Update:
Wishing a very happy birthday to Mr. Neil Peart.
— Rush (@rushtheband) September 12, 2012
September 12, 2012
Geddy Lee talks to Peter Mansbridge
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September 8, 2012
Rush wins “Album of the Year” at first Progressive Music Awards
In a “how is this possibly the first time” event, Rush won the Album of the Year award for Clockwork Angels.
Clockwork Angels picked up "Album of the Year" at last night's Prog Awards. Here's BBC's wrap up of the event: http://t.co/u8ZsUfrS
— Rush (@rushtheband) September 7, 2012
Veteran rock band Genesis have been honoured at the first Progressive Music Awards, alongside other bands including Pink Floyd and Rush.
Genesis members Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks picked up the lifetime achievement award at a ceremony at Kew Gardens on Wednesday.
Keyboard legend and ex-Yes member Rick Wakeman was given the Prog God Award.
The awards, created by Prog Magazine, were hosted by BBC Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler.
Prog rock, which grew out of 1960s psychedelia, was originally associated with 70s bands including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and King Crimson.
[. . .]
Canadian rock band Rush’s latest concept album, Clockwork Angels, was named Album Of The Year.
With its dystopian steampunk theme, the three-piece’s 19th studio album has earned rapturous reviews, even in the mainstream press.
Describing it as Rush’s “most solid and compelling set of songs in years”, The Guardian went on to say: “Those who worship at the temple of Rush will be in raptures; for those who remain agnostic, there may well be enough here to justify a leap of faith.”
It was also a handy reminder to me that I hadn’t actually bought the album yet: it was on sale in the Canadian iTunes store for $6.99. Sold.
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August 18, 2012
Prog rock today: looking back on the future
The final installment of Dave Weigel’s history of prog rock at Slate:
This is what fascinates me about prog. The music is relentlessly futurist, with no nostalgia for anything in rock. Was there excess? I think we’ve answered that — there was horrible excess, and some of it involved the lead singer from the Who singing atop a giant rubber penis. In the U.K., the music press turned on prog, and turned viciously. Same thing in the States. “If you can’t have real quality,” wrote Lester Bangs of ELP, “why not go for quantity on a Byzantine scale, why not be pompous if you’re successful at it?” Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, made it into Cameron Crowe’s ‘70s nostalgia film Almost Famous. ELP did not.
[. . .]
Pop’s move away from prog didn’t happen that quickly. It was slow and tortured and involved a ton of moving parts breaking around the same time. In the United States, where most of this music ended up being sold, progressive rock radio slowly, slowly was assimilated into the Borg of commercial networking. “The reason free-form, underground progressive ended up becoming unpopular is it was the ultimate ‘active’ format,” says Donna Halper. “It was aimed at music freaks who adored everything about the newest groups and didn’t ever wanna hear a hit. OK, fine, that makes up about 6 percent of your audience. But the mass audience wanted a middle ground.” A&R men stopped looking for “progressive” acts. Sire stopped promoting Renaissance and started schlepping the Ramones. “You’d put an album out, but they were expecting to sell so many thousand,” says Davy O’List. “I don’t think it hurt the live concert attendances, but it hurt overall.”
Culturally and lyrically, prog began as anti-“establishment” music. But compositionally, it rewarded long listens and worship of virtuosity. Punk deconstructed that. [. . .]
Prog, went the thinking, was an affront against sincerity. If you gussied a song up with strings, surely you were covering for a lack of feeling. That point was made countless times, usually in the same terms with which Bangs dismissed ELP. The originators of prog were trying to make simple pop songs irrelevant. The music that replaced prog copied that reaction — what had gone before was corrupt, and had to be destroyed.
That sensibility lasted longer than most medieval land wars. The occasional mainstream defender of prog always, always started in defense mode. In June, this year, Ted Leo published a confessional in Spin all about his love for Rush. It was packaged as a “confessional” because Rush were proggy, and you couldn’t endorse prog qua prog.
[. . .]
Rush, who came late to the prog wave (1974), have trimmed back the pretention while flaunting the virtuosity. As a reward, they can still play stadiums, in basically any country. They just happen to be the most sellable artists in a niche genre. Virtuoso metal and math rock, bands like Mastodon and Protest the Hero, have nestled into the same place. That’s one fractal of modern-day prog.
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August 14, 2012
Neil Peart interview in Maclean’s
He’s in conversation with Mike Doherty on a range of topics including the upcoming Rush concert tour:
Rush’s 20th studio release, Clockwork Angels, hit No. 1 in Canada in June — not bad for a steampunk, progressive rock concept album. Its story, about a young man who flees a land designed to function in perfect mechanical order, reflects the philosophy of drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. Now living in Santa Monica with his wife and daughter, the native of St. Catharines, Ont., is preparing with his long-time bandmates, bassist-singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson for a concert tour that starts next month. At a Toronto rehearsal studio, he granted a rare interview about musical integrity, freedom and his fight to escape precision.
Q: Thirty-eight years ago you joined Rush, and the next day you went shopping for instruments for your first tour. What are your memories of that time?
A: I remember all of us riding in the truck down to Long & McQuade [a music store in Toronto]. What a young musician’s dream, to say, “Look at those chrome drums. Look at that 22-inch ride cymbal. I’ll have those.” It was one of those unparalleled exciting days of your life.
Q: Did you feel you were embarking on a great, lifelong journey?
A: No, nothing like that. When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, “If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!” And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch. Whereas if you’re [thinking], “I want to be a rock star” — those kind of people just want to know how they can start at the top, and they’re doomed not even to get to the bottom.
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December 23, 2011
Choosing the right historical figures to appear on Canadian banknotes
Colby Cosh has some thoughts on who we should be celebrating by including their images on our currency:
Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.
I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five — that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford.
He invites the readership to provide their choices for banknotization. I thought the obvious suggestion was to include Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart — our Holy Trinity — on the banknotes.
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September 6, 2010
Fifteen albums/fifteen minutes
I got tagged with this Facebook meme by David Stamper a little while ago, but I’m only now just getting around to addressing it. Here’s the description I was sent:
The rules: Do this if it’s fun. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums you choose.
So, because I’m too lazy to do it in Facebook, I’m doing it here (eventually, through the magic of Twitter, the link’ll appear in Facebook anyway). Roughly in chronological order:
- Rush, A Farewell to Kings
- Al Stewart, Past, Present & Future
- Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
- The Alan Parsons Project, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
- Dire Straits, Dire Straits
- Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
- Neil Young, Live Rust
- Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
- King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
- Kitaro, Silk Road
- Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage
- Dead Can Dance, The Serpent’s Egg
- The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God
- John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
- Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
I had to take it in chronological order to limit it to only fifteen, so no really recent stuff . . . but perhaps that’s fair as it’ll take time to show if more recent stuff will hold up to long-term listening. Not quite making it onto the list was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis & Gil Evans.
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