The Hip tour officially kicked off their purported last tour of Canada last Friday night in Victoria, BC.  It was a surprisingly small venue with only 9,000 seats for the show.  Several people were live tweeting during the show, snippets and comments which made me happy, yet sad as well.  I have tickets for the show on Tuesday in Vancouver, BC and I’ve never looked so forward to something that I knew was such as a finality and would never exist again in my world.  It’s a nauseating yet exciting feeling.  I am attending the show with two of the people that I saw The Tragically Hip for the first time – my mom and my good friend Trevor, who’s wife will also be coming.

I went for a drink with Trevor the other night, it’s the first time we have hung out in probably 20 years and it was awesome, our friendship is still solid after all these years.  We discussed how this show will be a full circle for us, the first time any of us had seen The Hip we were all together at Thunderbird Stadium.  So many things have happened since that point in time in all our lives, now we will be together to bid an assumed farewell to a band we all love so much.

Right now I’m listening to my own Hip retrospective playlist, eager to hear some of my favourites on Tuesday night.  The love of some of these songs goes back to a time before I became jaded, to much simpler, more enjoyable times of my life.  The love of some of their later works stems from the hard times that their music got me through.  Phantom Power is definitely one of my faves and came at time when I needed the upbeat energetic nature of that album.  It got me through some rough commutes home with so many other thoughts going through my head…I would just focus on the music and feel it at my core.  To this day my mind is so in tune with the album, every beat and nuance I feel as well as hear.

Fast Forward, it’s now Tuesday, the most anticipated yet dreaded day in the recent past.  Show day, and I’m mildly sick to my stomach although I’m not certain if it’s an exited nauseous or what.  Today has been proclaimed the official Tragically Hip Day in Vancouver by the Mayor.  I don’t know if that would be considered a big honour by The Hip or not but I sure like that us Vancouverites feel the need to give them the honour.  Realistically I think that the folks out here in BC have spent countless hours listening to this band on road trips to the great outdoors to commune with nature at it’s finest while slugging back a beer beside the campfire.

I know I definitely have some fond memories of a trip I took to Vancouver Island in my younger years.  Driving from Victoria to a little town called Cassidy to see the car races one summer Saturday night.  There were 2 cars full of us, I was in the van we fondly called the Mystery Machine (picture a beat up old blue Chevy child molester type van) and on the way back from the races Up to Here was cranking on the deck and we ran out of gas on the Malahat Highway…not a particularly good place for that to happen.  We didn’t have cell phones in those days so we just sat there listening to the tunes and thinking about what we should do.  As we sat there, our friends who had been ahead of us realised we were not behind them any longer and came back for us.  I took quite a few trips in that Mystery Machine with the Hip playing, we road tripped down to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico the summer of ’99 and I can’t count how many trips out to Tofino surfing.  That was back before Tofino and Uculet became tourism hot spots.  We used to camp up the logging roads partying, cranking tunes and smoking a lot of Canadian green all while the bears trundled along the road minding their own business while we minded our own.

So to The Tragically Hip, I do want to extend my gracious thanks for the soundtrack to some of the best times I’ve had in my life so far.  You’ve rocked it with the thought provoking Canadiana lyrics an the absolutely mesmerising musical beats which make me feel at one with my country and my fellow Canadians.