Rush flew the Clockwork Angels tour airship across Florida and up to Nashville this past week, playing shows in Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando and Nashville. Tonight they'll hit the PNC Arena in Raleigh before heading to Virginia Beach on Sunday. They'll then work their way up the east coast before rounding out the first leg of the 2013 tour in Atlantic City next Saturday - then it's on to Europe after that. The band has been sticking to the same setlists that they performed on the 2012 leg, but have mixed in what seems to be a Night C set now, which they played for opening night as well as Wednesday in Nashville. This Night C setlist is identical to the Night A setlist with one song swapped out of the first set. If that pattern continues (C, A, B, C), tonight should see them playing the same Night A set that they played in Ft. Lauderdale last Friday. Just to be clear, the sets for all 4 shows so far were all already played on the 2012 leg - there's nothing new for 2013; it's just that they now seem to be alternating 3 sets instead of just 2. For those of you who purchased VIP ticket packages for any of the 2013 dates, it looks like these have started sporadically shipping to some folks. If you have received your package, snap a photo and send it in. For everyone in the UK, digital radio station Planet Rock is running a contest where you could win a pair of front row tickets and meet and greet passes to one of the 5 upcoming UK Rush tour dates. You can get all the details and listen live to Planet Rock at the Planet Rock website. You can also enter to win tickets/passes by following Planet Rock on Facebook. They are currently giving away tickets/passes for the Birmingham show; just like/share this post for a chance to win.
A short, new interview with Geddy Lee appeared in Tuesday's edition of UK newspaper The Independent. Geddy talks about the band's recent Rock Hall induction and why he thinks it took so long for them to get in:
... "For years, I think it was almost taboo for people to acknowledge the influence of such a freak-flag band as Rush," ... "More recently, there's been a maturing of our audience into positions of success and power." ... Lee's unusually high voice has also made things tricky at times, one critic famously describing him as sounding like "a chipmunk on acid". "'The damned howling in Hades' was another one," the singer laughs, "but it suited what we were doing back then and I was never going to change that. The gibes were painful at first; I'm a human being. I just grew a thick skin and learnt to accept that my voice is part of what makes Rush unique." ...
A few reviews of the April 18th induction ceremony and this year's induction class appeared online over the past week or so. Robert Scovill of SoundProLive attended the ceremony and wrote this review describing how Rush fans took over the night:
... In the first five minutes of the ceremony, you could just sense that there was an element of the population in the room saying to itself, "okay what the hell is a Rush and who are all these people in the audience going crazy right now?" It was a spine-tingling, hair-on-the-arm raising moment. Throughout the night, all other inductions were simply dwarfed by the response of the Rush fans in the building and frankly, it made for some uncomfortable moments for many on the night. ...
This review titled L.A. Mocks, Cleveland Rocks from Jack Marchbanks of 90.5 WCBE has some insightful commentary about why the choice of Cleveland as the location of the Rock Hall makes sense. Here's a nice write-up and review of the induction from Jordan at Echoes of Old Applause. And here are some very interesting comments from Rock Hall nominating committee member Roy Trakin:
... Say what you want about the Canuck noodlers-and their appeal continues to elude this voter-they've carved out an impressive career doing things their way, without a nod to fashion past or present. And maybe their induction offers a valuable lesson to all us rock critic snobs. Perhaps it's time to withhold aesthetic judgments and reliance on our own personal tastes, and be more inclusive about those we choose to honor. And while music would seem to be the most subjective of all the arts-especially rock and roll, which has always been about acceptance-perhaps it's time to step back and at least try to be fair about who belongs, and who doesn't....
For those of you who missed the ceremony, HBO will be airing an edited version 2 weeks from tomorrow on May 18th. On a related note, the Rush Backstage Club now has the Rush Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction commemorative t-shirt that was sold at the ceremony available for pre-order on their website. The black t-shirt features a front print that reads Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2013 around the Rush explosion logo, and there's also a Rock Hall logo printed on the right sleeve. The projected ship date for the t-shirts is May 13th and you can pre-order yours here.
