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, Nov 27, 2009@10:56AM | comments removed/disabled

I hope that everyone in the US had a great Thanksgiving holiday and is surviving Black Friday. The big news item of the past week was Rush being awarded the SOCAN international achievement award at the organization's 20th annual award ceremony in Toronto this past Monday. In other news, late last Friday we learned that Neil Peart will be recording a special new version of The Hockey Theme for The Sports Network (TSN). On Monday the folks at RushCon posted portions of their 2-hour RushCon 9 interview with Michael Mosbach along with a survey to help their planning for RushCon 10.

In another bit of SOCAN-related news, Alex Lifeson was involved with the SOCAN-sponsored Retail Council of Canada's 2009 golf tournament last month. He's pictured on the golf course in this news article. Thanks to RushFanForever for the heads up.

Today marks the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. There are many options for buying the perfect gift for your favorite Rush fan (including yourself!). There's always the official Rush store at the Rush Backstage Club. And if you can't find it there you can probably find it at Rush Swag, which collects all the Rush merchandise at Amazon.com into one convenient place. And for those rare collectible items, . Happy shopping everyone!

The second Trailer Park Boys movie - Countdown to Liquor Day - was released to theaters in Canada back in September and Alex Lifeson made a cameo appearance as a cop. The film will be released to DVD on December 22nd and is now available for pre-order.

Geddy Lee was quoted in this recent Globe and Mail article on Toronto rare book collector Garrett Herman:

... he was cultivating a reputation around town as a major book hound. "Every rare book store seems to know Garrett," mused musician Geddy Lee, another book lover who knows Mr. Herman from the Toronto chapter of Grapes for Humanity, a charity of oenophiles that raises money for land-mine victims. "I was once at David Mason, hoping to buy this book, but it was already on hold for Garrett," the Rush singer said, bemused. "Everything was on hold for Garrett!" ...

Thanks to John at Cygnus-X1.net for the heads up.

Eric at Power Windows recently put up this fascinating post about the details behind the Permanent Waves album cover. The album is the subject of the 2010 Rush wall calendar which confirms the following interesting bit of trivia; the Permanent Waves cover is the only Rush studio album which pictures a member of the band - although you have to look very closely to see it.

Reader Kenny pointed me to this recent San Francisco Chronicle review of a KISS concert which equates KISS and Rush as bands with a large guy-to-girl audience ratio. The article sparked this humorous letter to the editor from a Rush fan:

Rush fans way past mindless titillation

Editor - You've done it now, Peter Hartlaub: You've ticked off Rush fans!

In response to Hartlaub's review "Kiss' music thunders, but theatrics lose their luster," Tuesday), OK, sure, Rush concerts probably do have a higher guy-to-girl audience ratio than even Kiss concerts, but at least guys that listen to Rush have a lot more on their minds than trying to extend the length of their tongues and giggling like schoolboys over the sexual innuendo of "You Make Me Rock Hard."

Be warned, Pete! Or someday Rush fans are going to hunt you down, give you a stern talking-to and then lecture you on the social implications of collectivism and individual freedoms.

- Ken Crews, San Francisco

Here's a bit of Rush triva/history that you may or may not be familiar with (I wasn't until just recently). Back in late 1996 Rush played a secret show at a small venue in Toronto as part of the Molson Canadian Blind Date promotion where a secret big name act would play a small club. The show took place on December 18, 1996 at The Phoenix Club in Toronto near the end of the first leg of the Test For Echo tour. A photo from this show is included in the Rush biography Merely Players (click thumbnail) and reader RushFanForever dug up this old review of the show:

No fog machines. No video screens. No fireworks screams. No laser beams. No floppy-eared bouncing Presto bunnies either. Tonight's Blind Date show at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto was a Rush fan's testimonial. Stripped of all the appealing high-tech sensory theatrics that are the band's calling cards, what lingered were three guys on a stage playing their guts out and enjoying every minute of it. Like slapping a CD on your player and slipping the headphones on,the distractions disappeared. The music and emotion coming in loud and clear.

"We're gonna play a whole bunch of absurd music for you tonight," said bass player Geddy Lee in his best English accent. And he wasn't joshin'. The 19-song set was a diverse sampling of Rush's 20 album magical mystery tour which pleased the loyal devotee as well as the enthusiastic newcomer. ...

As the end of the month approaches, it's likely that Rush has already had (or are having very soon) their planned November band meeting in Los Angeles that Neil Peart had mentioned in his latest news update at NeilPeart.net. Hopefully we'll hear word of what came/comes out of their meeting sooner than later. One thing that Neil mentioned as being a possibility is Rush playing with an orchestra. There have been several classical tributes to Rush released in the past few years including The String Quartet Tribute to Rush's 2112. YouTuber brunofelix20 thought it would be neat to sync up the string quartet version of 2112 with Rush's version. You can listen to the impressive result below (the accompanying video is really cool too). This gives a small taste of what Rush with an orchestra might sound like:

Here are part 2 and part 3. Thanks to RushFanForever for letting me know about these.

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

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