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Timbale

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  1. This might sound snarky...but I don't mean it to - I think there was some mythologizing around R40 and the idea that they were going out "at the top of their game". Certainly Geddy wasn't in peak form as a vocalist...and I think Alex had some less than stellar moments on that tour as well. 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. I say that so that you don't beat yourself up too much on missing the tour. It was a pretty great set list, especially the 2nd half...but it's quite likely you saw a better tour.
  2. Timbale

    The Worst of Rush

    I would listen to Tai Shan over everything off of Snakes and Arrows save Far Cry...and over large chunks of Vapor Trails and Clockwork Angels as well. It's a proper song, not a pro-tools jams-spliced-together-with-some-vocals-pasted-on-top exercise. I've never understood the hate for Rush's softer side...but then the 'listen to my music" section of Presentation is my favourite part of 2112...
  3. Another person who has to temper their praise by making it clear that they don't like Rush. When his assistant or whatever says I'll make you a playlist, he goes on about how he was a DJ and therefore knows "all of Rush's songs". He likely knows Tom Sawyer, Spirit of Radio, Fly By Night, Limelight and Closer To The Heart. How someone can read and like that book and remain totally uncurious about their deeper catalogue is beyond uncurious about their deeper catalogue is beyond me.
  4. Machine gun images pass Like malice through the looking glass
  5. I totally relate to what you are saying. When I was first into Rush, I felt like they were on a completely different planet talent and presentation wise. I find it funny now when I see people talk about them - Peart in particular - as these untouchable gods. A quick scroll through youtube can find you plenty of 15 year olds playing Tom Sawyer note for note on a drumkit. But of course, like lots of music, virtuosic or not, it's not what the person played...but the fact that they chose to play it. The intention and the artistry of it is so much a part of what makes music great. But the other thing that set Rush apart for me was what I perceived was the greater sense of intention behind their music. Like Trent Reznor says in the Rush documentary, it seemed like they were on a righteous path. I always had that feeling about what they were doing artistically (and I still do, really)... and doing coke and having drinking contests with Hawkwind or whoever it was doesn't mean that they weren't in it for the music...but everything I'd ever read about them (and the portrayal of them in the doc) made it seem like they were a fish out of water in the rock and roll scene. Geddy's book changed the perspective I have about them...that yes, they were doing something musically unique...but they also were "just" a band like any other band. And that makes sense...but it wasn't the way I thought about them for most of my life.
  6. One of the things I've always been struck by is how in Rush's classic late 70s - early 80s era, their sense of tempo is not very...consistent. Let me say off the top that Exit Stage Left is my favourite live album of theirs - I adore it - but when I think of how some of the songs speed up and slow down...and that these are not bootleg versions but the best performances from lots and lots of live tapes...it's a bit wild. The revelations from Geddy's book regarding coke made me wonder how much of that can be attributed to the rhythm section being high. (Some of the Signals tour boots are pretty crazy...the whole set is just wizzing by at breakneck speed...) It also made me wonder if anyone was in the position...and if anyone took the chance to say, hey, maybe if you cut down on the blow we wouldn't be leaving the venue 5 minutes early every night because all the songs are way too fast. Or, even if among the 3 of them they listened to some board tapes and thought, the tempos are a little hit and miss...maybe there's a reason....
  7. I guess there is a broader topic that is connected to this… That since reading Geddy's memoir I've been thinking about a lot. And I would reiterate that I started listening to Rush when I was nine or 10 years old. I took Rush very seriously. I was very much into what Neil was writing about… And about the progression of his lyric writing from a technical standpoint as he grew. I also was already banging on pots and pans, and knew that I wanted to become a drummer… So of course the music was very inspiring on that count as well. My friends were listening to Kiss and Motley Crue and Def Leppard and although I did like some other pop music… Rush seemed like a completely different animal than anything anyone else was listening to. I remember my dad doing the classic come into my room and tell me to turn that noise down, and explaining to him that Rush was "not just some other rock band". And as an adult, of course I know that as people who were professional musicians, in a certain way the guys in Rush I have way more in common with members of Aerosmith then with people who do some other job. But I had so many years of not thinking about it that way… That reading the tour stories in this book was a bit discombobulating. It feels way more like they were just a rock 'n' roll band like anyone else… They just leaned into progressive arrangements and wrote about conceptual things. The music is still wholly unique... but it's like Rush as an entity wasn't really what I had imagined they were all those years ago.
  8. Different strokes, I guess. I would not categorize Caress Of Steel as "aural sludge". Not at all. I do not think it's their best sounding album or anything, (although sonically speaking I'd listen to it ahead of Vapor Trails, S&A and Clockwork Angels any day), but I think it's in line with their mid 70s output. Geddy has talked about how they thought there was more reverb on stuff because they were high...but it doesn't strike me as an overly dry album. I think some of Fountain Of Lamneth - No One At The Bridge and Bacchus Plateau in particular - sounds great, and although as an adult I can't really bring myself to listen to ANY songs that have narration in them (it just seems so silly to me now) I think a lot of The Necromancer sounds awesome...Alex's trippy volume swelled double tracked guitars are recorded very nicely to my ear. I don't think COS is brilliant writing (and it's the weakest of their concept pieces)...and I'm not at all shocked to learn that Peart was high writing it. But, I think I was a pretty naive kid, and like @Rush Didact, I didn't see anything in their music that was overtly druggy. It all basically made sense to me, conceptually. But then, I never thought of Dark Side Of The Moon as a drug album, so what do I know. For me, when I would hear my friends' Kiss albums ...that stuff to me was what I connected to drug culture...in a sex, drugs and rock and roll way. Or another pal would play me Grateful Dead boots...and those guys jamming in mid-tempo 4/4, noodling around for 10 minutes on 2 chords... that seemed like music made by and for high people. Nerdy, bookish allegory and shifting time signatures engaged my brain, which felt like the opposite of "drug music" to me. I do think that's a naive perspective now, but it was where I was at when Rush came into my life.
