The 2013 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony

I don’t need to rehash the obvious: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a sham, devoid of credibility and of questionable character.

It’s one thing to bitch and complain about it on a blog, or even to publicly challenge the Hall like Eddie Trunk does at every opportunity, correctly questioning why the RRHOF continually ignores progressive and metal acts in their yearly inductions.

But it’s another thing when Quincy Motherfucking Jones publicly challenges the Hall, right on its stage and on the same night that he is being inducted.

If you’re pissed enough to completely tune out any marketing event that the Hall creates-like HBO’s 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony-then you have more will than I. In my mind, it’s worth watching, if not for the live performances then at least for the speeches, some of which are surely bound to create a stir.

Quincy Jones doesn’t create “stirs,” he initiates changes. More to the point, are we about to see a shift in the Rock Hall’s future inductions based on Mr. Jones’ very clear points about honoring the vast number of pre-rock artists that our responsible for nearly every level of what the Hall is supposed to represent.

Will we now see some of these artists lining the hallowed halls of…wait…who the fuck cares?

Which is exactly the point Jones was trying to make. Instead of being this yearly masturbatory event, what if the Hall was actually attempting to support the recognition of how vital our indigenous music is to this nation.

The words of Quincy Jones, as was his induction speech by Oprah Winfrey, was the evening’s most poignant moment-and most important. It was a challenge to Jann Wenner to raise the bar beyond the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame™ brand name, and we’ll see if he heeds the very clear Mission Statement that Mr. Jones was suggesting.

Because when you take a long look at the path that the Hall is on, there will become a point where music loses its ability to touch those that may need it the most. Quincy recalled his own moment of clarity and how that moment was a life and death decision for him. The promotion of music should be a priority for the Hall, if only for the recognition of its own self-interest.

The HBO broadcast unfortunately showed us how much our heroes and stars have aged. Jones is frail, Harry Belafonte used a cane to approach the podium to help induct Public Enemy, and even Randy Newman suggested that the rock and roll stage was filled with artists of “gray hair and width.” It would have resonated better if he hadn’t brought his friend Don Henley on stage to sing the old-and-in-the-way anthem “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It).”

Hell, even Jackson Browne is beginning to show signs of aging.

But I guess being “indicted” as everyone kept referring to it throughout the evening as an aging contributor is better than being inducted after you’re dead, which was the case of two performers.

Out of those two posthumous entries-Albert King and Donna Summer-only Summer seemed like a charity case, with the disco diva’s induction coming only after not making the cut when she was still alive.

As much as I appreciate her talents and material, I still have a hard time accepting members of a genre that was once viewed as the antithesis of rock and roll. Admittedly, the over-the-top hyperbole of Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night” on a warm Chicago night in July of ’79 is a bad thermometer of actual evidence, you have to appreciate that Comiskey Park was overflowing with people (during a time when the White Sox couldn’t get more than 15,000 fans on a traditional evening) who clearly felt enough hatred towards disco music to disrupt a night of America’s pastime.

But in 2013, we now admit the genre’s most successful artist into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, while only one album-Bad Girls-qualifies as anything remotely similar to rock and roll.

To Quincy Jones’ point, I’m totally cool with cats like Count Basie getting inducted over Donna Summer. At least it’s justifiable.

“Albert King is the reason that guitarists break high E strings” is how John Mayer described the legendary guitarist Albert King, who finally got his induction. While I’m not a follower of Mayer’s music, I appreciated his history lesson during the induction speech and got a kick out of Gary Clark Jr’s performance of King’s material, even though the solo dual between him and Mayer ended up becoming an exercise of what not to do, particularly after you’ve seen that video footage of King and Stevie Ray Vaughn duking it out in a friendly spar of solos.

Mayer is spot-on in his assessment, as a guitar player of extremely limited skill, I can admit to housing a few extra E strings in the guitar case for this exact reason.

I can also admit that I’ve attempted to use the “Albert King tuning” on a few attempts, thinking that it would assist in bettering my guitar abilities as a player who plays a right-handed instrument with their left hand.

It made me sound worse.

To hear Albert King’s playing is to understand how powerful the instrument can be, as it turned a big, six-foot-four, two-hundred and sixty pound giant into an emotional bundle of bent notes and heart-wrenching solos. He is missed, and now he is recognized.

The Lou Adler induction was a hoot.

The Heart induction wasn’t.

While my feelings on disco run one way, I’m totally cool with rap artists being inducted. It is a genre that is a part of the same origin as rock and roll music and it has become a critical element in youth culture, often cross-pollinating with the genre to where the walls between them are paper-thin anyway.

I can remember the moment when I heard Public Enemy’s “Sophisticated Bitch” in college, and then, not more than a year later, I heard It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and became frightened of them.

Not frightened in a bad way, but frightened in the same way that I saw punk music in my early teenage years. Music can reflect scary things, and not just in an Alice Cooper way. They can reflect things that don’t shed a very positive light on society, and we can ultimately become better people as a result of listening to their discord.

Public Enemy’s discord served as much as a wake up call to white America as it did in channeling the anger and frustration of African Americans. To hear Chuck D’s speech was special, but for me, the most awesome moment was hearing him utter, “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me!” on the same platform where Presley is ground zero of the genre that is rock and roll.

The progressive rock collective was granted its second entry, thanks to the tireless support of their fans and the fact that the band has now been around so long that you can help but admit, “Rush is pretty fucking awesome.”

Dave Grohl was right when he said that “Rush has always been cool” but there were moments when their material was certainly far from it. That’s no excuse for the fact that it should not have taken the Hall this long to acknowledge their influence.

