Thanks to John at Cygnus-X1.net and Eric at Power Windows, the Rush Time Machine Tourbook has been transcribed along with some of the images scanned, and made available online for your viewing pleasure. You can check it out at Cygnus-X1.net or at Power Windows. Neil Peart's writeup is particularly interesting as he talks about the concepts behind the whole time machine/steampunk theme of the tour and how all that might translate to the band's upcoming album Clockwork Angels:

... Geddy brought up a project that has long appealed to him-collecting all of our instrumentals into one album, and perhaps writing a new one to go with them.

"Maybe something a little more extended," he said, and my ears pricked up. Years back, we had done our share of long works, lyrical concepts and instrumentals (always remembering the subtitle of "La Villa Strangiato" from 1978, "An Exercise in Self Indulgence"), but lately we had tended to make our songs, if not concise, at least more compressed. So that, for example, an instrumental like "The Main Monkey Business" on Snakes and Arrows was enormously complex, but worked through its movements in six minutes, instead of nine or ten.

At that suggestion, wheels started turning in my head. Now that we were talking about doing something a little more ambitious musically, I wondered if it wasn't time to think that way in terms of lyrics and concepts, too. The chorus line in "Caravan" seems apt: "I can't stop thinking big."

I told the guys about an idea for a fictional world that had interested me lately, thinking it would make a great setting, maybe for a suite of songs that told a story. A genre of science fiction pioneered by certain authors (including my friend Kevin J. Anderson) had come to be called "steampunk," seen as a reaction against the "cyberpunk" futurists, with their scenarios of dehumanized, alienated, dystopian societies. Our own previous excursions into the future, 2112 and "Red Barchetta," had been set in that darker kind of imagining, for dramatic and allegorical effect, but I was thinking of steampunk's definition as "The future as it ought to have been," or "The future as seen from the past"-as imagined by Jules Verne, for example, in 1866, when he was writing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. ...

You can purchase your own copy of the tourbook at the Rush Backstage Club. Many thanks to John and Eric for taking the time to do this.

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