Rush Archives

Wow. Like the debut album or not… John Rutsey is a part of Rush history and his passing at 55 has thrown me for a loop. Here’s a guy who was a founding member who has basically become a footnote in the band’s history. Compound that by the skill set that Neil Peart brought to the band and their subsequent rise… it must have been hard to live in that constant shadow.

Having not heard anything from or about John over the years makes you wonder what kind of life he had: Was he happy? What was he doing? What does he think about Rush?

Regardless. Gone at 55 — that’s young. Let’s hope he didn’t have any regrets.

Do you have a growing family? Have an extra 5.7 million to spare? Alex Lifeson is selling his home in the Rosedale section of Toronto.

Property details from mls.ca.

Keith Spera from The Times-Picayune had a nice interview with Alex Lifeson. Some of the items touched on are the erosion of the Rush mystique, the band’s plans for the future and Alex’s desire to do a tour where they play nothing but unplayed material:

We’ve got so much catalog. I’d love to do a tour where we just play stuff that we’ve never played before. Don’t play anything that we play now and call it the B-track Rush tour. Play some of the stuff nobody has ever heard us play live. That would be a lot of fun. There are lots of opportunities and directions that we can go.

 Alex also discusses the Florida incident and their recent YYZ jam with the Foo Fighters.

Over the years I’ve been pretty “vocal” in various forums about things I’d like to see Rush do: add interactive content to their CD releases, make raw track files available for re-mixing, sell their music direct to fans via their site, etc. It’s great to see that Neil Peart is getting his entire drum set sampled.

Who knows what the end product will be? In the past, Bun E. Carlos from Cheap Trick was selling CDs of his drum licks… you could piece them together to get a performance and then record on top of them. I’m wondering what they’re thinking of doing with Neil’s set? Maybe loops? Certainly, we’ll get samples. This’ll be great for keyboard drummers!

Check out the Studio ProFiles site for a clue as to what may be coming… it appears that they’re doing the sampling work.