Grohl and his wife Taylor Hawkins were the perfect fit for Rush’s speech, channeling the band’s penchant for humor and self-deprecation in a completely appropriate manner.

Rush then admitted that getting into the Hall was kind of a big deal for them with Neil Peart using his talents to pen a very heartfelt speech, while providing little explanation for why his nose was a completely different color than the rest of his face.

Meanwhile, Geddy Lee also failed to acknowledge why his nose was actually bigger than the rest of his face. He did correctly (and admirably) determine that it was the fans who were probably the biggest reason the band was even on the stage that evening.

And then guitarist Alex Lifeson gave what was probably seen as the most bizarre acceptance speech in Hall history, while anyone familiar with the band understands that humor is a big part of the trio’s longevity.

 

"Blah Blah Blah"

Lifeson gave a speech without even saying a word, removing language and replacing it with “blah blah blah” while acting out the emotions of the story of their journey into the Rock Hall that evening.

The Grohl-led Rush cover band (complete with 1975 era kimonos) was hilarious and the Rush suite of “Tom Sawyer” and “Spirit of the Radio” probably accounted for the closest thing that actually resembled “rocking” during the entire evening.

Rush’s induction was probably the most anticipated part of the evening, even the all star jam at the end of the evening (complete with more Flavor Flav vamping and an obligatory Tom Morello guitar solo-the dude seems to really gunning for Rage’s first year induction) seemed tepid compared to Rush’s by-the-numbers arena bombast.

The evening ended just like most other induction ceremonies: with a very tentative jam of everyone trying to make something transcendent in an impossible situation.

Regardless, at least Rush is in the dump and at least Q gave Wenner a much needed run over the coals. Whether or not he has the moral compass to actually heed those words is another matter, but one thing is for certain: Deep Fucking Purple better be in the place next year.

Rush - Clockwork Angels

Prior to the release of Rush’s twentieth album, Clockwork Angels, the band had an opportunity to visit with Pete Townshend after receiving the Governor-General Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Performing Arts.

The formal gathering provided the Canadian trio with some face time with one of their acknowledged heroes after the event, and the conversation eventually led to the “What’s next?” question. When Rush responded that they were putting the finishing touches on a new album, Townshend scoffed, hinting that the format that he helped secure as a legitimate art form with Tommy has evolved into a seemingly extinct outlet.

“Waste of time, making albums these days.” He pointed out rather correctly, and even the band was forced to admit that maybe so, but they had to.

You could look at their response yet another example of a band from a different era failing to acknowledge modern realities. Or you could accept the fact that Rush has operated exclusively in their own reality for four decades now, navigating trends and genres in a silo of loyal fans who appreciate the independent spirit of this band’s history.

A big part of that history happened with their 1974 release, 2112, a record that found them at the end of a record deal after three consecutive commercial failures to their resume. By all means, 2112 should have been the band’s clear bend towards their label’s desire to have a hit record. Instead, it’s a record in which half of it is devoted to a concept corny enough to alienate the placid record buyers it was trying to capture.

As we know now, 2112 became an enormous record for the band, inexplicably connecting them with audience who appreciated their excessive tendencies and geeky excursions. It also became the record that fueled fan’s future expectations, the benchmark for new conceptual meanderings.

With Clockwork Angels, they’ve returned to idea of a concept album once again, even coyly putting the hands of a clock on the album’s cover, that-if you consider the hands in military time-clearly spell out 21:12.

To be honest, I don’t have the patience to figure out what the concept is, exactly, all I know is that I think I heard a few songs reference timepieces and that the performances within the records hour-long running time are probably the best thing they’ve done since Signals.

It’s also the most varied, alternating between complex arrangements and textures that effectively demonstrate a wide pallet of sounds that could only come from a band that’s spent a great deal of their existence continually trying to move forward.

Whether or not you’ve personally been a part of this journey isn’t relevant. For those of us who’ve had a relationship with Rush at some point in their life will find Clockwork Angels to be not only a continuation of the band’s recent upswing, but one of the premier entries in what’s not only been a long, storied career, but a somewhat choppy one at that.

The band wisely chose to work with producer Nick Raskulinecz again after giving the band a flattering mix for Snakes & Arrows. His role is vastly expanded here, giving Clockwork Angels a perfect blend of the band’s progressive background with their more recognizable synthesizer years, all while making sure that the material has a distinctively modern sound, capable of scaring off any younger contenders trying to surpass these elder statesmen.

They do it by not just focusing on the complexities of their craft, but in casting a wide net over its very definitions. Guitarist Alex Lifeson channels his best Robert Fripp at points where atmosphere and texture rule over guitar worship soloing. The acoustic moments are compelling, and when the material calls for a bit of big power chords, Lifeson responds with memorable attacks and distinctive tones.

Geddy Lee’s vocals are more palatable than they’ve ever been, with hints of emotional qualities that were not present when his voice was more of a distraction than an instrument. And speaking of, his bass duties are pushed up high in the mix, suggesting that he’s never stopped building his low-end craft even when his hands left the fretboard for the keyboard.

Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart also deliver some of the best work of his career, with the words providing evidence of added focus and his drumming showing signs of intentional spontaneity. Credit Raskulinecz here too, as the pair purposely avoided unnecessary exposure to the songs so that when the time came for Peart to perform the rhythm tracks, he was only familiar with the song’s outline, approaching it with only a basic notion of how he would address each fill or tempo change.

