The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream: Emperor Penguin

September 14th, 2009. Edmonton. The last time The Tragically Hip ever played 'Emperor Penguin', and not one person in that building knew it.

Seventy-two performances. That's the whole run. The first on July 2nd, 1998, a couple of weeks before "Phantom Power" was even in stores, and the last one in Edmonton on the We Are The Same tour before the song went in a drawer for good. Justin pulled that off setlist.fm live on the stream, Hipbase backs it up, and it turned into the thing nobody saw coming, because one of the two guys at the table tonight is Shawn from Edmonton. He was at that show. He found out on mic.

We're on a Thursday this week, which is the end of the Thursday experiment. Back to Wednesdays next week. It was nice while we had it.

'Emperor Penguin' landed at number 32 on the TTHTop40 Countdown and neither panelist is at peace with it. One of them would have guessed somewhere around 65. The other would have shoved it higher. Nobody splits the difference. So there's that.

Then we spin a live version from Massey Hall, 2009, and Gord introduces the song with a line about why they don't play it often that tells you everything about how the band felt about it. There's a ninety-second outro hanging off the back of it that belongs to Robbie and nobody else. And somewhere early on Gord comes in on the wrong verse and does something with the save that Justin had been chewing on all day before we even hit record.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• Two readings of the lyric that come at it from opposite ends and land in the same spot, and one of them hinges on which parent actually sits on the egg.

• "I like the tone of your trumpet. Come on, let's spill some paint." The most abstract stretch on the whole record, a notebook theory, and a guess involving Josh Finlayson that may not survive contact with HipMuseum.

• The late night call in radio show sitting underneath these lyrics, and the drive home through the Bible Belt that Justin still can't shake loose from this song.

• Shawn plays bass, so he hears this as a Paul and Robbie record, with Gord Sinclair and Johnny Fay rock solid and deliberately out of the way. Then Robbie takes it home.

• Steve Berlin, the first of his two with the band, and what having a producer in the room at the Bathhouse did to the atmosphere of this thing.

• "Phantom Power" as the line in the sand. The last record of the first era, and what happened to a good chunk of the congregation immediately after it.