The 1st leg of Rush's 2011 Time Machine Tour wraps up tonight at the 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore, Maryland. The band will then take a much-deserved 11-day break before heading across the pond for a series of European dates. It's been a whirlwind week for Rush starting with last Friday's soldout show at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland which was filmed for the band's first full-length live concert DVD shot in the US. The big news from that show was that Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage filmmakers Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn would be directing the filming for the DVD. The pair came out and addressed the crowd (video here) prior to Rush hitting the stage and announced that they'd be handling the filming. They also challenged the crowd to be the best crowd they'd ever seen ... and the crowd delivered. Rush delivered too - their performance was spectacular and full of energy and they fed off the crowd. As Geddy left the stage at the end of the night he said Thank you, Cleveland, Ohio! ... Best! Audience! Ever! We appreciate it so much. For complete coverage on the Cleveland DVD filming, be sure to check out this post.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer had a huge multi-article feature on Rush and the DVD filming in last Friday's edition in the lead-up to the show including interviews with Geddy Lee and with Donna Halper. The Geddy Lee interview focused on Rush and their history with the city of Cleveland and why they chose Cleveland to film the DVD, and Donna Halper - who attended the show as a special guest of the band - discussed her role in the band's history. Donna also spoke with The Cleveland Sound, Yahoo! News and her old radio station WMMS in the run-up to the show last week. According to Donna, she also did a short interview with Sam and Scot to be used for the live DVD. In a separate article Geddy gave the Plain Dealer a very interesting track-by-track breakdown of Moving Pictures. And the newspaper also published a feature titled Why isn't Rush in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? where they spoke with fan and riab reader Todd Walterspaugh, who organized a protest of sorts (really more of a gathering in support of the band) in front of the Rock Hall the afternoon of the show. Close to 200 Rush fans (including yours truly) showed up for the gathering, all wearing their Rush paraphernalia and holding a variety of Rush banners, license plate and signs. The center of attention was Walterspaugh's large banner depicting the Rush Starman logo mooning the Rock Hall logo. The crowd gathered in front of the Hall holding up the banner for a huge group photo which you can check out here, and garnered a bit of news coverage from local talk radio station WTAM (photo gallery here).
Alex Lifeson was also interviewed by Yahoo! News last week and spoke about the DVD filming, Donna Halper, the Rock Hall and when asked how long he thinks the band can keep going, he replied:
... We're more popular than we've ever have been, performing with more confidence and skill, having greater vision on how we build our shows, watching our audience relationship build to a place that is as large as it has ever been. We have so many things in the right place. "The only thing that I see stopping us at this point would be the physicality of growing older... I figure we can play at the peak level we're at now for at least the next few years," ...
After the Cleveland show Rush hit Detroit on Sunday, then made their way back to their native land for shows in Hamilton and Montreal on Tuesday and Wednesday. John at Cygnus-X1.net has scanned the 2011 Time Machine Tourbook and placed the images online here. The 2011 tourbook is an updated version of the 2010 tourbook, with several new images from the 2010 leg of the Time Machine Tour. You can purchase a copy at your friendly neighborhood Rush concert or online at this link. And also be sure to check out all of the official Rush Time Machine Tour photos from tour photographer John Arrowsmith at this link.
Neil Peart and his new book Far and Away: A Prize Every Time were the subject of an article published earlier this week in the National Post. From the article:
... Far and Away is a reflective, immersion-style travel diary detailing the musician’s motorcycle trips along the back roads of North America, Europe and South America. “When I write about history or nature or geology, it’s from a first-person point of view,” Peart says. “It’s me riding past a town [by motorcycle] and figuring out why something is the way it is.” ...
You can read the entire article/interview at this link. Far and Away is Peart's 5th full-length book and was released earlier this month. You can find out more about the book and purchase your copy at this link. Jeff Woods of the syndicated radio show The Legends of Classic Rock also interviewed Neil Peart prior to Tuesday night's Rush show in Hamilton, Ontario to discuss the book. We learned yesterday that this interview will air in a one hour special on The Legends of Classic Rock on Sunday, May 29th. For a list of stations and air times, check out this link.
