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Indeed, Alex Lifeson, Rush's guitarist, said he has noticed that fans who grew up with Rush seem "a little more detail-oriented in their professional lives." He said, in middle age, they seem disproportionately made up of engineers, chemists, economists and businessmen."Just yesterday I got an e-mail from an astronaut," Lifeson said. "A guy up in the space station. He brought a copy of our last album with him into space. I mean, this is amazing. You know how many Rush fans there are within NASA? A lot. I'll leave it at that. And I'm not just talking about the guys out in the field. Our fans are inside, close to the big programs. They run everything."
Alex: You know, it's funny that you mention that. I was up at my studio...I'm upgrading and changing my control room around a little bit. Rich and I have sort of "moved in together" in there. And I was cleaning up the back room...I've gotten rid of a bunch of stuff over the years...and I just found a case that was way up on the top shelf, and at the bottom of this box were a bunch of reel-to-reel, unlisted, unmarked, recordings...and I can only imagine that they're pre-'74. So, they would probably be from between '70 and '73...recordings from that period. So, they would probably have songs like "Run Willie Run," and "Slaughterhouse," and "Garden Road," and all of those early songs that we wrote and played during our bar days.Skip: Oh, wow. I've got to tell you that I think the fans would eat that up, even if it was just something put out via the web site, in digital form, as an "official bootleg series" or something.
Alex: Yeah, I'll see what sort of shape they're in. I know a couple of the reels were...you know those small reels, and I've got to think that even spooling them might be a problem, never mind me playing them. Anyway, I just discovered them, so who knows? There may be something in the near future.
The whole interview is nice and long and worth reading.
Not much new sadly. Here are some highlights.
On picking new songs to play:
We wanted to play the whole record live, but we had to settle for nine songs, otherwise we'd be playing for four hours and that's a little too much for us and, I think, for our audience. We had to make a decision about some of the songs we wanted to do. We all really wanted to do "Faithless", and we talked about actually doing it on the last half of the tour. We prepped it and we ran through it a couple of times, but in the end we just decided to kind of stick with what we had and just change up some of the older stuff.
On Rush being an influential group:
I think that younger bands look at us as perhaps a model that, you know what, you can do it your way. You can play the music that you want to play. You can find your audience, you can grow and not get stuck in all the things that, you know, people used to get stuck in. Now, granted, things have changed so much in the last five to 10 years in the industry, and things don't happen the way they used to happen...]]>
Looking good. Release date is November 25.
]]>There's a greatest hits package coming out soon called Rush: 1989-2009. Word is that there's be unreleased live tracks from that era. Word also is that they're looking to sign with Rounder Records.
On the hazards of playing at a casion in Atlantic City:
The arena in Atlantic City was inside a garish casino, where the management held back (denied us and our fans) the front section of seats. Those were “comped” to the “high rollers” (by definition, big losers), and thus we looked out from the stage at the first few rows (the ones we could see most) filled with people who had no idea why they were there except that it was free.In contrast to our real fans farther back, who would mortgage their Hemispheres picture discs, and perhaps internal organs, to get closer to the stage, we were confronted by mild curiosity at best, and at worst, rude indifference. As the show went on, we started to see empty seats where bored big losers had slipped away, a woman looking down and texting through whole songs, and a pair of slack-jawed, sulking teens (the Beavis and Butthead of the Guitar Hero generation—as Cartman from “South Park” says in the hilarious sample that Geddy uses in “The Trees,” “Real guitars are for old people”) actually yawning. Anyone would agree that yawning is not appropriate behavior at a rock concert. (Vomiting, yes, but not yawning.)
There's more about riding on the East coast and New England, riding without a helmet, looking forward to some time off, and some photos as well.
It's among the largest single donations the museum has had, according to director of marketing Bob Kendrick. It also represents some history the museum didn't previously have. "Some of these guys have been dead for some time, and we could not get these (signatures) before no matter what their significance was in the Negro Leagues," he said.]]>
The members of Canadian rock band Rush have donated $100,000 from the sale of tickets to last weekend's Winnipeg concert to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The three band mates -- Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart -- also announced today they will be selling museum T-shirts at all of the remaining Canadian stops on their Snakes and Arrows Live concert tour, and donating all of the proceeds from those sales to the museum's $105-million private sector fund-raising campaign. "My band mates and I are proud to be associated with the creation of a Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg," Lee said in a written statement.Quite cool! Word is that the shirts are already available for sale at the shows. Not sure if they'll have them for the US dates.]]>