Rush lighting director Howard Ungerleider was a recent guest on the Geezers of Geer podcast to talk about his long career in the touring industry and his longtime relationship with Rush, including the band's upcoming Fifty Something tour and what they might have in store for the fans. He discusses the excitement surrounding the tour from both the band and crew, new drummer Anika Nilles, the dynamics of ticket pricing in the current market, and more. Howard describes how he first learned Rush would be touring again, and his involvement in the initial planning:
... for the first time ever in the history of Rush, we all had to sign NDAs to keep it quiet. I had to keep it quiet for months. I had to be sitting through meetings with them. ... [Rush] have always treated me well. When I won the visionary award in 2014 at LDI, [Ged] said that, I can't imagine doing it without Howard. So that's cool. ... I go there for the meeting and it's the usual players - every time we do a Rush tour we sit down with Geddy's brother Alan and his buddy, he's an award-winning video director, Dale Heslip. Then there's Alex Lifeson who comes and goes, but he's usually there, myself again. And then we start brainstorming. ... The only thing we don't talk about really is lighting because they don't want to deal with that. They want to deal with how the show is going to look on stage. They trust me with the lighting because of all these years ...
Howard also mentions how Anika Nilles came on board, and how the band had essentially already chosen her by the time he learned about the tour:
.. Not only was she chosen, but she was already rehearsing with them. On and off. She's been coming in. ... I saw her [perform] with Jeff Beck before I even knew that she was going to be the drummer. But Geddy's base tech Scully, he was Jeff Beck's tech out on that [tour]. So Scully was the one that said to Geddy, "You should check out Anika." And ther's me in the audience sitting with my wife watching Jeff Beck and there was a female bass player as well. That was awesome. ... I just kept saying to to my wife, "This drummer, it's insane how good she is." And we walked out of there blown away. And the fact that she's now in Rush is just amazing because it really is cool. ... they made the best decision on this one ...
Here he is discussing how Rush will have a keyboard player (that's not Geddy Lee) on stage for the first time:
... There's going to be a keyboard player on the stage. ... [Ged] wants to back off on keyboards. He's still going to play his synthesizer, but the keyboard thing ... he had to trigger everything. He had to play all the keyboard parts. And he's a bass player. He'd rather be free to move around and sing. And that's what he wanted to do. Matter of fact, one of his dreams is is to just play bass like what he did for YES [playing Roundabout at their Rock Hall induction]. But that's what I kind of heard in that in that little speech that he made. ... If it wasn't Rush, he he would definitely play bass in another band for sure. ...
Howard also mentions that this will be the first Rush tour with no buses, and that the band and crew along with all their gear will be flying between cities. You can check out the entire hour-and-a-half interview below or on YouTube. Thanks to Brian E for the heads up.