Clockwork Angels most telling moment may come with its title track, beginning with progressive layer of atmospheres before turning into churning bit of double-timed frenzy. The trick goes back and forth, until it turns into an acoustic Zeppelin shuffle right around the five-minute mark. It’s well thought-out, expertly delivered, and it suggests that not only are Rush still trying to deliver career triumph to us, they may still be able to accomplish it.

“All the journeys of this great adventure” Geddy sings, looking back on the band’s history and noting the struggles of their early years with “It didn’t always feel that way.” As the track progresses, Lee finally admits “I wish that I could live it all again” while the band performs as if the last four decades haven’t slowed them down a bit.

Waste of time? Judging from Townshend’s twilight output, maybe. But for the members of Rush, Clockwork Angels is a late career triumph that sounds like the band’s time was put to excellent use.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Rush - Power Windows

Power Windows came out during my initial forays into the local community college. I went to community college for just one year immediately following high school, because I was too stupid to stay in my own State when I was of legal drinking age there.

Allow me to explain.

The State of Illinois had a drinking age of 21 as long as I was in high school. The irony is that there were two really good liquor stores right across the state line in Illinois that would occasionally be a hot spot for selling booze to minors, unlike in Iowa where the drinking age was 19. You could only buy booze at state run outlets, which was a little bit like walking into an East German liquor store, I suppose.

The stores had the same color schemes; their signage the same blue and yellow block lettering that said “Liquor Store.” The staff-all of them employees of the State of Iowa- all wore a blue uniform with a prerequisite name badge.

Beer was 3.2% AHC and could be purchased at gas stations, grocery stores and convenience stores. If we ever wanted to get rip-roaring drunk, we’d drive out buyer down to Missouri to get the sweet nectar of 5% AHC.

It wasn’t until a few years after high school that someone suggested the manner in which Iowa sold hard liquor to its citizens was similar to the way they did things in the Soviet Union.

That was it.

Within short order, the State of Iowa announced that they were breaking up the state-owned monopoly of hard liquor sales, causing its citizens to get excited at how they might be able to purchase Canadian whiskey on a Sunday afternoon. The parents of one of my friends put together enough capital to open up a liquor store in my hometown while even my own grandparents considered doing the same thing in the small town they lived in.

Iowa also began to get consistent with their drinking age by increasing it from 19 to 21. I had already turned 19 prior to the change to the drinking law, so they allowed me to be grandfathered into the law.

After my 19^th birthday, I was often assigned the task to purchase booze for my friends who weren’t yet of age. On one particular evening, a friend of mine was having issues with his Illinois girlfriend that needed attending to, so we stopped by a convenience store where I purchased a twelve pack of beer.

After inhaling a few cans, my friend decided it was time to visit his Illinois girlfriend and determine the status of their relationship. We arrived at his girlfriend’s place, he went inside, they broke up, he came back out, got into the car, and we all cracked a fresh can for the drive back over to Iowa.

I was in the back seat, nestled between two three-way speakers where my friend had loaded Rush’s Power Windows into the cassette deck. For some reason, I used to carry drumsticks around, and as everybody knows, Rush is the premier band for any drummer.

I began to play along to the opening track, “The Big Money,” mimicking any fills that I could manage and hitting every cymbal crash.

Directly behind me, the familiar colors of blue and red illuminated that rear window.

They cop claimed that my drumming appeared “suspicious,” which gave him some bullshit probable cause to pull us over. This led to the discovery of the open cans of booze, all possessed by underage drinker, one of them too stupid to wait the 10 minutes or so to cross back over the state where he was legal to crack open the can of his shitty domestic beer.

I blame Power Windows for that incident, but I also blame the drinking for me thinking that the record was good enough to warrant such “suspicious” shenanigans to get me busted.

A recent revisit of the album failed to point out any stellar highlights, aside from the aforementioned “The Big Money” which provides Alex Lifeson with at least a pulse while Geddy slap and tickles that bass to no end.

He also slabs on humungous layers of keyboards and synthesizer, signaling that all of the rumbling going on for Grace Under Pressure was completely justified as Rush was beginning to lose their hard luster after one too many records of the keys taking up valuable real estate.

“The Big Money” is a distraction. It's the one song where everyone involved plays their heart out, trying to convince the listeners that they’re still the progressive juggernauts underneath all that digital soundscape.

But as you progress through Power Windows, you begin to feel that the band is becoming too chummy with this instrument. Never mind that Neil Peart’s delivers some of the worst writing of his entire career, he’s also managed to create an electric drum sound that could pass for a rabid fan making the most ridiculous drum sound with his mouth, trying to imitate one of Neil’s fills. So essentially, there are drum sounds that sounds like a dude making drum sounds. It’s ridiculous.

I remembered liking the song “Manhattan Project” once, but now that I’ve heard it recently, I think I just liked the idea of a song called “Manhattan Project.” Rush have managed to take a subject matter where Peart could run in all different directions with, but instead we get a pained retelling with every clichéd line you could imagine.

It gets worse, and by the time you get to “Mystic Rhythms” you realize that the biggest reason you like it is because it’s at least a melodically decent song in a sea of brittle waves of Rush’s love of synthesizers.

It would mark the point where I dropped off Rush’s radar until a track from Test For Echo hinted that they may have gotten back on course. On Power Windows, Rush appears suspiciously off track, suggesting that they would be fine upstanding Canadians if they paid the “Possession Of Beer By A Minor” fine I ended up getting for making real life drum sounds with my own mouth.

I  

By Hatchet, Axe and Saw

I stayed up too late the other night to watch the Rush documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage again. I think I mentioned the awesomeness of this film before, but in case you haven’t seen it, check VH1 Classic’s schedule every now and then as it’s on constant rotation there.

