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LONDON, Ont. - Now we know why they call it Rock the Park.
With the Tragically Hip right on target for two hours last night, a Rock the Park record crowd of 12,500 fans cheered frontman Gord Downie and their heroes. The Hip concert, with songs played hard and well from all over their career, was an instant contender for concert of the year.
The outdoor music fest's sixth edition continues at Harris Park tonight. It will tough to match the night shared by the Hip and their fans as the fest opened.
"We are going to do some old songs, we are going to do some new songs," Downie promised early on between trademark twitches and struts around the stage. "We're even going to do some songs we know."
He was a man of his word. When a band follows The Depression Suite, from its new album, We are the Same, with a classic like Poets early in the set, that's new and old.
Downie and bandmates Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois, Rob Baker and Johnny Fay were back in the London region having playing indoors at the John Labatt Centre and outdoors at Stratford in recent years.
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"On behalf of the boys, thank you, summer on, summer on London," Downie said before the Hip began its encore with a terrific Love is the First, another song from the new album.
Downie strapped on a guitar, to huge cheers, at the start.
By Poets, Downie had ditched the acoustic guitar for a handkerchief that he kept swirling and twitching almost as he much as jumped around himself.
In a strange, who but Downie would think of it touch, Downie kept the big fluttering hankie around him most of the night. One he pitched toward the fans. Others he brushed against that famously bald head. Whatever, that fluttering white piece of cloth meant it was never a sign of surrender.
There was no quit in the Hip last night.
Older songs like Wheat Kings and Scared were fresh under the night sky. Downie went back to an old line about a fictional travelling salesman plying his trade to introduce Scared. "The commodity is fear, the song is Scared," finally reaching this critic who always thought of the Hip man selling beer door to door.
How Hip.
Speaking of Hip, Ottawa alt-rocker Kathleen Edwards, who was on before the Hip and is excellent, had a tough job. She handled it with the in your face hipness of somebody who has great songs and loves the dentist who gifted her with cool new braces.
"He's the only man in my life that ever said I had a small mouth," Edwards joked at one point in a set split between her own fine songs fired up by her terrific band and her running feud with a few too Hip fans.
Some fans chanted "Hip, Hip, Hip" before she hit the stage and during breaks between her songs.
To this reviewer, the icing on the cake of the Edwards' set was her obvious glee in firing "Hip, Hip, Hip" right back at fans who had that one thing on their minds.
"You're not going to get them out here with that," Edwards said after her rivals in the crowd failed miserably to match her Hipfan intensity or volume. "The good news is that one of the secret weapons for the Tragically Hip was poached so terribly from my band. I'll never get over it," she said before welcoming the man who was poached, Jim Bryson back for some of her set. Bryson returned to help the Hip.
Canadian rock bands the Arkells and the Spades were also on the opening night bill. U.S. country stars Big & Rich, who will have Cowboy Troy on hand, headline tonight.
Classic rockers the Doobie Brothers are the headliners when Rock the Park 2009 closes on Saturday.