Rush is a Band

A blog devoted to RUSH:
Neil Peart, Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Fri, Mar 29, 2024

Updates and other random Rush stuff

Fri, Jul 15, 2011@11:00AM | comments removed/disabled

UPDATE - 7/15@5:35PM: RollingStone.com's Weekend Rock Question: What is the Best Prog Rock Band of All Time? Duh! Thanks RushFanForever for the heads up.

The 2011 Time Machine Tour ended nearly 2 weeks ago so it's no surprise that things were a bit quiet on the Rush news front this past week. Hopefully Geddy, Alex and Neil are enjoying their time off with family and friends, dining on honeydew and drinking the milk of paradise. We want them all well-rested so they can complete work on Clockwork Angels this Fall. Everyone who saw any of the shows on the tour may recall that the band teased us all right at the end of the show by playing a snippet of Cygnus X-1. Well, last month scientists finally confirmed (thanks schklerg) beyond a shadow of a doubt that the real Cygnus X-1 is indeed a black hole. Coincidence? Hmmm...

This coming Tuesday, July 19th Universal will be releasing an enhanced 2-CD version of last year's Rush ICON compilation. The first disc in the set will contain the 12 tracks on the original release, and the second disc will include a selection of 11 live tracks taken from Rush's first 4 live albums; All The World's A Stage, Exit Stage Left, Grace Under Pressure Live and A Show of Hands. For all the details including the tracklist check out this post. You can pre-order your copy at this link.

Also this coming Tuesday, July 19th Audio Fidelity will be releasing a limited edition 24 Karat Gold CD version of Rush's Roll the Bones. This will be the first Rush release from Audio Fidelity although another company - Mobile Fidelity - has previously released limited edition Gold CD versions of 4 other Rush albums; 2112, Moving Pictures, Signals and most recently Permanent Waves. Audio Fidelity has also indicated that there would be more Rush releases coming in the future. You can pre-order your copy of the Roll the Bones Gold CD at this link.

Last Friday, July 8th the very last space shuttle of NASA's Shuttle Program took off from Cape Canaveral, FL. To mark this historic event, Spinner magazine compiled a list of the top 10 Space Shuttle wake-up songs and Rush's Countdown topped the list at #1:

Canada brought more to the Shuttle Program than the Canadarm, and it came in the form of a Rush song. The iconic Canuck prog-rockers' 1982 single 'Countdown' was wholly inspired by Columbia's first trip in 1981, the first of the Shuttle Program. The song even samples audio from this launch and was played to wake up the crew on Columbia's 27th flight in 2002, on the day the shuttle landed back on Earth for the last time. So it's a pretty perfect pick to complete our wake-up song countdown as NASA's space shuttle program enters T-Minus Zero.

The August, 2011 issue of Guitar World magazine is a special issue featuring their list of the 100 Greatest Classic Rock Guitar Songs. Rush's Limelight made their list at #25 and you can see what they say about the song in the attached scan. Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb made the cut at #20 and their write-up includes comments from Alex Lifeson on the song and guitarist David Gilmour (see attached scan) taken from a previous Alex Lifeson interview.

The last of the three David Barrett Trio tracks that Alex Lifeson produced - Disappearance - will be available to purchase as a download this coming Tuesday, July 19th. Both Hollowbody and Sonar are already available for download on Amazon (Hollowbody, Sonar) and iTunes (Hollowbody, Sonar). All three tracks can be heard on SoundCloud at this link. David talks about the songs and how his collaboration with Lifeson came about in this January post on his blog. The Trio is asking for assistance to fund their project via RocketHub at this link. Please help them out if you can.

Both John at Cygnus-X1.net and Eric at Power Windows have taken advantage of the lull in Rush news to clean up their archives of old Rush articles. John added to his site a September, 2002 Modern Drummer cover feature with Neil Peart, a February, 2003 interview with Neil Peart from Cycle World, and a Classic Rock magazine special Rush issue from 2004. On the Power Windows site at the bottom of the Linernotes pages for some of the album releases, Eric has News Archives containing transcripts of past articles and other key news content, videos and hyperlinks. Eric recently finished cleaning up the content of the My Favorite Headache, Feedback and Snakes & Arrows news archives. Thanks guys!

Kirkus Reviews has posted a very positive review of Neil Peart's most recent book - Far and Away. You can check it out at this link.

Reader George C noticed that Billboard.com is running a poll asking people what their favorite 80's music video is. Not surprisingly, no Rush videos are listed as options - but you can write in your vote. So I suggest that folks write in The Big Money or some other Rush video from the 80s.

Yesterday was Bastille Day, so here's a bootleg video of Rush from back in 1976 performing their tribute to that fateful day. There's no bread, let them eat cake!

That's all for this week. Have a great weekend!

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