For as many times as I’ve seen it, I should probably go out and get an actual copy for myself. But like cd’s, I’ve slowed down my physical purchases with dvds, mainly because it doesn’t make much sense to overload our suburban abode with a bunch of physical media that will all one day be available digitally and then store in some other digital cloud that never needs dusting.

There’s one moment in the movie where Billy Corgan speaks to the band’s importance to him while growing up. At one point, Corgan describes asking his mother to come into his room so that he can play a Rush song to her.

The song-which I’ve forgotten now and am too lazy to look up at the moment-resonates within him, and he finds the theme to the song so important that he wants her to hear it.
I’m sure how she interpreted it was different than his intention. I know this because I’ve lost count at trying to turn on my parents to some personal song only to see them fail to understand the significance to what the song means to me.

And I’m certain that my own kids will try to do the same and I’m sure that I too will fail to find the significance in how they relate to it.

But I won’t stop in trying, and I will never begin to simply discount what kind of impact a song may have on them. I’m interested in the emotional connection that songs have in people and that’s the reason why today I continue to obsess over such things.
There are songs in which we like because they sound good and there are songs that we like because they complete an emotional synapse, keeping it fresh for as long as we are able to retrieve that memory.

At one point, when I began to notice my parent’s immediate reaction towards a piece of music that they didn’t appreciate, I simply stopped trying to get them to identify with a band or a song.

For my mom, it was during my Doors phase. I was playing Waiting For The Sun and she told me to “turn off this crap” when “My Wild Love” was playing.
My dad actually stood up for me on that one.

But he had difficulties too, and that became all too apparent when he and I along with my girlfriend at the time went out of town shopping. On the way home, I played Raising Hell but Run-DMC after purchasing the cassette. I thought that maybe the Run-DMC/Aerosmith collaboration of “Walk This Way” would get him to better appreciate rap as an art form.

It didn’t work.

My father had also purchased a cassette that day, John Fogerty’s Centerfield.
Guess which tape my girlfriend and I had to endure the rest of the way home?

To this day, I can’t stand that album-mainly for that piece of shit song “I Saw It On TV,” the one where Forgerty goes through a completely nostalgic list of Baby Boomer events- ala “We Didn’t Start The Fire”- to which my father would give bits of commentary over the historical imagery.

There was one time when I was either in middle school or just starting my freshman year of high school that my father knocked on my bedroom door and wanted to ask me a music related question.

Let me just say now that at this moment, I felt on top of the world. My father was coming to me for a musical question, thereby acknowledging that I was somewhat of an “expert” on the subject.

I was more than happy to oblige.

“Do you listen to the band Rush?” he asked.

Duh!

What music-loving 8th grade boy didn’t listen to Rush!

“What’s the name of the song that they do that is about racism?”

Of course, the song he was referring to was “The Trees” and I immediately went to my copy of Exit…Stage Left to give him a sample.

He went on to explain that the subject of racism was being discussed in his American history class and that a couple of students had brought up the song.

“Can you make me a copy of it?” he asked.

I probably had the thing done in a few hours-including a bunch of other Rush tracks in case dad became enchanted with the Canadian power trio.

After all, he was a big fan of Cream.



A week later, I couldn’t resist.

“What did you think of that Rush song I taped for you?” I asked him.
“I haven’t listened to it yet.” He admitted after a quick pause to reflect on the question. “I think it’s still in my briefcase somewhere.”

It became clear that there was no real intention of him actually listening to it and that it probably wouldn’t enter his curriculum either.

He’d become too attached to the familiar, resistant to anything new-particularly to anything discovered by a teenager.

My commitment today is to at least listen to what my kids present to me. It’s a microscope to what they may be feeling inside, and as we should already know-teenagers aren’t the most open of specimens when it comes to matters of the heart.

Rush - Snakes & Arrows: Live

What’s the point, really. Rush has released so many live albums that it’s practically irrelevant at this point. For some of us old timers (read: me) we remember when the obligatory Rush live album…and yes, they were always “obligatory”…signaled the end of a Rush “era.” At least that’s what they told us on the gatefold of All The World’s A Stage. In layman’s terms, it meant that the band was getting ready for a minor stylistic change. More keyboards, less long-winded songs, harder rocking, etc., but the reality is that Rush has never really deviated that much from their original power trio approach, and by that I mean everything beyond the debut album. You see, the only time Rush allowed for a major shift was after the first album, essentially the transition from a farm-league Led Zeppelin band into the Rush as we get all geeked out about. It should come as no surprise that the reason for the geekiness is that they replaced original drummer John Rutsey with Neil Peart, a dude that breathes nerdiness every time he picks up the pen.
So again, there’s no need for Snakes & Arrows: Live unless you’re a fanatic Rush fan (and there are tons of them) or unless you’re a fairly sane fan (like me) that happened to see the tour and would like a fairly economical memento, because you were too cheap to fork over a few twenties for a concert tee.
Let’s back up a moment.
Rush’s Snakes & Arrows is the band’s best in a few decades and, with some fairly liberal trimming, could have been a great Rush album.
Rush’s Snakes & Arrows world tour found the band in exemplary form, seemingly rejuvenated from recently celebrating their 30th anniversary and releasing that aforementioned high-water studio album.
Their performances are stellar with each member delivering some passionate playing. Geddy Lee’s voice, once the topic of Pavement lyrics, has actually lowered an octave to the point where it’s less annoying yet still distinctive.
Neil Peart is spot-on and the solo he creates on “Malignant Narcissism/De Slagwerker” is fantastic: using triggers on his electronic kit, Peart unleashes a virtual big band featuring him as modern-day Gene Krupa.
And Alex Lifeson…what can you say. Lifeson’s playing has gotten more subtle and atmospheric over the years, stepping up to deliver biting solos as needed. Whereas before you may only see one specific tone originating from his amplifiers, now there are multiple textures.
Combined, these old dudes still slaughter men half their age and Snakes & Arrows: Live is a fine artifact of Rush’s twilight chops. With material heavy on the album of the same name, a few surprise catalog picks (“Between The Wheels” from Grace Under Pressure, “Circumstances” from Hemispheres, “Witch Hunt” from Moving Pictures, “Entre Nous” from Permanent Waves) and the required classics (“Limelight,” “Tom Sawyer,” “A Passage To Bangkok,” “Freewill”), Snakes & Arrows: Live rates higher than Exit Stage Left but lower than their (still) best live album All The World’s A Stage. In my opinion, it also rates a half a point higher than the actual studio album as it removes all of the filler and contains the best songs from that album.
Which pretty much makes it required listening for any Rush fanatic, who’s probably anxiously waiting for the dvd version to arrive this fall.

