facebook group poll came back and the ranking didn't survive contact with the room: like or love landing somewhere in the 80s or 90s percent, by the panel's own count. Justin's read: run the original poll again with a fan base twice the size it was when it ran, and 143 doesn't happen.

It's a callback week too. This same song turned up at Historic Fort York on June 24th, 2006, four songs ahead of 'No Threat,' the track this show covered last week (per setlist.fm).

The lyrics get worked over three different ways before anybody lands close to the same page. Indigenous reconciliation, read through "the documented indigenous" and "civilization flipped its desk." A career-long metaphor about writing itself, "paint and sketch" as the whole method. And a theory about the United State of Ricochet that might be about atomic particles, might be about Gord catching flack for something he said, might be neither. Nobody wins the argument. Everybody's a little bit right, which tracks for a Gord Downie lyric.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Breck's debut, and the two words he reaches for before anything else about the song: crispy and classic.
• The unsteeped teabag. What Breck gets called mid-episode, and why it sticks.
• A grade five teacher with an alarming approach to desk discipline, and the times tables it apparently taught for life.
• The case for Gord Sinclair's harmonies being the most underrated thing on the whole record. Justin makes it twice, unprompted.
• End of summer picks. Justin's answer is this song itself, which is the whole reason he's in the chair this week. Breck goes with 'Ahead By A Century'. Toots goes with 'Lake Fever', the track right before this one on the record.
• "I feel this tune and I know all the words and I can sing all the words, but it doesn't mean that I understand them." Justin, more or less summing up the whole hour.

Next week the wheel lands on 'Vaccination Scar,' from "In Between Evolution."

THE PANEL

• Breck from Reno. First time in the chair. A musician (formerly of Trouble Show) who hears the interplay between Paul and Rob before he hears anything else. Plays Sagebrush Sounds in Winnemucca, Nevada this month, put on by High Desert Habit, with new music of his own coming this fall.
• Toots from Whitby. Back again. A pro gigging drummer, twenty years alongside Matthew Holpe, with a sold-out barn show called September Songs on the 12th and a new project debuting October 30th, his 50th birthday, at Melanie Pringles in Whitby.
• Justin from Bridport, Vermont. Back again, and showed up having already decided this was his song of the summer before jD even asked the question. Announces Sprint Cars of New England at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and helps run the Vermont Motorsports Hall of Fame, which names its 2026 class in early October at the Milk Bowl, Thunder Road.

GEDFEST TORONTO - SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Horseshoe Tavern, with Grace, 2. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer. Tickets through facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ.

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