Weatherman

On 4/22/2024 at 1:46 PM, 78jazz said:

The Camera Eye.

 

There, I said it.

Hm. The production quality is SO good on MP that the song itself may not actually be as good as we'd like to think.

Like, imagine The Camera Eye on RTB, sounding like it was recorded inside a PVC pipe. Would we still like it as much? Food for thought. 

(OTOH: Bravado is such a strong song that it overcomes the crummy production. Imagine Bravado recorded on MP.)

23 hours ago, Timbale said:

...but also, "mean mean stride" and "mean mean pride" right off the top irks me.  I just don't think it's a good lyric...and the repeat of "mean" really rubs me the wrong way. 

 

It's okay. Not his best, not his worst.

I will always thank the random person on here who pointed out that "the space he invades he gets by on you" is a reference to the Space Invaders video game.

1 hour ago, bytor11 said:

 

 (its a terrible re-make of the 2112, Kevin J Anderson is widely considered a hack) 

Kevin J. Anderson is interesting in that he dictates ALL his stories, mostly while hiking. 

I mean, that's time-efficiency, and it's good for health. But I don't know how good it is for balancing all the elements of a complex story. 

1 hour ago, bluefox4000 said:

 

 

I've been saying this since 2012.  songs lack any memorable hooks.  it sounds like shit.  Hamfisted story.

 

but everyone DROOLS over this mess.

 

lol.

 

Mick

I couldn't even get through CA. I couldn't get through Vapor Trails either. 

Snakes and Arrows: made it through -- great production -- but I was bored.

Let's stir things up around here!

We all know Rush's stinkers, mostly recorded in the 90s and thereafter.

Better question: Which beloved Rush hit do you hate? What supposedly great Rush song makes you roll your eyes? 

Maybe you don't like the time sig. Maybe you don't like Ged's squeal. Maybe you don't like Al's tone. Maybe you've just heard it too much. 

I'll go first: 

1) Freewill. I hate the alternating 6/8 and 7/8 time sig (especially that extra last beat on the 7). I hate the way that Ged's voice doubles the guitar line in the verses. I really hate Al's spastic solo. It's overall bad prog. 

2) Distant second is Closer to the Heart, just because it's overplayed. It wore out its welcome in a way that their other hits didn't. 

Share below!

On 3/28/2024 at 11:37 PM, Timbale said:

 As for Neil...I think he played very competently, as always...but there had been a fire missing for quite a few tours, I think. 

A friend of mine is a professional percussionist, and he said that to me in 2014. 

He felt the Prof had been coasting for a while. 

I dunno. If the extraordinary drum solo from Live in Frankfurt is Neil just "mailing it in", then what the hell would a full effort look like?

On 4/5/2024 at 8:16 PM, custom55 said:

So with Phish, a song is NEVER the same when played live.   That's why seeing this band live is always an experience.

 

Another thing with Phish is CK5, their lighting guy.  His lighting performance is a "jam" sort of speak, and along with the music, the lighting is never the same.

 

Exhibit A

 

 

I went to a Phish concert once. I was the only person not on drugs. 

Bored out of my skull after a while. I watched a skinny guy wearing a purple wizard's robe and purple wizard's hat move through the audience selling "magic peanut butter" in tinfoil. He was more entertaining than what was happening onstage.

Weird vibes overall. 2/10 would not recommend. A Rush crowd was always more my style. 

On 4/5/2024 at 2:40 PM, apetersvt said:

For me,  I don't feel the 'magic' with bands who pretty much play the songs exactly like they are on the album.  It's all rehearsed and planned.  Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of those bands at well but not to the context of EP's original post.

It's the bands that go into the free flowing jazz improvisation where nobody knows what's gonna happen next.  Then the 'magic' happens when everyone listens to what everyone else is doing and everyone synchs up and adds in their moments to elevate the spiritual moments.

 

You must not feel much magic with Rush then. 

I loved the trio, but I always got the sense in concert that they didn't listen to one another very closely. I don't mean that in a bad way, but their parts were just so complicated and predetermined. Ged, Alex, and Neil were more concerned with hitting their individual marks, finishing the descending run on the 1, etc.

