The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream: Tiger The Lion

June 16th, 2000. The first of only 89 times The Tragically Hip ever played 'Tiger The Lion' live, and the last one is a long way off from there.

Eighty-nine, per Hipbase and setlist.fm. That's the whole run, first to last, June 2000 to a night in November 2009. Fifteen of those as an opener, which makes sense to everybody at the table. Fifteen as an encore, which makes sense to nobody. It never went out as a single. The record it sits second on went two times platinum in Canada and took home the Juno, and it's the second of the two Steve Berlin made with the boys. 'Tiger The Lion' landed at number 65 on the TTHTop40 Countdown and not one person in this room is at peace with that.

Then there's the poll. Just over half the Facebook group came back with love it, which the panel did not see coming, and close to eight in ten landed at like it or better. For a track this strange, sitting where it sits, that's a number worth chewing on. Somebody in the comments wanted an option between love it and like it. Jeff has a fix for that, and it's better than extra medium.

Duxoop from Toledo dropped a question in the chat that stopped the table cold. What is that opening noise? Jeff had already gone looking earlier in the week, so we get the answer live: what the sound actually is, who made it, and the instrument buried underneath it that most of the congregation has never once picked out. Twenty-six years of listening and there it is, right in front of everybody the whole time.

We spin the MuchMusic Intimate & Interactive version from that same summer, Chris Brown and Kate Fenner on stage with them, and then Jeff comes back with something none of us caught. Gord is reciting under Rob's outro. Not scatting. Reciting. From a poem, by a Canadian poet Gord loved enough to record in full for a tribute record years later. And the hotel that poem is named for is a ten minute walk from where Jeff grew up.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• John fucking Cage. Greg pulls the passage Gord was reading and puts it in a bigger frame, and it turns out to be about a whole lot more than music. Jeff, meanwhile, has listened to some John Cage and has thoughts about it that are not kind, and he says them anyway.

• A song with no chorus. Not a bridge in the middle either, just a break. So how does it hook anybody? Dave takes a run at that one, and at what Rob does on the outro instead of what any other guitar player would have done with all that room.

• Greg's theory that the catalogue splits into four groups, that this is where the art rock properly starts, and that this cut sits in the top five heaviest songs the band ever recorded. Bombs dropping. His words.

• The sequencing. 'My Music At Work' into 'Tiger The Lion' into 'Lake Fever'. Dave would have moved it. Greg would not have moved a thing.

• Where the lyrics turn. Dave on the shift that starts around this record and how much harder Gord makes you work from here on in, and Greg on the mouth shapes and the dancing and writing words that sound right before they mean anything.

• First listens. A leaked MP3 that took seven hours to download. A boombox on a deck in Tacoma running the record two days straight. A Calgary apartment full of diehards filing this one under wait, what.

Next week the wheel lands on 'No Threat', one of the two new tracks tucked onto "Yer Favourites". Brand new panel, brand new song.

THE PANEL

• Greg from Tacoma. Met the boys back around 'New Orleans Is Sinking', has seven to ten copies of every CD and gave most of them away. He makes music with AI under Hadees Market Music, spelled H-A-D-E-E-S, after his grandparents Hazel and Ira D.

• Jeff from Belleville. Third time in the chair. Belleville sits on the Bay of Quinte, which is exactly why the last ten minutes of this one belong to him.

• Dave from Halifax. First time at the table, and a musician, which shows the second the outro starts.

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.

THE TIP JAR

Greg asked for this link on mic, so here it is. If the shows are worth something to you, buymeacoffee.com/tthtop40.

FIND US

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MORE THE TRAGICALLY HIP ON SHUFFLE LIVE STREAM

'Emperor Penguin': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/a2f229b2-b5fc-41e4-8d78-632080d31a3b

'Pigeon Camera': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/49a9167c-6f8d-4641-8306-959189b38ec8

'Gus: The Polar Bear From Central Park': https://redcircle.com/shows/a01e8de3-1a04-4a44-ab9c-8fc6e3cb7474/ep/68d2991b-9074-43ef-bd71-aa832c59a787

Live performance counts, dates, and chart details come from Hipbase and setlist.fm, as cited on the stream. Album details from the "Music @ Work" credits.

#TheTragicallyHip #MusicAtWork #TTHOnShuffle #GordDownie #TheHip #TTHPods

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