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Voting starts on Tragically Hip’s Kingston commemorative brick

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[The idea for a commemorative brick celebrating The Tragically Hip was approved Sept. 20 by Kingston council. PHOTO: Ben McLean]

The Tragically Hip’s last stop on their bittersweet farewell tour on Aug. 20 in Kington, Ont., has gone down in history as a day in which Canada stood still.

After frontman Gord Downie revealed earlier this year he had terminal brain cancer, the band went on the Man Machine Poem tour and raised more than $1 million for research on the disease.

In fact, with only 15 dates, The Hip’s tour has been listed as the seventh highest-grossing summer concert tour worldwide by Pollstar.

Now, the Kingston band’s last concert is to be commemorated with a stone in the city’s Springer Market Square and fans have an opportunity to participate by selecting which line from one of two songs will appear on that stone.

Voting has begun online, closing Oct. 12. All responses are anonymous and will be counted, according to the city’s website.

Option 1

“We danced the sidewalk clean…”

The Tragically Hip

A National Celebration

August 20, 2016

* Lyric from “New Orleans is Sinking,” Up to Here, 1989.

Option 2

“…everybody was in it from miles around …”

The Tragically Hip

A National Celebration

August 20, 2016

*Lyric from “Blow at High Dough,” Up to Here, 1989.

The idea gained momentum after a local fan, who watched the final concert in Kingston with 25,000 fans from his radio station 96.3 BIG FM, posted a mocked-up photo on the station’s Facebook page.

Ben McLean went out after the concert and took photos of the downtown square and on one brick he used MS Paint to have it say: “The Tragically Hip, August 20th, 2016 … From Miles Around.”

That line comes from “Blow at High Dough,” one of the band’s best-known songs.

“I thought it would be received as a neat idea. But it went kind of bonkers,” said Mclean in an earlier interview.

After 1,100 likes, city council took notice and then made a final vote last Tuesday to create a commemorative brick by Oct. 31.

Downie still has a few concerts in him. He’s got two in October to support his Secret Path project — an album, an animated film and a graphic novel honouring Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibway boy who died from exposure and hunger after escaping a residential school near Kenora, Ont., in 1966.

The shows will be at Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Oct. 18 and at Roy Thomson Hall on Oct. 21. Proceeds will go to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

With files from Terri Coles