All of it was laid out well in advance. And because they were all so precise, the group moved like clockwork.

Angelically. 

On 4/4/2024 at 12:00 AM, Entre_Perpetuo said:

That’s probably true, but I also don’t really listen to much Dead/Allmans/Phish type stuff, so idk for sure. 

Came here to say The Allman Brothers Band. They had exactly what you're describing.

Not for their whole career, but definitely in the early 70s (with Duane Allman) and then again in the 2000s (with Derek Trucks).

Check out "Live at the Fillmore East" - it's the best place to start, and one of the best live albums of all time. 

11 hours ago, JARG said:

Holy necropost, Batman!

 

OK, now that that's out of the way, imo there have been three guitarists who been game changers in popular music.

 

First off, Chuck Berry who showed the world that the guitar could be the focus of attention, sharing melodic and expressive duties with the human voice.

 

Hendrix came along and said, "yes, but look what else you can do with the guitar". He took the guitar to a completely different level.

 

EVH came along and said, "thanks for opening the door, Jimi, but look what else you can do with the instrument".

 

Certainly there have been enormously talented players sprinkled in the mix - Lifeson, Gilmour, SRV, Paul Gilbert, and Billy Gibbons are among my faves - but Berry, Hendrix, and Van Halen are the three true pioneers, imo. Eddie would have to work far less to passingly cover the Working Man solo than Alex would Eruption.

Yeah, the pioneers aren't always the "best" or most popular players either. They just hear things differently.

They're first.

I acknowledge that Eddie was a genius, but his solos are hard to listen to because of the squeals and mania. His rhythm playing was much easier to digest.

On 1/28/2024 at 5:17 AM, yyz305 said:

I LOVE this track these days. I didn't 'notice it' much, until they played it on the Time Machine Tour. One of my favourite songs in the set on that tour!

It's my favorite song on Presto and I totally get why they named the album after it.

Presto is a singer's album. Geddy was at his best from HYF thru RTB. 

On 2/20/2024 at 9:17 AM, Relayer2112 said:

 

If you want to hear how human Alex is, listen to the following...I don't mean this to put Alex or anyone else down.  What I idolize about Alex (Ged, John and Neil also) is that he took his desire to play and would not be denied.  Years of struggling, knowing that there were players out there who were better than him, yet still becoming a rock god to many.  His greatest talent was/is playing the right notes at the right time to make a song meaningful and memorable.  He always did just what each song needed...no more, no less.

 

Yeah I've heard that before. It definitely brings him down to earth. 

On 2/15/2024 at 2:14 PM, JARG said:

There was a time when the members of Rush were like gods in my eyes. They were powerhouses on their respective instruments, writing amazingly involved pieces of music and expressing atypical concepts in a thought-provoking and poetic way. Clear that idle idol worship was all just me projecting onto them what I wanted to be true.

 

The veneer really began to slip away as I developed enough facility on guitar to play in a Rush cover band. The more I knew about how Alex played his parts, and, by extension, the ins and outs of music composition and arrangement, the more human he, and they, became. And once I was OK with them just being "regular" guys, the less I was affected by rumors of drug use. Many of my musician friends did inordinate amounts of drugs, but that didn't lessen them as friends in my eyes.

Interesting. I went the opposite here. 

I discovered them as songwriters: my classically-trained professional pianist cousin gave me MP and said "study these guys, they're amazing". 

So I learned to play guitar by learning Alex's parts. I never idolized them

UNTIL

My first concert, Roll the Bones tour. Alex was flipping incredible. I remember watching his fingers on Spirit of Radio and going "ohhhh he's better live than in the studio, shiittttt". Then they became larger than life and pretty much stayed that way, in my mind. 

On 1/31/2024 at 8:54 AM, Timbale said:

Caress Of Steel, which I loved (except for Going Bald) didn't strike me as druggy, and still doesn't really.  

The music on that album was clearly made by three people who could barely see straight from the drugs. It's aural sludge.

The music before (FBN) and after (2112) is so much brighter by comparison. Put down the hash oil boys!

I'm not surprised by the booger sugar in the early 80s. But I am surprised that they persisted using it all the way through the late 90s, at least. 

