Episode Details

July 16th, 2005. Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland. The Tragically Hip played 'Vaccination Scar' for the fifty-ninth time, and never again.

Track four on "In Between Evolution" (June 29th, 2004), the ninth studio record of thirteen, cut at Studio X in Seattle with Adam Kasper producing, and the album landed at number one in Canada in its first week. 'Vaccination Scar' was the first single off it. It finished 66th on the TTHTop40 Countdown, nowhere near the top 40. Then the live poll went up in the Facebook group and came back 64 percent love it, 33 percent like it. jD's read on the leftover one percent: that's the margin of error, not three actual humans.

Which brings up the thing the panel cannot get past. Fifty-nine live plays, and forty-two of them were show openers. The band walked out and led with this song more nights than not. On the record, it sits fourth. jD calls that a missed opportunity and wants to put the question to the band directly. Jeff from Newmarket has a baseball-lineup theory. Brian from Buffalo thinks there's no way it shouldn't open the thing. Nobody defends the sequencing, and everybody agrees the band was going to do exactly what it wanted anyway.

It is also a political record, made in an election year in an American studio, and Tracey from LA says the song reads different now than it did in 2004. Underneath all of it: the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a word that turns out to have nothing to do with the bridge at all, and one line in the album booklet that settles an argument the internet has been having for twenty years.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• The icebreaker. One song each they never got to hear live. Brian's answer comes attached to a number that stings.
• jD did some housekeeping in the shuffle machine before the show. The odds for every future episode just changed.
• The lap steel argument. Jeff's case for why the slide lines on this one hit differently than every other Hip song with a slide on it, and the earlier song he says is its cousin.
• The American word. Gord never says it out loud, and Jeff has a guess at what it is.
• Forgetting, or for getting. Greg from Tacoma has the album booklet open in the chat, and the answer is better than either one.
• Wobbly, and the Wobblies. What jD found when he stopped looking at the bridge.
• The broken guitar string tour. Brian's name for this stretch of shows, and what he thinks Gord was taking out on those strings.
• A story about Eddie Vedder and the cutting room floor that nobody in the room can quite confirm.
• Where Brian ranks it out of every song the band ever recorded, off a list he sat down and made the week Gord died.
• "It's three chords with attitude. It's like garage band, punk." Tracey from LA, on why the simplicity is the whole point.
• Next week the wheel lands on 'Evelyn,' from the debut EP, the Baby Blue album.

THE PANEL

• Tracey from LA. Back again. Came to the band late and is making up for it with bootlegs and live recordings, and she would take any of it live, though 'Grace, Too' is what she would ask the jukebox genie for. Hears Gord's phrasing as cards coming out of a magician's mouth.
• Brian from Buffalo. Back again. 54 shows deep, an honorary Canadian who reckons he learned most of his Canadian history off Hip lyrics. Saw this song four times, all four in a row, three of them as the opener, and never again after that. Go Bills.
• Jeff from Newmarket. His first time in the chair, originally out of Belleville, which makes him the second Jeff from that town to sit on this panel and the reason jD is coughing into his hand all episode. Plays guitar, bass, and sings in a cover