GEDfest Past, Present, & Future - Secret Sauce

11,300 pennies, a frame five feet by nine, about 250 pounds, and all of it Gord. Penny Gord has hung at the National Music Centre, it travels with Trickle Down now, and somewhere along the way it became the closest thing GEDfest has to a mascot.

The first three episodes covered where GEDfest came from, where it stands, and where it's headed. This one is about who. Keith's word for it is the secret sauce: the ambassadors, supporters, volunteers, and tribute players who turned one Calgary night in memory of Gord Downie into twelve chapters across Canada and into the United States. Every one of them got here a different way. A pile of pennies. A cold email. A song sung at a private party. A message from an old friend nobody had heard from in twenty years.

That last one belongs to Dan Murphy. Dan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2023. Three years on, he and his family have a fund at Princess Margaret, the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer, and GEDfest Toronto is raising money for it. When his oncologist told him they'd be talking about quality of life, Dan and his wife made a choice: "We decided to make quality of life about quality of life." A couple hundred people he knows, some of them friends from grade school, are making the drive to the Horseshoe in October.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• The icebreaker. A song from The Tragically Hip that sounds like the end of summer. One answer arrives on a cassette carried back from Kingston to a university residence floor, and Keith is answering this question for the fourth time without repeating himself.

• Luke Carruthers on how a pile of pennies turned into posters for every city, then merch, then a backlit sign he's building to hang out front of the Calgary show.

• Robbie Milgaard named his band after a song by The Hip. Keith tells the story of the night Robbie first sang it with Trickle Down, and what Robbie said at the mic before he started.

• Alan Cross on why a fanbase ends up doing this kind of thing, and why the answer starts with the band.

• The night BCDC opened for Trickle Down at the Palace in Calgary, and what the five of them said to each other backstage before they had to follow it.

• Brennan Rafferty, on the road to the Kootenays, with a tip on a young Calgary band you'll want to say you saw in a bar once.

• The first email that got a reply, and why Keith credits one of the people on this panel with giving him the nerve to keep sending them.

• Keith's case for what GE