More Notes On Rush

Because this was my first Rush concert, there’s a few additional bonus tracks to speak on.

• First of all, my cousin and I agree that all Rush merchandise going forward must include the old logo font, the pentagram, and the naked dude. It’s iconic, and after thirty plus years of this shit, the band needs to start thinking in terms of joining the ranks of the Stones, the Dead, or Triumph.
• There are very few chicks that go to Rush concerts. There are even fewer at Judas Priest concerts.
• To the dude that created some of Rush’s computer generated videos: USA networks called and want their Commodore 64 back. Christ. If that’s the best you can come up with, just throw on the lasers and smoke machine instead.
• Bob and Doug McKenzie look old. I mean really old. I mean the make-up was horrifically noticeable during their video introduction and the bit wasn’t even that funny. Nostalgia wins though; Bob and Doug McKenzie are still cool, and the introduction was better than “Brother Bear.”
• Lose the pyrotechnics fellas. That shit came across as unnecessary and silly.
• Alex Lifeson is an awesome guitarist. For years I wondered why he always appeared on top of those yearly guitar magazine polls, but after seeing him live, I understand. Precise and controlled, Lifeson pulled off some incredible solos and did it with soul and confidence.
• Geddy Lee is a badass. He plays two instruments at once while I can barely play one.
  I was recently informed through a comment at Glorious Noise on my concert review that those were, in fact, real rotisserie chicken ovens. The mics were a gag as Lee plugs directly into the board or somethin’.
• “Subdivisions” is a fucking awesome tune.
• “YYZ” was fucking great.
• “Spirit of the Radio” was fucking incredible.
• The crowd would get louder every time Geddy did one of those famous Geddy Lee wails. His voice has gotten less irritating over the years, but he can still destroy eardrums if desired.
• The new material sounded really good live, but then again, most of the shit they did sounded really good.
• These dudes are incredibly wealthy. Their live show reflects how they’ve achieved their wealth: through their live shows. None of them give a shit how much Snakes & Arrows sell because their banking six figures with every single show.
• Even the roadies are nerds: most of them hung around the stage and listened to the band during the set. Not because they had to; because they wanted to.

