Rush Archives

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.

Photographer Ross Halfin has a great shot of Geddy Lee playing his old Rickenbacker 4001. Call me stuck in the past, but I just love that bass… the tone, the look… everything. It oozes “Rushness”.

Ah well, you can’t win them all.

I just updated WordPress to its latest version and now I’ve got to go back and re-do my customizations. I’m sure everyone is up-to-date regarding Rush and their tour, so I won’t bore you with any of those details.

However, Neil Peart did post an update to his news site. If you haven’t ventured over there, I highly recommend it. His updates are rather entertaining and insightful. The latest update confirms the old saying… “it’s a bitch getting old”.