Ongoing History Daily: The first live Tragically Hip album

The live Tragically Hip album is called Live Between Us and there’s a great story about the origin of the title.  Back in 1986, just as the band was starting out, they spotted some graffiti on a wall at the corner of King and Princess streets in downtown Kingston.  Somebody had written “The Hip Live Between Us.”  The guys thought that this was cool—that they had two fans who thought so much of the group that they were proud to proclaim to the world that the Hip was their neighbours.  That’s not what the message meant. 

At the time, the Hip had a saxophone player, and he was having trouble with his girlfriend.  I guess he was spending too much time with the band and that was messing up their relationship–ergo, “The Hip live between us.”  I don’t know what happened with the relationship, but the sax player soon quit and was replaced by Paul Langlois.

By the way, there’s another live Tragically Hip album coming in June.

The last Ongoing History Daily post was about something known as “laser rot.”