  9. 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.
  10. Admittedly, A Passage To Bangkok is very obvious. I was 10 years old when I got into Rush, so although I knew all the words to it, I didn't really grasp its meaning...and as I got older, well, 2112, particularly side 2, wasn't really my jam. Caress Of Steel, which I loved (except for Going Bald) didn't strike me as druggy, and still doesn't really. It just hits me as weird fantasy writing - not much different from Cygnus or Jacob's Ladder. I always thought of Neil as a very logical writer (still do), even when writing fantastical tales, which to me didn't translate to being a pothead. He clearly was both, haha.
  11. I never thought they were on drugs - everything they wrote seemed logical to me.
  12. I am not quite finished Geddy's book - about 3/4 of the way through, and loving it. Like many people, I was pretty shocked to read about the drug use...and that Geddy in general had a more "rock and roll" lifestyle than I had imagined. Or maybe even been led to believe. It has made me think about the story he tells both in the book and in Beyond The Lighted Stage about that first gig opening for Uriah Heep. Without the context of everything that went before that we didn't know about when BTLS came out...that story could easily be read as if it was his first ever drink of hard liquor. The way he tells it - they've never had a rider before, they didn't really know what to order - it all had such an air of innocence about it. It doesn't sound like a story that a guy who's been wasted a whole bunch and tripped on LSD would tell. I don't think anything in the book contradicts that story...it just seems very....cherry picked for the film to underscore the image of them as not very "rock and roll". Similarly, the stories that Kim Mitchell and Gene Simmons tell about them don't seem like the same band having drinking contests with Thin Lizzy and snorting coke with fans. Did anyone else feel a sort of disconnect with those things?
  13. After watching Liquorice Pizza I dove into this band - they're pretty stellar musicians.
  14. This. It is so full of funny ideas, dialogue and acting that it is remarkable.
  15. Not the greatest doc ever made...but super entertaining. Brooks is one of a kind.
  16. This is a sci-fi masterpeice.
  17. I am adoring this record... it's hard to rank something so new against records that I've had a relationship with for so many years...but I would put it above Up and maybe even 1 and 2! (III is my fave of his, with IV, So and Us right behind...) It is just so great that he is still making valuable art that is in line with his best work at this stage in his life...we are so conditioned to receive "ok" albums from legacy artists like this. If this was anyone's album, at any age, it would likely rank among their best work. I followed along as he released the songs one at a time last year...I know a lot of people didn't seem to like that choice, but I really did. I had an incredibly hard year last year...cancer diagnosis and treatment - and it was a bright spot each month to look forward to. I loved them all as the came out...but I remember so clearly hearing Playing For Time that first listen. It made me weep. It's not my fave on the record...but boy did it hit me hard.
  18. To each their own. I think categorizing my objections as being about "applauding the star of the show" is to pretty grossly misinterpret what I was saying. If you really think I don't believe Geddy deserves applause at his book tour shows, I think you really didn't get my point. "Participation trophy" is actually a perfect description of what I was talking about - people who in public spaces actually want the attention while doing something seemingly altruistic like cheering an artist. From all the footage I've watched of the book tour on youtube - which is a fair amount - I am very often struck by how the tone of the night is kept from getting too deep at times because there's always someone who needs to "whoop!!" when Geddy mentions the title of a song every damn person in the venue is intimately aware of. My opinion of that kind of behaviour is that it is self-serving, and not really about the artist...and certainly not about the community gathered to enjoy the show. Perhaps I have PTSD from all the dudes I've had behind me at Rush shows over the years yelling "play 2112!" as if the band can hear them from the Greys in Maple Leaf Gardens. I don't know. One of my fave interviews with Geddy is on a show called Speakeasy with Michael Chabon. Despite the fact that it is a live interview in front of an audience, it manages to be a great conversation that doesn't have to "play to the audience" or get derailed all the time by applause. Like I said, to each their own - I know if I had gone to one of the book tour stops, I would have been annoyed. I envy you that you wouldn't, because it makes live performance an often frustrating thing for me.
  19. I would highly recommend this documentary to anyone even vaguely interested in the Smothers Brothers. I had always heard that their 60s TV show was on the radical side...but I never really knew anything about it. These guys, particularly Tommy, were really cutting edge! All that stuff that Letterman was doing in the 80s with criticizing GE while on NBC...the Smothers' were going WAY harder on that kind of "bite the hand" stuff. This was really eye opening. And f**king funny.
  20. Grace Under Pressure tour, September 21st, 1984, Toronto. The show that they filmed. It is interesting having your first Rush show (and first real rock concert for me) on video to go back to. In the age of the cell phone it's not so remarkable, but at the time being able to re-watch a year or so later was pretty cool.
  21. No - the album itself. I don’t know that track. Is it good?
  22. Also, Tai Shan is a better song. It has a discernible melody, a catchier chorus, a more interesting arrangement, a more compelling drum track, better harmonies, better (and more understandable) singing and is more personal in nature.
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