Tragically Hip ‘New Orleans Is Sinking’ Live 1999 Arrives on YouTube

A New Year’s Eve performance of Tragically Hip ‘New Orleans Is Sinking’, filmed live at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on 31 December 1999, has been made available on YouTube for the first time, offering a long-overdue digital home to one of the Canadian band’s most enduring live moments.

A Song That Wrote Itself in a Meat Locker

The track first appeared on Up to Here in 1989, the album widely regarded as the band’s commercial breakthrough. It produced two No.1 radio singles: ‘Blow at High Dough’ and ‘New Orleans Is Sinking.’ The record also earned the group a nomination for Most Promising Artist at the 1990 JUNO Awards. The band at that time comprised Rob Baker on guitar, Gord Downie on vocals, Johnny Fay on drums, Paul Langlois on guitar, and Gord Sinclair on bass.

The song’s origins are as unlikely as its staying power. In a guitar tutorial filmed at the band’s Bathouse Studio and released last year, Baker described how the track came to life in the late 1980s. ‘Sometime in the late 80s, maybe ’87, ’86, we had a rehearsal space in the west end of Kingston, in an old abandoned meat locker,’ he says. ‘When we weren’t playing gigs, we were jamming. One night we were jamming with the song “Shaking All Over,” which we never really played on stage as a band. When you play a song for 20 minutes it transforms into something entirely different. It morphed into something and then Gord [Downie] started singing lyrics. The song kind of wrote itself: “New Orleans Is Sinking.”‘

That improvisatory instinct, the sense that a song could arrive whole from a single extended session, became a hallmark of the Tragically Hip at their most alive. The New Year’s Eve 1999 recording captures that quality: a band fully inside its own mythology, playing to a city at midnight.

Tragically Hip ‘New Orleans Is Sinking’ and the Weight of What Followed

Watching the footage now carries an additional weight. According to CBC News, Downie had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in December 2015, and he died just over a year later, aged 53. The diagnosis gave the band’s final cross-Canada tour in the summer of 2016 an unmistakable gravity, and the closing show in Kingston, Ontario on 20 August 2016 became something close to a national event. Rolling Stone reports that, according to the CBC, more than one-third of the country tuned in.

Those concerts are now the subject of a new live album. Live July 22 – August 20, 2016 collects recordings from across that final tour, including ‘Ahead by a Century’ from the Kingston finale. It arrives one day before CBC’s 22 August rebroadcast and global live stream of The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration, marking 10 years since the band played its last concert.

The context matters when you return to the 1999 footage. Here is a band 13 years into what Universal Music distributes, a catalogue that CBC News notes spans 13 studio albums from their formation in 1984 to the end, playing one of their signature songs to a hometown crowd at the turn of the millennium, with no reason to suspect the arc would end the way it did. The Tragically Hip were never short of myth, but that particular evening now reads, in retrospect, as the kind of peak a band rarely knows it is at while it is happening.

‘New Orleans Is Sinking’ was always about submersion and chaos given a driving backbeat. In that New Year’s Eve context, with a new century arriving, it must have seemed almost celebratory in its abandon. The song, and this performance of it, repays revisiting.

Live July 22 – August 20, 2016 is available to stream now, and the CBC rebroadcast and global live stream of The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration is scheduled for 22 August.