Yer Hipstories - Reflections From The Final Tour: August 20th Bathouse Finale

Hey, it's jD here. August 20th, 2026. Bath, Ontario. A stone coach house west of Kingston that the band turned into a recording room, where "Phantom Power", "Music @ Work", "We Are The Same", and "Man Machine Poem" were all made. Ten years to the day since the last show. This is the last one. Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour ran the length of the Man Machine Poem Tour, city by city, Victoria east to Kingston, and it ends here, in the room where the last record was made. Three fans at the table, and not one of them tells August 20th the same way. One was on the floor. One was in the square with 25,000 people. One was on his couch in Brockville with a bottle of wine and a good reason. 🎸 𝗪𝗛𝗢'𝗦 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘 Shamus from Brockville is a teacher whose marriage is punctuated by The Hip turning up uninvited. A wedding present in 1997 from a friend running sound on Another Roadside Attraction put him somewhere he was not supposed to be, then somewhere better. A door held open at a highway rest stop in 2002 put a member of the band right in front of him and his wife, and what the two of them said in unison is the whole thing in four words. He tried for Kingston, he tried for Ottawa, and he got into the penultimate show because of one message from his wife on the afternoon of. He still has the ticket. He brought it. Eric from Ottawa went to seven shows before Kingston, most of them out west, most of them alone, on advice from his spouse that turned out to be exactly backwards. Kingston was the white whale. He got in because a Canada Post employee named Jonathan Allard refreshed a screen at the right second, ended up holding two front row tickets and nobody to bring, and posted an ad asking people to make him a proposal. What Eric offered instead of a markup, and what he handed over three months in advance on nothing but trust, is the best ticket story this series has turned up. Then he found his seat and found out what was bolted to the floor in front of it. Tiffany from Kingston got a tattoo the morning of the show. The lyrics come from a song she had never heard live, off a record she was still learning, and she was hoping against hope they would play it. They played it. She spent the night in Springer Market Square with her husband and her best friend, bused home so she would not have to think about parking, and hit play on the PVR before her coat was off. She also has the sharpest read on why a night that size, that emotional, with that much beer in it, produced no trouble at all. 💬 𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗬 𝗦𝗔𝗜𝗗 "You're acknowledging that you're on the way out, unfortunately, but yet you're going to park that emotion and you're going to be the undisputed best frontman ever." - Eric from Ottawa "It kind of felt like the day after a wedding. You get married and you've got all this anticipation. And then the event happens and it's over. And you're just sort of like, well, what now?" - Tiffany from Kingston "As a person who's been in bands, there's a thing where nobody's leading. It's almost like a Ouija board." - Shamus from Brockville ⚡ 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗡𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 Thirty songs at the Rogers K-Rock Centre. Three encores, which was not something they did. Eight songs played tight together at the front of the stage before the thunderstorm broke the set open, and the panel has a theory about why the five of them stood that close. Each of them brought one song back. Shamus picked '𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘦', off the record he could not bring himself to listen to until he heard it live. Tiffany picked '𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘉𝘭𝘶𝘦', which is now on her arm. Eric picked '𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴', and his reason has nothing to do with the band and everything to do with where eight thousand people were looking. Setlist confirmed via setlist.fm. ❤️ 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗠 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗔𝗡𝗘𝗟 Tiffany and her husband run a food drive for the Humane Society every December - Fill The Sleigh on Facebook, a sleigh on the front lawn, and about 150 blow molds around it. Three years in, nearly $5,000 and over 5,000 pounds of food. Shamus asks only that you share the road, use yer blinker, and be kind to each other. 🎧 𝗟𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗡 Listen: [EPISODE LINK NEEDED] 🎟️ 𝗚𝗘𝗗𝗙𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗢 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 Saturday, October 17th, 2026. The Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, with Grace 2 on the stage. GEDfest raises money for Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer, and this community has put nearly $40,000 toward causes like these since 2018. Tickets: facebook.com/GEDfestYYZ Thank you to Shamus, Eric, and Tiffany for closing this out, and to every person who sat down over the run of this series and handed over the most specific night of their life. It was never really about the setlist. So there's that. Where were you on August 20th, 2016? Floor, square, couch, somewhere else entirely. Tell me in the comments. #TheTragicallyHip #GordDownie #TTHPods #HipFans #CanadianMusic #InGordWeTrust

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