In this short documentary about The Tragically Hip, director David Battistella uses a split-screen and acid-etched colours to distil the iconic Canadian band’s essence. After decades together, through hotels, highways, gigs and recording sessions, The Hip’s members have forged a powerful brotherhood. “These guys are my life partners, musically” says bass guitarist Gord Sinclair. The Hip’s brand of straight-ahead rock and roll has catapulted the band to international stardom, and ensured them a place in Canadian musical history, but at heart, they remain a bunch of guys from Kingston, Ontario, making music together just for fun. This film was produced for the 2008 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award.
The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie on what makes a great show
“For a show to be great, something’s got to happen. I go for it; I sing, I dance, I listen to this great band, I do what the music urges. My brain tries to get a step ahead: jump there, turn, kick, spin, drop to your knees, dab brow with white hanky. Throw hanky into crowd. It’s just all really so fun and improvisational and cool and when things break or fall down or go wrong, it can be even better. This is my show, and having said all that, I really want and work to be a great singer. That drives me as well. To do my part for the band.”
Gord Downie On The Responsibility Of The Tragically Hip
In 1996, Canoe.ca gave the opportunity for The Tragically Hip fans to interview the band. A few great questions were submitted, and this one stood out the most.
Q. Do you see it as your role or responsibility as public figures to be political? I remember seeing you at Molson Park in Barrie on Canada Day and Gord D. spoke bitterly about “Canada Day” and what we were celebrating that day.
I see our role or responsibility as musicians to be musical. We were a little uncomfortable with the way other musicians on the bill were treated. After an Evian bottle of urine was hurled at the stage it became a little difficult to go along with the whole Fraternal brotherhood thing. Probably a minority, but we had invited all those people as our guests, and we felt that we had assembled a cool and interesting day of music. It was that day that I began to think that booze together with Nationalism or Patriotism was a very dangerous mixture. Ultimately, I believe everything would have been way better if we’d done the whole thing on July 2nd — we could have celebrated the Canada of the Self and not the Canada that is sold to us.
That time The Tragically Hip appeared on Saturday Night Live
…and SNL alum Dan Aykroyd got all choked up, too. Here’s Grace, too.
Tragically Hip’s final concert to be broadcast live on CBC
The final concert of the Tragically Hip’s upcoming summer tour will be broadcast and streamed live on CBC.
The news comes after many frustrated Hip heads who couldn’t get tickets called on the public broadcaster to air the band’s final show. It’s set for the Rogers K-Rock Centre in the Hip’s hometown of Kingston, Ont., on Aug. 20, where the street in front of the arena is named after the band.
Tickets for the highly anticipated Man Machine Poem tour — announced after frontman Gord Downie revealed he has incurable brain cancer — sold out in seconds before popping up at dramatically inflated prices on resale sites like StubHub.
The Kingston show will begin at 8:30 p.m. ET, and will be broadcast and streamed — commercial free — on CBC Television, CBC Radio One, CBC Radio 2, cbcmusic.ca and CBC’s YouTube channels.
Peter Gabriel pays tribute to Muhammad Ali with new song, “I’m Amazing”
Peter Gabriel has released a new song inspired by Muhammad Ali. Gabriel says he wrote “I’m Amazing” a few years ago, and decided to release it in the wake of Ali’s death.
Peter explained the story behind the track in a short post on Facebook. “I wrote a song a few years back – ‘I’m Amazing,’ which was, in part, inspired by Muhammad Ali’s life and struggles,” Gabriel wrote. “At the time of his death, when so many people are celebrating his life and thinking about all he achieved, it seemed the right time to release it.”
Rainn Wilson Gets the $25,000 Weezer Experience
In a new satirical video from Funny or Die, actor Rainn Wilson gets “the Weezer Experience,” a bundle offered to fans who donated $25,000 to the band’s crowdfunding campaign for their new album. The promised bus trip to the Galapagos doesn’t go quite the way Wilson expected.
“You know what’s so crazy? Is your name is Rivers and my name is Rainn, and they’re both such watery names. I mean, it’s like, what’s next? We’re gonna meet some kid named Lakey Boy?”
Watch Fred Armisen Impersonate Any Southern Accent
Fred Armisen shows Jimmy Fallon his expert skill with impersonating the Beatles and Southern dialects he’s nailed down.
The Most Edited Wikipedia Articles Of The Last Decade
Wikipedia recently celebrated its 15th birthday. The online encylopaedia has grown to over 5 million entries and anybody can edit them. In fact, the English language version of the website has attracted around 808 million edits over the course of its lifespan.
George W. Bush is the most edited Wikipedia topic entry of all time with just under 46,000 edits. (Internal communications pages actually dominate Wikipedia’s list of the pages with the most revisions.) George W. Bush’s page is also the most edited entry in a single year, according to numbers obtained by 538, with people tweaking it 20,894 times in 2005. 2015′s most edited article was a little more obscure. “Geospatial summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield” grabbed top spot last year with 7,290 edits.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Double Trouble Drummer Chris Layton on the Ill-Fated Stevie Ray Vaughan-David Bowie Partnership
Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton talks about David Bowie’s partnership with Texas blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Vaughan and Double Trouble were the first ever unsigned act to play the festival and the band nearly exhausted nearly all its shoestring budget getting to Switzerland in the process. On the festival’s first night, the crowd, expecting an acoustic set, booed the band off the stage. It wasn’t the laidback set attendees were promised and they responded accordingly, but Vaughan’s guitar playing did catch the ear of one attendee: David Bowie.
Bowie sent an emissary to the band’s dressing room after the show requesting an audience at the bar frequented by festival performers.
“Oddly enough, Stevie spent just a couple of minutes talking to him, and then he got up and left and never really returned,” Layton says.
Bowie’s proposition to both Vaughan and the band was simple: Vaughan would play on his new record he was working on with Chic-alum Nile Rodgers, then Vaughan and Double Trouble would open up for him on the tour that would ensue – Bowie’s first tour in five years.
In the liner notes of a DVD of the Montreux set, Bowie wrote that he took his “courage in his hands” and asked him, but wasn’t expecting much:
“And as Stevie’s music was such hard core blues I expected and would have understood a polite ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ You can’t imagine how delighted I was when he accepted the offer on the spot and said he’d love to try out a new kind of record just for the experience. When I asked if touring could also be a possibility he again replied in the affirmative, ‘Hell, yeah,’ he said, ‘I tour real good.’”