The crowd was not the sellout it used to be for a Tragically Hip show, but the conversation around town after their latest CN Centre gig was still man-sized.
People came away from Saturday's show with strong opinions, only made possible by the strong abilities of this still amazing band. One thing that is never in question after The Hip is how well they all play. What they are not is the sidemen at the Gordon Downie show, even though Downie is quite the spectacle, what with the endless dancing and gyrating, and the constant stream of conversation - but conversation with no one at all, even though he might look like he's looking the front row right in the eye. When he goes on stage, he sees a world only his eyes can decipher, but never is he disengaged. Never.
He didn't say a single word specifically to Prince George about Prince George, but Downie never just goes through the motions.
And sing. He's in better voice than when they first blew the lid off the Canadian music scene in 1987-88. The band has flown many colours since then - straight ahead rock, touches of country, touches of folk - but he flashed the punk card on Saturday with tuneful screams and shouts.
Less tuneful was his odd choice to sing a half-measure behind the beat on almost all the most famous songs on the setlist. It was maddening for those who like to sing along.
It did show off Downie's abilities to follow the metre so well he could deliberately drag his feet, and it caused every listener to rethink and reinvest in songs so well known to the Canadian ear, the mere mention of them can spark hockey games in July.
But for those who wanted to dig their voices in and share the wordy riches of New Orleans Is Sinking or Grace, Too or Ahead By A Century, the effect was jarring and disconnecting.
The band played five random songs to start and to finish the show - totally random, no connection to being hits or blue-chip fan appreciation - with a black-and-white screen enhancing the viewing experience. Then, as advertised, the screen flipped to full colour during the middle of the concert and they powered through the beloved 1992 album Fully Completely. They played the whole album in its order and its entirety.
This had a couple of effects, namely it exposed which songs were stronger and weaker when radio and video were no longer skewing perceptions (but you'd get a different list from each audience member) and it showed off just how strong the overall Tragically Hip artistic rigor was back then. Not one song on that album (or any others in their repertoire) is a filler track or vanity project.
You could put Fully Completely on "random shuffle" and still get full effect.
And Hip songs also stand the test of time. The instrumentation is not dated, the lyrics are not pop culture dependent.
You may not understand them, but you want to hear them and sing along with them over and over again.
Somewhere along the way, right after the splendid Phantom Power album of 1998, this was somehow lost. Their followup, Music @ Work was so disappointing I drifted quickly away from the band that was once my daily musical sustenance. Five more Hip albums have come out since then and I wonder if I've missed something great by not opening those boxes. After watching the commitment to showmanship, and the clear connection to their own music this band still feels, I am pledging to myself that I go back and introduce myself to that catalogue from 2000 onward.
I will also delve back into the first half of their career because I was bitterly disappointed to not get 38 Years Old, Scared, Boots Or Hearts, Blow At High Dough, Poets, Bobcaygeon, Something On, Inevitability of Death, and many more. I mean, they played three songs off the Road Apples album and still missed nine good ones, and played zero Phantom Power tunes.
I get it, they can't play all weekend to get out all the good stuff, but that realization struck me all the more that I had wrongly dismissed these heroes of Canada. I know now that they are as vital and skilled today as they were when they owned the 1990s music scene, and that was a monolithic era in music.
You've heard retro-complaints about different pop music time periods, but the 1990s is not one of them, especially in Canada. If they are game to give their old songwriting habits one more go, I am game to buy it. I just needed my memory to be fully, completely reminded.