Rush - Live Review

I told a coworker last week, a twenty-something woman who works in my department, that I was taking Monday off to recuperate from the weekend.
“What are you going to do?” She asked.
“I’m going to go see Rush!” I said, with a certain amount of anticipation and pride.
“Who’s that?” She wondered, with absolute seriousness.
This shocked me more than my wife’s friend who, upon learning my same plans asked the question “They’re still alive?”
At least the friend acknowledged some understanding of the band, who they were and how long they’ve been around.
After three decades, I’d never been to a Rush concert. I was a fan and, strangely enough, the band had even played a significant role as the soundtrack during one of my first sexual explorations ever. It’s inappropriate, I know, but I hadn’t been exposed to Roxy Music’s Avalon at the time, so give me a break.
I started to distance myself from the band around the time when I became pretentious about music and started to care about things like Brian Eno-era Roxy Music and how Rush’s added synthesizer works to their mid-80’s output seemingly neutered the band from any hint of their former power-trio bravado. The band would later return to their more guitar-oriented formula, but by then I was even further away from the playlist of the classic rock station.
After a bit of middle age nostalgia and a strong album of new material, I considered the exorbitant ticket prices (the seats, about thirty rows back from center stage, had a face value of $90) of Rush’s Snakes & Arrows tour to finally check out a band that had played a vital part in my own upbringing.
The experience provided me with the realization that, perhaps, the bands that I held in high regard during junior high weren’t that embarrassing; that those three Canadians could still manage to fill the 28,000 capacity First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Chicago for a very good reason:
They can fucking play.
I understand how divisive it is being a Rush fan; you either love them or you don’t, and there is very little room for middle ground. They also seem to be more of a “man’s band” and they predominately male audience that I encountered probably outnumbered the ladies about three-to-one. With that being said, the attractive and professional looking woman in her early thirties that had a seat next to me new the words to every song in the band’s three hour set including the new material. And the two middle age ladies standing behind me started screaming “Wooo Hooo!” when the band started playing “Natural Science,” certainly not one of Rush’s most popular songs, in the middle of their second set.
In other words: the chicks that were in attendance were hardcore fans themselves and would surpass me in their knowledge and overall admiration of the band.
Chicago is a special place for Rush (they recorded their 1998 live album Different Stages at this same venue), but the band deviated little from their already established 28 song long playlist that is broken up between two sets. The first set, introduced with a comedic dream sequence video starring Alex, Geddy and Neil show over three HD screens hanging over center stage, contained 11 songs, randomly lifted from the band’s 18 album deep catalog.
While the band admirably focused on the material from Snakes & Arrows, the crowd didn’t seem to mind it; the audience was extremely generous towards these songs and the band executed them with fire and enthusiasm.
The band’s Permanent Waves album is the second highest source of material for this tour, and that decision worked well for me. Permanent Waves is one of my favorite Rush albums ever as it signaled the band’s second major shift in sound while producing some of their most recognizable songs (“The Spirit of the Radio,” “Freewill”).
Those aforementioned tracks, along with Moving Pictures’ “Limelight” and “Tom Sawyer,” Signals’ “Subdivisions” and 2112’s “Passage To Bangkok” proved to be the night’s most recognizable songs. Everything else, it seemed, was chosen to provide the band’s loyal followers with a chance at catching something not regularly performed.
Snakes & Arrows three instrumental tracks, along with the wordless “YYZ” from Moving Pictures made an appearance, hinting that the band felt the need to address their own increase ages and its effect on their dexterity. While noticeably older looking, none of the band sounded a bit winded as they showed off their impeccable chops that’s been mined from over three decades of performances.
To complement the band’s notoriously famous un-photogenic image, the show is supplemented with obligatory lasers and other lighting highjinks along with smoke machines, flashpots, and some woefully lame computer-generated imagery. When the video director wasn’t dazzling the crowd with circa-1982 visuals, they were at least acknowledging the era with a Bob & Doug McKenzie song introduction and band-created vignettes. The best one came from the courtesy of South Park’s “Lil’ Rush” cartoon where Cartman gets Tom Sawyer confused with Huckleberry Finn before being corrected by Kyle.
The band members also managed to provide the crowd with a few visuals themselves.
Geddy Lee, dressed in black t-shirt, black jeans, and Chuck Taylors, worked the frets of the various Fender basses used during the show while returning to his familiar black and white Rickenbacker bass for one song, “The Spirit of the Radio.” His rig was built into rotisserie chicken ovens, labeled as a “Henhouse” brand, complete with rotating chickens cooking inside of their glass doors. The amps (which appear to be fully functional, as each one was individually mic’d towards the bottom) stood about six feet high and were maintained by roadies would occasionally don a chef’s hat and come out on stage to brush the chicken with butter and seasonings.
Alex Lifeson looked smartly dressed in blue jeans and a dark button-down shirt while sporting what appeared to be wrestling tennis shoes. A barrage of Barbie dolls surrounded his stage monitors, with arms raised, mocking him as the only female fans that the guitarist of Rush has probably seen during his tenure. On top of his guitar stacks were dozens of toy dinosaurs, perhaps addressing the fact that Rush has, indeed, reached a level of dinosaurian proportions from not only their style of music, but their median ages as well. As Geddy himself addressed it as they went into the intermission after the first set. “We’re old.”
And then there’s Neil Peart, the man responsible for some of the band’s most head-scratching lyrical moments and for the, literally, thousands of air-drumming worshippers in attendance would stood slack jawed at each impossibly complex fill and/or tempo change.
Playing behind a beautiful crimson red DW kit embossed with the Snakes & Arrow log, his riser rotated during the drum solo after “Malignant Narcissism” to reveal an electronic kit behind his acoustic. After a curious blend of acoustic and electronic drum soloing, a pre-recorded segment of big band music played, allowing Peart to play along to the styles of his idol Buddy Rich, while black and white video footage of some of those swing-era drum heroes were projected on the screen. After one impossibly difficult fill at the end of “Summertime Blues” (with more Blue Cheer influence than The Who, surprisingly as Peart’s acknowledged Keith Moon as one of his influences), the drummer slumped over as if his heart had stopped before cracking a rare smile at his band mates who were awaiting the final cymbal crash.
There was an obvious respect and admiration towards each other throughout the show. Lifeson uttered a few words of “nicely done” into Geddy’s ear after some tight, low-end riffing while Lee himself sat down off of stage left to watch Peart’s entire drum solo.
It was a display of camaraderie that rivaled that of those in attendance, many of whom brought their own children in the hopes that their idol worship would somehow be passed along to a new generation.
At the same time, that kind of “family outing” made it fairly uncomfortable for someone like me who planned on smoking a perfectly rolled joint during “Natural Science” to get “prepared” for Peart’s upcoming drum solo, only to become the recipient of the angry glares from parent’s shielding their children from the smell of marijuana second hand smoke.
In an act of unprecedented uncoolness, I forgot the lighter in the car and nobody, I mean NOBODY around me seemed to be holding a source of fire. I guarantee you that wasn’t the case whenever first toured in support of Permanent Waves; those seats would have been wafting in the stench of weed. It didn’t really matter to the music and I’m sure my forgetfulness raised my standing among the middle agers (and I’m one of them) in attendance.
Christ, I’m old enough now that the security guard didn’t even frisk me coming into the amphitheatre; I could have brought a three-foot bong in their and he wouldn’t have even noticed!
We may have been old, but goddamn it, we were in impressively large numbers that evening, revisiting our past and admiring the spunk of a power trio who still seemed focused on carrying on, regardless of perception or lack of critical recognition.
I understand how Rush’s impact may be overlooked among the younger generation (Snakes & Arrows is proving to be one of the band’s worst selling studio albums), but there’s still plenty of fans for them to bank upon for a few more years of large stadium tours and, God bless ‘em, if they want to mount their undertakings on the back of a barely noticed studio album.
While I may have first learned about Rush during junior high, I also learned a few other things, like how the dinosaurs ruled the Earth for a very long time.
And last Saturday night, I got a chance to see how dinosaurs ruled the Earth again.

