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Alex Lifeson interview


Indica
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QUOTE (Moonraker @ Sep 5 2004, 12:23 AM)
Just finished reading it (took my time)

It certainly is a very good article encompassing many aspects of Rush at its current stage. There is even comment by Alex regarding the New Years incident. Very nice find Indica biggrin.gif

No problem, I found it on another Rush forum. I figured I would post it on here since it's so recent. I figured any of you would do the same thing. That's why I love these forums, when I first joined I was overwhelmed with Rush info. I've been a rush fan for over 25 years and joined a rush forum and learned so much stuff that I never knew, it was so overwhelming.

I love it!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2.gif 2.gif 2.gif 2.gif

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thanx for posting that link!!

it was an awesome article...

even when you scroll down after the article and find that great picture...

very cool...

thanx again!!!

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QUOTE (Alsgalpal @ Sep 5 2004, 12:55 AM)
ohmy.gif ohmy.gif ohmy.gif Very cool!!!! I have one of him on cd, called something about kings or something like that... biggrin.gif

Love that CD! So many interesting bits. We should discuss them on the Alex page...

 

Last time I was at Amazon they had a few copies.

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Thought you all would want to know - it turns out that the interview with Alex at the Dutch Progressive Rock Pages wasn't a legitimate interview. One of the guys at Counterparts, who'd done an interview with Alex for the CP site back in 2002, noticed that one of the answers Alex supposedly gave was almost word-for-word identical to a passage from the earlier interview.

 

After reading about that, I checked some of the other passages in the interview and found one where it looks like the guy took parts of a couple answers from a 2002 CNN interview and edited them down into a single "statement", and another where he took an answer GEDDY gave in a Billboard interview published in the May 15th issue this year - and didn't even change a reference to "Alex and Neil" to being "Geddy and Neil" which it should have been if it had really been Alex speaking. (I felt really stupid about not picking up on that. The comment had sounded familiar, but I figure since I read so many interviews I'd just seen one where a similar question had been asked, and ascribed the name mix up to being a typo. Ugh! I HATE getting suckered like that).

 

The worst part, though, is that since several chunks were obviously plagarized from other interviews, it would appear that NO interview took place at all - meaning that most of the other answers are likely complete fabrications, with the author putting his views into Alex's mouth.

 

The DPRP has pulled the interview from it's website, and I noticed that the author is no longer listed as a member of their staff. Still, it's really sad that someone would do something like this - especially to Alex. Some of the comments in that interview were about the NYE incident and could potentially have caused Alex problems in his case. The whole thing REALLY pisses me off.

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Ok, there is further follow-up on the DPRP interview with Alex - here is a message posted at the Counterparts message board (where the questions about the article started) by one of the editors of DPRP magazine.

 

QUOTE
Dear Rush-fans,

This is Bart here, one of the chief-editors of the Dutch Progressive Rock Page.

I must say that after hearing the allegations about the interview being based on plagiarism I did not have a good Sunday. I spent most of the day meeting with my fellow editors while at the same time trying to reach Andy to hear his explanation.

We never doubted our fellow team member but removed the interview so we could sort things out and give Andy the opportunity to disclose his sources. We also disabled Andy's feedback option on the site, to prevent him from being bombarded with e-mails from angry Rush fans.

We were convinced the allegation were not true and luckily Andy's response gave us the facts needed to withstand these allegations. He admits on having quoted other interviews, but saw no harm in doing so, especially seeing this is an often used technique by journalists: Basically you ask the person you interview to reflect on a previous statement, elaborate on it, and then for the flow of the article you include the original quote in the answer.
However, in the current age of Internet such articles are readily available to anyone, even years after their publication.

In total Andy has used quotes from three articles: an interview with Geddy Lee in Billboard, the 20 questions Q&A from this forum, and the CNN article from 2002.

At DPRP we always strive to give credit to any sources we may use, and had we known about this earlier, the interview would have been published as it is now. The interview is now back online, with a few amendments made, including links to the quoted articles.

For the people who immediately jumped to the conclusion that the other 3900 words of the article were fabricated by Andy himself, this is not true. The entire interview, apart from the three quotes, was conducted by Andy and the statements in the interview are those of Alex Lifeson. No words were twisted and no false statements were put in Lifeson's mouth.

DoubleAgent5150 [Note from Kriselda: DA5150 is the Counterparts member who had done the "20 Questions" interview from which one answer had been lifted] had it on good authority that Lifeson was not interviewed by a Dutch website, and he was right. Andy interviewed Lifeson on behalf of the British Metal magazine Powerplay, since he writes for both and his articles are often used for both Powerplay and DPRP.