While on the subject of Neil Peart, earlier this week Drum Workshop posted a 3-minute video to their YouTube channel of Neil discussing the all-maple VLT (very low timbre) Time Machine Tour kit snare drum and why it has continued to be his preferred snare both on stage and in the studio. You can watch the video at this link. The VLT snare is included in The Neil Peart Evolution Snare Drum Collection. And Neil also appears on page 5 of the latest Aerostich RiderWearHouse catalog posing in his Aerostich Transit riding leathers alongside his BMW bike. You can check out a scan of the photo at here (thanks Twisted Perception).
Rush is featured on the cover of the latest edition of Classic Rock's Prog magazine which hit newsstands in the UK this past week. The issue contains an exclusive interview with Rush and Neil Peart and the cover tagline reads:
The one great thing about Rush is that the three of us are stupidly fearless
-Geddy Lee
If you would like to get a subscription to Prog or purchase the issue you can do so via this website.
Record Store Day took place this past Saturday, April 16th in the US/Canada/UK. A 7-inch limited edition vinyl release of Rush's Caravan/BU2B was available at participating stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. Reader lavilla picked up the red color vinyl (it also comes in white) and shared some scans of it which you can check out in this photo gallery. Speaking of the Caravan/BU2B single, BU2B was quietly released as a radio single in early March and has been hovering around the top 40 of the Mediabase Rock Charts for the past several weeks. As of this posting it's sitting at #21. So if you are so inclined, call your local rock radio station to request the song.
The Moving Pictures 5.1 surround sound 30th anniversary deluxe edition hit stores a few weeks ago and shot its way back into the Billboard 200 at #137 for the week of April 9th thanks to a slew of pre-orders. After falling back off the chart for the following week of April 16th, it rebounded back for the week of April 23rd, making it all the way to #51. This week it's sitting at a respectable #100; a very impressive feat for an album that's over 30 years old. You can get more details regarding the Moving Pictures deluxe edition in this post and order your copy at Amazon (CD+DVD, CD+Blu-ray).
Rush was featured as the band of the week for a nice little article last week on the University of York's student website Nouse.co.uk. You can check it out at this link.
Heavy metal band Machine Head are currently in the process of recording their next album and recently posted a making of the album video to Youtube. In the video they show off their Jam Room which includes a collection of posters of all of our favorite bands, the bands that meant something, and helped create what we became; a Rush 2112 poster is prominently featured. At the 4-minute mark of the video, drummer Dave McClain is shown wearing a Permanent Waves t-shirt. When Machine Head released their sixth studio album The Blackening a few years ago frontman David Flynn told MTV in an interview that the band was on a Rush kick while recording that album. Thanks to Power Windows for the heads up.
Reader MickAv8r let me know about a Rush reference in the latest episode of the animated FX TV series Archer (Season 2, Episode 13 - Double Trouble). In one scene the ISIS group pulls up in Doctor Kreiger's van which has a huge mural painted on the side which says Exit ... Van Left and depicts Doctor Kreiger peeking behind the curtain to the stage, mimicking the cover of Rush's Exit ... Stage Left. You can check out a screenshot here.
And Power Windows recently let us know about a small Rush reference on a recent episode of Showtime's United States Of Tara (Season 3, Episode 3 - The Full F*ck You Finger, aired April 11th). As Marshall is helping his dad Max clean his hoarder grandmother's house, he comes across a second place trophy for Max's band Beaver Lamp from a battle of the bands competition. Max explains how bad they were with we lost to a Rush cover band, that ought to tell you everything you need to know about Beaver Lamp.
Reader PhillyMike let me know that Starwood Preferred Guest - the hotel loyalty program for Sheraton, Westin and others - offers options to use points for items other than hotel stays, including Live Nation shows. They're currently offering a limited number of premium ticket pairs for the Rush shows in Phoenix and two in California for 10,000 points.
Bobby Owsinski is an author, producer, and a music and technical consultant who has a blog called The Big Picture where he occasionally will take a song and conduct a detailed analysis. In an April 12th blog post he does an interesting song analysis of Rush's Tom Sawyer which you can check out at this link (thanks Robert).
A video interview with Alex Lifeson going over his onstage gear for Musician's Friend was posted to YouTube earlier this week. The interview was conducted during the band's dress rehearsal the night prior to the March 30th opening show of the tour at the Bank Atlantic Center in Florida. You can watch the 8-minute-plus video below or at this link.
That's all for this week. Have a great weekend!
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