Set One
Introduction Video - Dream Sequence with Alex and Neil followed by Geddy and his Scottish Counterpart

Limelight
Digital Man
Entre Nous
Mission
Freewill
The Main Monkey Business
The Larger Bowl (with Bob & Doug McKenzie introduction)
Secret Touch
Circumstances
Between The Wheels
Dreamline

Set Two
Introduction Video - The Alex/Leela Board Rant

Far Cry
Workin' Them Angels
Armor And Sword
Spindrift
The Way The Wind Blows
Subdivisions
Natural Science
Witch Hunt
Malignant Narcissism
Drum Solo
Hope
Summertime Blues
The Spirit of Radio
Tom Sawyer (with South Park/Lil' Rush introduction)

Encore
One Little Victory
A Passage to Bangkok
YYZ

This article originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Rush - Snakes & Arrows

For over 30 years, Rush has endured their share of career-long criticism ranging from everything from Geddy Lee’s vocal ability to Neil Peart’s penchant for overblown lyricism.
But maybe the critics should consider the lineage that the band has never attempted to hide from ever since their debut album back in 1974. When one considers this, Rush has held true to the modern-rock ethos of what constitutes “power trio” format (proggressive bent jamming over weighty themes) and, remarkably, they have done so with their large fan base in place.
For their 18th studio album, Snakes & Arrows, Rush remain steadfast to the formula that provided them with gold and platinum awards and sold out venues each time they hit the road.
Even the title itself is indicative of the headspace that provides fans with literary insight and critics with additional ammunition. “Snakes & Arrows” is loosely based on a game created by Buddhist saints and sages called “Leela.” When a Leela dice is rolled, the player moves around the board. The places on the board represent various stages of consciousness or existence, and the player can be brought to higher levels via “arrows” and to lower ones through “snakes.” If the premise sounds familiar, it’s because the game found its way to America under a more suitable name for Western tastes: Chutes & Ladders.
If that much forethought was put in simply coming up with a fucking title for the album, imagine what these Canadians worked out with the music.
Rush circa 2007 is pretty much the same sound that fans have been accustomed too since ditching their misguided synthesizer tinkerings in the mid-to-late 80’s. Snakes & Arrows continues the band’s hard rock tendencies with little effort to comply with the desire of some who are waiting for another landmark shift like 2112 or Permanent Waves.
So with those expectations clearly out of the picture, Snakes & Arrows does show some notable improvements in terms of songwriting; this may be Neil Peart’s best lyrical work yet.
The lead-off track, “Far Cry,” finds the band, who could’ve easily become insolated among their supporters, firmly in touch with the realities of the modern world. “It’s a far cry from the world we thought we’d inherit,” Lee sings, before admitting defeat with Peart’s line “One day I feel I’m on top of the world/And the next it’s falling in on me.” It’s a far cry from a lyricist who’s was previous known for using trees as a metaphor for racism and catching the spit of that modern day warrior, Tom Sawyer.
“Armor And Sword,” the album’s thematic title track, Peart channels Richard Dawkins’ book The God Illusion which explains how faith is primarily an inherited role, passed down like culture itself. Regardless of what faith a child is brought up with, it probably won’t be strong enough to overcome whatever trauma that life throws at them. To that, Peart (who’s been through his own share of personal tragedy) discloses that “No one gets to their heaven without a fight.”
The high spots of the album are three instrumental tracks. “Hope” provides some generous Alex Lifeson acoustic fretwork, while “The Main Monkey Business” finds the trio working out a dynamic six minute jam. But the best of the three, “Malignant Narcissism,” hints at the band’s sense of humor (the song title comes from the movie Team America) and it sounds like an update of “YYZ” (from Moving Pictures). Best of all: it clocks in at mere two minutes and eighteen seconds.
Producer Nick Raskulinecz, who’s previously worked with such irrelevant arena rock acts like Velvet Revolver, Foo Fighters, and Stone Sour, punch Peart’s kit way-the-fuck-up in the mix to the point where you’re left wondering if he could have been one of those high school band drummers who stenciled the Rush pentagram logo on their sheet music folders.
Snakes & Arrows won’t be the album that silences the cynics nor will it be the album that provides them with any new fans. The fact is: they don’t need either. So, considering who this album is ultimately geared for, Snakes & Arrows will be noted as one of the band’s highpoints within a career that even the most acclaimed bands feel envious about.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Rush - All The World's A Stage

