GEDfest Past, Present, & Future - Past

A Thursday night in October. A narrow bar on 8th Avenue in Calgary. A pile of crumpled fives and tens that added up to $7,000.

That is where GEDfest starts, and this is the episode where the people who were standing in that room tell you how it happened. GEDfest is Gord Edgar Downie Fest, a celebration of the life and music of Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip, and in 2026 it runs in twelve chapters across Canada and into the United States. It began with a handful of guys in a basement in Crestmont learning "Road Apples" front to back, and one sentence from Don Martin that changed everything: the only way we could play this live is if we had a charity.

Trickle Down is the band at the centre of it, and their origin is not a music story, it is a birthday story. Don picked up a Squier starter kit in his mid-forties with a $300 work bonus burning a hole in his pocket. A 50th birthday jam. Then a 60th birthday jam ten years later, with a singer who had a great voice and never once learned the words. Keith Dick sat down behind a kit and learned to play drums, more or less, that afternoon. Everything that follows - the Legion, the Palace, the Big Four, Buffalo - runs back through that room.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Keith on the phonetics problem. GEDfest has been pronounced just about every way a person can pronounce it, and he is quietly keeping score.

• Don's version of the origin story does not match Keith's version of the origin story, and the gap between them is the best five minutes of the episode.

• Jeff Hiscock could not get his own gear through the front door of the first GEDfest, because the room he was about to play in was already full. What he did about it involves reloading the car.

• A tax lawyer in Toronto that nobody in the organization had ever met, one link on The Tragically Hip's website, and the donation that made Don think this thing might actually have legs.

• Kevin McKay and his wife Tracy were the first two people to walk into a GEDfest that Keith had not personally invited. How they found out about it is a very Calgary answer.

• Ian Martin's opening move after seeing Trickle Down play a Canada Day gig was to walk up and start hugging the band. His second move was the website contact form, and Keith still remembers opening it.

• A man in his twenties sang every word from the front row of a packed room last year, then asked Jeff to sign the set list and told him why he was there. Jeff still gets goosebumps telling it.

• Ken Bellis on the thi