Back off, please. I am a Rush fan, and I have the CDs to prove it. I didn’t insult Alex, Geddy or Neil. I merely point out that, when you’re being asked to pay 100 or more dollars a ticket, you MAY want to ask yourself whether the band puts on a show that’s worth it.
There’s no sin in being a talented singer or musician who lacks charisma or stage presence. We can’t all be Elvis, and most fans wouldn’t want Geddy to TRY to be Elvis. Not all bands are Kiss, and nobody expects Alex to spit blood or set off fireworks on stage.
Stiil, for a hundred bucks, I’d like to see more than three guys standing there playing their songs. I could stay home and listen to their songs on my stereo for free. I’ve seen Rush in concert twice, and didn’t demand a refund either time. But neither did I come away thinking, “I can’t wait to see them again.”
They don’t have any trouble selling out big arenas, so obviously, not everybody agrees with me. If you go to see them, I sincerely hope you have a great time.
But I won’t be there with you. In my humble opinion, Rush is one of those bands, like the Cars, whose concerts are little more than note-for-note recreations of their recordings. I LIKE the recordings, but don’t need to pay to hear them again.
After 15 years of listening to Rush on a daily basis I finally got to see them on their European tour a couple years back. Everything was just as cool as I thought it would be, except for the fact that, for some odd acoustic reason, I couldn’t hear a thing Geddy played. (I did hear Neil’s drums and Alex’ guitar just fine). Being a bass player and a Geddy fan, I’m still pissed that I had to sit through the three-hour show watching Lee work the hell out of his Jazz Basses on the video screen. I’m sure he was all kinds of great. Fuck, shouldn’t have reminisced.
I’ve seen Rush about a dozen times, my first show was the tour supporting the Presto CD.
To answer your initial question, Rush will sound very good in concert. They have been doing the stadium thing for a long time, and their crew gets it right. I had one bad experience at a Rush show involving sound. I was sitting near a stack of speakers that played the triggered samples & sound effects much louder than the rest of the music. I always chalked that up to a venue problem, and when there wasn’t any of those types of effects playing, the sound was still top notch.
As stated, the boys don’t tend to jump around or personally go nuts, but they will take some steps to get the crowd into it. Beyond the band itself, Rush does a very good job with supplemental movies on stadium big screens, if you’re watching R30 you get the idea. One thing you won’t get from the DVD is the light show. Astorian may have seen them back before they made a point of bringing innovative lighting on tour, but the Rush light show tends to be very good and fun to watch. The show I saw recently on the Snakes & Arrows tour was an amphitheatre show, so the lighting wasn’t as impressive as it would be indoors, but still pretty cool.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that now that they’re old guys, they have more fun playing these shows. Live, they don’t seem past their prime at all.
Slight hijack: Mister Rik, in another thread you mentioned the band tuning down for “Circumstances.” That got me scouring my live versions of songs and checking their tuning. My research is far from finished (as this has prompted me to set up my synths & bass in such a way to be the Geddy portion of the Rush Tribute band in my head and spend way too much time playing these songs I stumble across.) but so far, Circumstances (a whole step down) is the only example I’ve found of this. I’m about to check disc 2 of the R30 DVD to see if they tune down By-tor or Xanadu, and I’ll report back my findings.
Rush is my favorite band. I haven’t seen them live since the eighties, but they were always worth the ticket back then.
My brother had the opportunity to see them on their last tour and he said they are just as great now as they were when we were kids. He’s quite the critic so that means a lot.
I’m part of an online community of musicians dedicated to transcribing Rush’s music note-for-note and making tablatures available (we have complete and accurate guitar, bass, and drum tabs for nearly every song up through Test for Echo, as well as several songs from the two most recent albums). I got the information from this group. Basically, Geddy has three basses that he uses live: His black 1972 Jazz Bass, tuned normally; a Geddy Lee Signature Jazz Bass (exact copy of his main bass) tuned to “drop-D” (that is, just the E string tuned down a full step for certain songs, mostly from Counterparts and Test for Echo and probably a couple from S&A, that were written in drop-D), and a red Jazz Bass that is tuned down a full step, for use on the older material that is now too high for Geddy to sing. I also remember seeing a brown sunburst Jazz Bass on a couple songs on the R30 tour (and I see he used it for “Between the Wheels” on the S&A tour, though they performed that song in the original key, so I’m not sure why he’s using that bass rather than his regular black Jazz.), and Geddy used a Jaco Pastorius model fretless Jazz Bass for the instrumental “Malignant Narcissism” from S&A.
I just checked my bass against the performance of Circumstances on the Snakes & Arrows tour DVD, and I’ll correct my previous statement: they played that song tuned down just a full step (with Geddy using his red Jazz).