Strangely, my first exposure to Rush also came during my first exposure to the opposite sex. It was the fall of the eighth grade when myself and another classmate found ourselves in the company of two other eighth grade girls with no parental supervision.
One of the girls invited us over to her house while her parents went out to watch a high school football game. The four of us were supposed to be there too, but the very idea of unsupervised liaisons was, obviously, more enticing than football.
The girls had already invaded the liquor cabinet by the time we arrived, so any notion of heavy petting was quickly reduced as both of them had trouble standing upright, let alone removing undergarments.
But believe me, I tried my best. On the unmade bed of the host’s older brother (who happened to be playing in the football game we should have been at), every advance was met with her unfocused ramblings and drunken stalling.
As she excused herself to use the restroom, I understood that I wouldn’t be losing my virginity on that evening. This frustrated me. I noticed her brother’s stereo next to the bed and my eyes glanced over some of his collection. In a fit of selfish revenge, I took his 8-track of Rush’s All The World’s A Stage and put it in the pocket of my blue jean jacket.
A few months later, I was fortunate enough to have another opportunity present itself, this time in my own bedroom. During the time that I had A.T.W.A.S., I played it continually. Rush’s Permanent Waves was the current album, but I was content with this double-live overview of the band’s first four albums. Since the album’s rightful owner was actually a high school senior who also happened to be a varsity football player, I immediately associated A.T.W.A.S. with coolness. In an act that now seems completely stupid, I instinctively put in that album on my stereo as we prepared to make out on my twin bed. And even though the voice of Geddy Lee didn’t get me any closer to losing my virginity, I did end up with a prominent hickey that I would proudly display at middle school until it healed four days later.
If you’ve ever heard All The World’s A Stage, you’ll understand that it’s by no means a “make out” album. In fact, it’s a fairly strange anomaly in the Rush arsenal: coming after their first four studio albums, it’s the sound of a young band finding some headway in terms of sales while still discovering what kind of band they ultimately want to be.
The recording is from the tour that supported 2112, Rush’s first foray into conceptual themes. That album is adequately represented here, as Geddy announces “We’d like to perform for you side one of our latest album.” before the power trio breaks into a five-part suite of 2112.
It also includes substantial workout of “By-Tor And The Snow Dog” (originally on Fly By Night) Rush’s first attempt at tip-toeing into the progressive rock world of lengthy songs composed of smaller suites/parts/movements.
But the rest of the album is pretty much straight-ahead smart rockers (“Bastille Day,” “Fly By Night,” “Something For Nothing”), with a helping handful of straight-ahead dumb Zeppelin rockers (“Working Man,” “In The Mood,” “Finding My Way”) taken from their un-original debut. Sure, it had been done before (and done better) but it’s a fun album nonetheless.
Arguably, the best songs happen to be the softer ones (“Lakeside Park” and “In The End”) where the trio gets to show of their dynamics and melodics, two characteristics that they later exploited quite successfully after Peart ditched his pretentious epic lyrical phase for more streamlined A.O.R.-ready material.
Rush has suggested that their “routine” of following four or five studio efforts with a live album somehow signals an end to each phase of the band. While that looks good on paper and on the liner notes for the live albums, it isn’t always the case. When you consider live albums like Exit…Stage Left (where the songs sound exactly like the studio renditions) and A Show Of Hands (ditto), the band never really demonstrated much noteworthy change afterwards.
They did after A.T.W.A.S., which makes it such a pleasure and an anomaly at the same time. The performances rock and they aren’t perfect; there are flubbed notes, rushed tempos and even (gasp!) sounds of the band tuning in between songs. They never sounded like this again: a young and hungry band with an eye on where they were going while managing to work through their past material with impatient ferocity.
It may not be one of the best albums of all times, but for Rush, it may very well be their best live document ever.

What About The Voice Of Geddy Lee?

I’ve always been receptive towards new music, but like any other music fanatic, there was a time in which my record collection was probably just as weak as the people I ridicule today. Ok, maybe not that bad, but I did have my share of duds while growing up. After all, I’m the guy that got pissed at Heather A. for putting a few saltine crackers on 38 Special’s “Wild Eyed Southern Boys” as it played on my turntable at my very first “the parents are away” party. Now I understand she was doing me a favor in her drunken comedy gesture. Thank you Heather. Too bad I couldn’t return the favor later on by telling you “speed kills.” She’s one of those chicks that came from a well-to-do family, got caught up in meth, and now looks 10 years older than me. She even came close to losing her kids after she left them outside in subzero weather while she did whatever mothers do under the influence of methamphetamines.
I stole at least four albums from her older brother: Ozzy Osborne’s “Diary Of A Madman,” Van Halen’s “Fair Warning,” Rush’s “All The World’s A Stage” and Billy Squier’s “Don’t Say No.” I was doing pretty good up until Billy Squier. And I don’t know what the fuck was with me and stealing back then. I nicked several albums from Woolsworth (do you know how hard it was to steal albums?), cassettes from K-Mart, and a shitload of cassettes from unlocked cars parked in the hospital parking lot. I would go to the orthodontist and then check for unlocked vehicles on the way back to school. I picked up Lindsey Buckingham’s “Law & Order,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Live,” and Tom Petty’s “Hard Promises” this way. Not once did I get busted.
I touched my first vagina to the sounds of Rush’s “All The World’s A Stage” 8-track. Even then I was an overachiever: using a format that essentially has no real ending seemed like the perfect soundtrack to exploring the warmth of womanhood. Never mind the actual songs were nowhere near sexual, sans the seven minute version of “In The End.” But whatever: forethought and sensitivity were never really an issue with the girl that once made a beeline towards my willy, backstage in the middle school auditorium. Besides, she seemed impressed that I could recite “I can see what you mean/It just takes me longer” alongside Geddy Lee. The man with the squeaky voice was my first finger bang companion.

But getting back to the kleptomania, I really have no idea what possessed me to steal music. It wasn’t like there was other examples of my material thievery either. I probably stole nothing more in value that some Bazooka Joe bubble gum up until that point. Music made me do crazy thing. Like cash in all of my savings bonds to a ton of albums down at the mall. There was something so powerful about having enough cash to actually secure an entire weekend worth of quality listening material. “Quality” being very subjective to the age and time. It’s obvious that “Hold On Loosely” held a special place in my heart for a brief period in my life. Perhaps if I wasn’t so cynical, it might still hold a place of fondness with me today. For the record: I’ve never stopped loving that live Rush album.