Rush Didact

There was someone over at the Steve Hoffman forum a while back who claimed he worked on the Beyond the Lighted Stage doc and saw the film cans for ESL in a warehouse, but I don't know how credible he was, and I've never seen any other information from anyone who would know, one way or the other. Until solid information to the contrary emerges, I choose to believe the original negatives still exist...

To be perfectly honest, I wish they'd quit with these 40th anniversary boxsets. I don't need a remastered Grace Under Pressure. I have half a dozen different masters of it already across various formats and nothing else they could do is going to make it sound better than it already does, short of a very tastefully done remix. What I DO want, and what I would actually shell out good money for, is a standalone video release of the complete p/g live show, ditto ESL and ASOH. Beyond that, give us the complete Toronto '97 show, or the shows from the Presto and RTB tours that were filmed. Release more soundboards as official live albums. I really don't care about studio albums with re-imagined artwork and little toy cars. I want new things to watch and listen to, that's all.

Hyperthetical is the word of the day. It's not just plausible, it's realer than reality itself!

The first show I saw was on the VT tour, and they were absolutely killing it. It's probably the most memorable concert of my life.

I think my own experience is a little bit different in that I missed the R40 tour. (The last time I saw them was the S&A tour in 2008; I was out of the country for the CA and Time Machine tours.) I was in Toronto the week that they played there, and if I'd put some effort into it, I could have found a ticket. For whatever reason, I didn't. It just wasn't important at that particular moment in my life, I guess — I was a week away from leaving for the Arctic for a year, and I had other things on my mind. When it became clear that R40 was the last tour, that decision started to bother me and slowly morphed into regret. When Neil died, it suddenly became much bigger and more painful. I suppose I assumed there would be some one-off reunion down the road, that I'd have a chance to make up for missing it, and then without warning that possibility was gone. Seeing Ged and Al on stage at Massey Hall wasn't exactly going back in time to fix that mistake, but it did let me forgive myself.

Shortly after his book tour ended, something Ged said in an interview struck me: one of the reasons he did the tour was for closure - for himself, yes, but also for us. That the way Rush had ended was so murky and dissatisfying, and ultimately tragic, he felt we needed to see him and Al on a stage together again to give the band a proper goodbye, even if they weren't up there playing music. At the time, it seemed like the kind of thing that people say in situations like this, just another cliche. What is "closure", anyways? But now that a few months have gone by, I'm starting to realize that I actually did need some kind of closure, and that Neil's unexpected death had left me in a sort of limbo that I couldn't get out of. From January 2020 until last December, when I saw Ged's show at Massey Hall, I probably listened to more Rush than I did in the whole decade before it. Their music was constantly playing in my car, I listened to the entire Something for Nothing podcast from first episode to last, and I spent countless hours talking about the band online. But all the sudden, since that evening, it's like I found something I didn't even realize I was looking for, and I've been able to let go. I've gone from listening to the band compulsively, to hardly listening to them at all. I've left a bunch of Facebook Rush groups, stopped looking for news and videos, and they've generally been less present in my life. It doesn't feel like neglect so much as acceptance, though. It feels okay. Turns out Ged was right, and he gave me exactly what I needed. I'm curious if anyone else went through something similar...

Yes, of course, but every bootleg from the tour sounds like that. I doubt there's a conspiracy to artificially speed up old Rush bootlegs here.

No, if they were sped up, the pitch would be off too. They actually were playing that fast.

I have to say, when I first listened to some Signals tour boots last year, the first thought I had was that the performances had to be chemically enhanced. They're absolutely flying through those songs. Neil is playing parts that are already hard to keep up with at album speed and taking them up another notch, and then another notch past that. It's nuts. And keep in mind, that's the year he turned 30, an age when most people are starting to slow down a bit and lose the intensity of youth, but he's playing faster than he ever had before. When I read Geddy's book, I specifically read the parts about coke with that in the back of my mind, and all the sudden it seemed to make sense. I would guess that the Signals tour was when things really started to get out of hand, and that might also explain why there were no official recordings done, and why that tour seems to get short shrift in general. Maybe things were pretty rocky in the Rush camp that year, even rockier than Ged lets on in his book. He wrote about his own problems with coke, but for obvious reasons he doesn't really talk about how much Neil or Al may have been doing. I'm going to bet that the Signals tour was probably a not-so-great time in Neil's life as well, and he likely had his own issues to overcome.

I was the same way. I didn't pick up on the deeper meaning of A Passage to Bangkok until I was late in my teens. (And actually, I remember there being a thread about it over on Counterparts, way back when, asking if APTB was about getting high, and the answers were pretty evenly split between "well duh" and "there's no way Rush did drugs!", so I was far from alone at the time.) I was a pretty innocent kid, and aside from that one song, there was really nothing about Rush's music that screamed "drugs" to me. There still isn't, to be honest. Stuff like Rivendell and The Necromancer comes across as nerdy and dorky, but I was nerdy and dorky and didn't do drugs (at that point in my life, anyways), so why should I have suspected them of it?

I can't imagine them ever doing another festival appearance. What I could see is them recording some new music and Geddy playing a few shows, with Alex appearing if his arthritis allows. The problem with arthritis is that Al isn't going to know if he can do it until day-of, so it would have to be flexible by necessity.

It's a strange thought, isn't it? Neil's death coincided with the start of an extremely turbulent and difficult period in my life; in a weird way, the unexpected grief of losing him was one of the triggers that kicked it off. Long and complicated story. But this anniversary has become one of those milestone markers in my life, one of those dates that I count forward from. Ah yes, four years now since all that shit started...

I think it can probably be explained by the fact that the guys in the band have a very different relationship to their music than fans do. Once the excitement of the early years wore off (which I imagine was more or less gone by the time they got to recording AFTK or Hemispheres) it was probably just a job to them. A fun job and a satisfying one, but just a job. Once a tour was over, it wasn't worth thinking about. I doubt Ged has spent any time at all thinking about what songs they played on old tours, except when planning a new tour, or when he sat down to write his book.

Some people do, and some people don't. If I had someone who wanted to listen to me ramble about my job in the Arctic, I'd happily spend hours talking their ear off about every tiny little detail of it. I loved what I did up there and found the work fascinating, even if there were parts of it that could get tedious. I've had other jobs that I'd rather just forget, of course, but I'm just generally a person who loves revisiting the past.

I could make a good EP out of The Anarchist, The Wreckers, Headlong Flight, and The Garden. I don't really need much else from that album...