11 hours ago, Timbale said:

For sure - and I don't fault him/them for not wanting to talk about coke use in the film.  But...in the movie Geddy says something about how (I think) Kiss's hotel rooms were "interesting to watch" or something of the sort... and it really makes them seem like they WERE the guys sitting in watching TV after gigs only...not the guys having a drinking contest with Hawkwind.  Looking back on the film, it seems a little bit distorted.  Maybe a little dishonest.

Agreed, and Gene Simmons making fun of them for being so "straight" wasn't exactly accurate either. 

I don't know how someone could listen to their 1970s output and think they WEREN'T on drugs. 

Attention all planets of the solar federation...

On 1/25/2024 at 2:33 PM, Slim said:

Unless it's very different from Rush, I hope they don't play together again. That souffle is past warming up.

 

 

I have no problem with this never happening.

It's so terrific to hear Alex in a different context in Envy of None. He's really versatile. 

Ged will have a harder time separating himself from Rush with future music, since his voice is the sound of Rush, and since he was the driving force behind the band. Listening to Ged's memoir really showed me how he was "the director" of the Rush story, so to speak. 

At a certain point they stopped making albums that were 90% great and 10% mediocre and started making albums that were 10% great and 90% mediocre.

I was six years old.

On 12/9/2023 at 10:06 AM, Tony R said:

Marco Minneman would be the perfect ‘neutral’ choice. Has the technical chops to pull it off without the baggage of a big name band. 

I hear Bram van der Berg will be available starting next month. 

On 12/22/2023 at 4:29 PM, snowdog2112 said:

Exactly. And that shouldn’t be surprising, I’ve heard countless artists not even remember which songs on are which albums and such. Most of them haven’t heard their own songs since they recorded them unless they’re live staples. Casual fans seem to have this expectation that you could randomly bump into Geddy and Alex on the street and hand them instruments and say “Play Different Strings for me” and they could do it on the spot. Most artists live in the moment, the fans know more about what they played on various tours and such than they do. I’ll bet Geddy hasn’t listened to ESL since it was mastered and I seriously doubt he knows what songs are on it. And again, this isn’t a criticism, that’s the case with almost all bands.

I've written over 50 books and countless educational materials. I can't remember what's in 95% of them. 

Just yesterday I was reading through a history exam for work. It took me about ten minutes before I realized that I'd written the exam, over eight years ago. I can only imagine how much more memory degrades across 40 years. 

3 hours ago, Todem said:

As far as the book......I thought everything up thru Hold Your Fire was outstanding. I loved hearing about his childhood, his parents, his early days before Rush and then the early days of Rush. It was great. Really insightful into his personality and his role within the band. Once we get into the Rupert Line and second go around with Peter Collins.....we have heard all of this a lot in the internet era. 

 

The real mysteries of Rush was the pre internet days. And that was the meat and potatoes of Geddy’s story for my taste. 

 

But overall it was a damn great read......and the audible book made it even better. He did a great job reading the book......it flew by for me. 

 

 

Agreed, with two additions:

1) I got the sense that he wasn't telling us everything about what went wrong in his marriage, or how he saved it. 

2) Big takeaway for me was that Ged is much, much more forceful a personality than many people assume. Inside the band, I would say he was first among equals. 

On 12/21/2023 at 5:16 PM, Rhyta said:

Geddy did write 1,200 pages so we didn't get everything in the book because editors pared it down.  Perhaps he will share more of it at a later time.  I am happy he has done what he has.

I'm looking forward to 10,000 words on French wine in the unabridged version. 

On 12/18/2023 at 12:50 PM, Todem said:

My girlfriend and I somehow got into a huge argument after Rush finished their set but still had not come out for the encore Medley etc. 

 

She was being insane......so much so she said let’s f***ing go.....I told her “f**k no” I don’t leave Rush early......ever. She stormed off without me.

 

This is what happens when we drag girls to a Rush concert.

Many such cases.

18 hours ago, ytserush said:

 

Going to one and watching the half-dozen or so others that are on you tube I kind of get the sense that this book tour is a victory lap and giving him the closure that he didn't get from R40.

He does need attention. I think it's mostly that.