The interview was conducted by telephone on Tuesday June 8th, at 5.45 GMT. Lifeson called Andy from the US leg of the tour.

I would like to thank Tomservo [Note: Another Conterparts member] for pointing this matter out to us, and I hope that we've managed to straighten things out quick enough.

On behalf of the entire DPRP crew I apologise for the inconvenience and I hope you will still visit us occassionaly.

Best regards,

Bart van der Vorst
Dutch Progressive Rock Page
www.dprp.net

 

Since I'd posted the information about the questionable nature of the article, I wanted to make sure their response got heard here as well.

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After Bart from the Dutch Progressive Rock Pages made his post to the Counterparts board, I had written to him to point out a problem with the revised article in regards to the quote from Geddy that had been used (specifically that even after the clarification, the part attributed to Alex was actually STILL from Geddy.) He also stopped by this form and saw a post I'd made there in which I commented that I'd also noticed that some of the quotes from the CNN article was still included as "current" material. Someone had asked why, if the author of the interview, had been able to get Alex to open up as much as he appears to have in the interview, would he find it necessary to use quotes from other articles. Here's my comment on that part of the matter:

 

QUOTE (From Thorswitch's post at Counterparts)
I don't know enough about how interviews are generally conducted, how this author does interview or how Alex handles interviews to really know how that might have happened, but I could imagine that if the author had done research he could have said "here's some things that have been said before on these topics, do you still hold these positions", or possibly he asked those questions and Alex just told him to use previous answers, or he might just be a rat bastard who lifted them to pad out an interview and didn't think he'd get caught. Your guess is as good as mine.

 

Bart responded to both the e-mail I'd sent him and the post I'd made at CP, and has given me permission to copy is response here.

 

He sent me an e-mail response, and I got his permission to post it here:

 

QUOTE (Bart from DPRP)
Hi Kriselda,

Thanks for your reply. I just read your post on the Rush forum and it seems I still missed a few things. I deleted the Geddy quote after reading your mail this morning, but you are right about the second sentence of the CNN quote - I missed that.

Thing is, Andy recommended to delete the sections entirely, but I figured it would be best to alter the text a little and make distinction between the quotes and the real article. So it is my fault that I screwed up there. I'm at work now, so I can't access the server, but I will have another look at it tonight.

You are right in your first assumption on the forum as to why these quotes were included. Andy was only allowed a 30-minute time slot, and in order to cover as much topics as possible, he asked Lifeson to reflect, elaborate or verify points from previous interviews, rather than asking those same questions again. For the sake of continuity he quoted the original articles as if it was one continuous conversation. Like I said, he saw no harm in it, as this is a well-used method. I don't agree with him on that (it would infuriate me too if I'd read my own work in someone else's article) so that's why I tried to rectify the things the way I did.

Best Regards,

Bart
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Well, what Bart from the Dutch Progressive Rock Pages is saying is that there were three answers that were taken from previous interviews - one that Alex did in 2002 with DoubleAgent5150 from the Counterparts site (for that site), one that Alex did for CNN in 2002, and one that GEDDY did this year with Billboard Magazine, but that the rest of the material is taken from a new interview that Andy Read did with Alex in June of this year. Bart also says that the reason Andy reused the three quotes is that he only had 30 minutes to speak with Alex, so rather than having him expound on questions he'd answered previously, Andy basically read the quotes to Alex and asked him if those statements were still accurate, and then included them in his piece.

 

It still bothers me, though, that one of the quotes was orignally said by Geddy, and in this interview, Andy was basically trying to put Geddy's words in Alex's mouth. If he had wanted to get Alex's opinion on that matter, I'd think he would actually ask Alex about it, or Alex would have given him his OWN statement. So that just seems kind of odd, but....

 

The ont I have the biggest problem with, though, is the answer about the NYE incident. It very well may be a genuine quote from Alex - according to Bart it is. But I know from a previous article that when journalists were given the chance to talk to Alex, they were told that if they brought up the NYE incident that he would terminate the call because he cannot speak about it. Any comments he makes could be used against him by the prosecution if it actually goes to trial. Plus, stuff like what he's quoted as saying in this article could just piss the prosecutors off enough that they might not be as willing to make a favourable plea-bargain with him. When I first read the article, the emotional impact of that section really got to me because I'm SUCH a fan of his, but the more I reflected on it, the more out of character it seemed that he would have said that in an interview - but the phrasing sounds enough like how he talks that I didn't think at all that it wasn't a real quote until questions about article as a whole were raised.

 

Which is basically a very long way of saying that I don't know if the rest of the article is genuine or not. I have my doubts at this point, but the editor of the DPRP is standing behind the story.

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