The latest issue of Prog magazine went on sale last month, and the issue contains a 14-page Rush cover feature which includes 45 stories from 45 incredible years together. John over at Cygnus-X1.net transcribed and scanned the entire article earlier this week and made it available online at this location. There are a lot of interesting bits of trivia and tales from the band's early days that not every Rush fan may have heard about, along with the band's take on more recent material - such as 2002's Vapor Trails:
... "That record took us 15 months to make," Alex says. "A long, long time. We wanted to keep the essence of the raw emotion that we were feeling at the time. So in places it's a little scratchy or distorted. And in the long run, it's kind of bothered us." "One day," says Geddy, "we'll do a proper remix of that album and re-release it. I was just talking to Neil about it and he was saying it's hard for him to listen to the album for the obvious reasons. When he hears it now, his playing sounds confused and angry - that's what he hears. I hear a kind of raw emotion and passion. We had a real strong desire to make music that had a hard-hitting effect. I just thought it could have sounded a little better."
You can read the entire piece online here.
We learned earlier in the year that author and music journalist Martin Popoff is following up his 2004 Rush biography Contents Under Pressure with a new illustrative history of the band titled Rush: The Unauthorized Illustrated History. The book was originally slated for a May 15th release but has now been pushed to May 30th (thanks John at Cygnus-X1.net). For details and to pre-order your copy via Amazon, go to this location.
A few weeks ago in a Friday updates post I'd mentioned that there was yet another reference on the FX animated show Archer (Season 4, Episode 13, Sea Tunt: Part II). At one point in the episode Krieger air-drums Tom Sawyer. Eric at Power Windows dug up a YouTube video of the reference which you can check out here.
As was reported a couple of weeks ago, Rush and a few other Canadian artists will be featured in a Canadian Recording Artist stamp series this coming July. Rush's stamp will feature the iconic Rush Starman. Along with Rush, Beau Dommage, The Guess Who and The Tragically Hip will also be honored with a stamp. These stamps will be made available on July 19th and are already available for pre-order from Canada Post.
Actor-musician Paul Spence (Dean Murdoch in the Fubar movies) integrated the album-cover art from Rush's Fly By Night into an ad he created to promote his gig at Vancouver's Biltmore Cabaret last week. You can check out the ad in this article (thanks RushFanForever).
Crowdmix is a new social music app for live events which allows you to share your music with the crowd and see in real time the crowd's mix of favorite bands, artists and track. The folks at Crowdmix are working closely with the Manchester Arena. At the upcoming May 22nd Rush show which kicks off the UK tour, they will be selecting a person at random who has downloaded the app and who is at the event. That person will get named at the venue (I assume on some kind of billboard). You can get the app in the app store here.
Redditor, homebrewer and Rush/Futurama fan ChrisWilcox recently faithfully recreated the fictional BenderBrau beer that was featured in the Futurama episode The Route of All Evil. The ale was brewed by Bender, Fry and Leela inside Bender so he resembled a pregnant robot. ChrisWilcox documented the entire process here and decided to pay homage to Fry's (and his own) favorite band Rush:
For the Yeast I chose wyeast california lager 2112. Its a common yeast for steam beers but its especially fitting because Fry and I both love Rush.
Thanks to KellyD for the heads up.
Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) recently appeared on the CBC's Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Reznor famously appeared in the Rush documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage and at one point Jian asks him about being a Rush fan. You can see what he says at the 20:30 mark of this YouTube video (thanks Scott K).
The fifth annual hard rock and heavy metal award show the Revolver Golden Gods took place yesterday evening at Club Nokia in downtown Los Angeles. Rush's Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee were nominated for the Best Guitarist, Best Drummer and Best Bassist awards respectively but ended up losing in all 3 categories. Former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted was also up for Best Bassist (and also lost) and had some nice things to say about Geddy Lee in this pre-show interview at about the 1:30 mark:
That's all for this week. Have a great weekend!
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