The Time Machine Touches Down and Three Extraterrestrials from Planet Rush Step Out (2011)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Frankfurt am Main / Festhalle / Germany
Concert date: 28.05.2011
Attendance: 20
Ticket price: 60,00€

It’s not every day that Rush wander over to Europe. They’re one of those legendary bands that can’t and won’t grow old. Besides an extraordinary body of work, a creative treasure trove of unique musical artistry, this is a band that has always come with a keen sense of refined fun, juicy and deliberate mockery, often at their own expense. Even though the guys have firmly waded into the sixth decade of their lives, they keep a remarkably youthful energy and an unrelenting drive.

A Rush concert is a special experience. It runs three and a half hours. It’s built from two sets with a 15-minute break in between. On top of that, it’s seasoned with extra short films full of goofy humor, where the leading roles go to none other than Neil Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. In short, a Rush concert is an event that properly shakes you up and wakes you up, from the inside out and back again. It carries you off into a Rush world all its own, one you’d happily stay in and never wake up from again.

The new world tour is called “Time Machine”! This time, though, the guys only touched down on the old European continent (not counting the British Isles) a handful of times. They hit just a few dates in Scandinavia and booked only one real European date on the whole tour, announced for 29.05.2011 in Frankfurt, Germany, a good 800km from Ljubljana. There was hardly any need to think it over, because the willpower this time was devastating in its determination to get things done. If these guys promise to play the entire album “Moving Pictures” live, a classic that celebrated the 30th anniversary of its “birth” last year, then going to a Rush concert simply becomes an absolute must.

Rush are great gentlemen, but at the same time (and thankfully) they still make no attempt to hide their endearingly childish side. A Rush concert is an unforgettable adventure, an experience of constantly interwoven intense feelings, created by the contrast of an extraordinary performance, stage sets, the play of lights and the sheer cheek of film animation. The many moods strung together over the course of the band’s set are stunning in their apparent reality!

The Festhalle in Frankfurt, which holds just under 20,000 people, had been sold out long ago. The concert was announced for 6:30 PM, and about an hour earlier the place was already boiling over. When the local promoter’s staff came to remove the first barrier, a euphoric roar went up from a delighted mass of several thousand people, who stormed up the wide stairs leading to the spacious concrete plaza in front of the main entrance to the hall. In an instant it went off, and the adrenaline rush, just as the word “Rush” demands, flooded the area. But there a second barrier held them back. A little more patience was needed.

It’s half past five in the afternoon, or to be exact, a quarter to six. People are jostling at the one and only merch stand on the whole grounds and nothing moves an inch. No way. I forgot about the T-shirt. I can’t miss a single second, the stands are calling! The hall is packed to the last corner, surely 18,000 people, even more than the day before at the Iron Maiden concert (at the same venue), even though both shows were officially sold out. This time the seats at the back were completely full too. And people from all corners and places. From loads of Poles, Italians, Spaniards, a bunch of hardy Slovenes, to visitors from Asia, even some from Chile, plus the USA and Great Britain.

They’re punctual! It’s half past six, the hall goes dark and all eyes are glued to a short film of contagiously fun Rush humor, set under the hypothetical premise of life in the distant galaxy of Willowdale (“this could happen”), starring the wacky, overweight Professor Schlobowitz (Alex Lifeson), who invents a time machine! A lot of it revolves around sausages this time. Through the whole concert, not just the short film, where the gluttonous Schlobowitz nearly chokes on a sausage. Next comes a demonstration of the device in front of the Irish cop O’Malley (Neil Peart) and a mustachioed officer (Geddy Lee) with a monocle. For their experiments they pick the band Rush and its song The Spirit Of Radio in a Finnish-Russian polka version, then a “disco Amanda Lear late seventies” version, and a lazily shimmering “jazzy funk” version. Not a single one satisfies anyone present, until the fat inventor fires off one last “super dooper” sound on the miraculous machine, accidentally hits the red button too, and it carries us out of the galaxy and the Gershon Rock joint, straight into the Festhalle and Frankfurt, where they hit the stage with the real The Spirit Of Radio (“Permanent Waves”, 1980), played by the real Rush.

It’s hard to describe the chain reaction that swept through the hall in those moments. A sea of hands in the air under the stands, the floor going completely nuts up to the halfway point,…. Euphoria everywhere. The trio’s classic opening punch is followed, through blasphemous strobing lights, by Geddy’s jump in his new All Star sneakers, and the band charges without a pause into the first real treat of an exceptional set list, Time Stand Still from the classic album “Hold Your Fire” (1987). Songs from that album aren’t exactly common, and Time Stand Still blasted us almost straight into the feel of the live album “A Show Of Hands”. Here Alex Lifeson jumped in on the chorus as a helper on synths (with a pick in his mouth, of course), while the individual chords have the real pedigree of being played through guitar synths. The flux of positive energy had only just started flowing in the hall when the next surprise followed. The title track of the album “Presto” (1989). Alex picks up a cherry-red Gibson Les Paul and opens the song in an acoustic manner. Here Alex once again wandered extensively across his pedals, while the song brought Geddy some relief where straining the vocal cords is concerned.

A camera under the stage, cameras in the pit, giant microphones on stage aimed at the crowd. What could that be? Rush are recording the concert. They’re probably recording every show of this tour, so we can look forward to a new DVD from it.

On stage, to the left and right of Peart’s drum fortress, stands a replica of a time machine. A classic. On the “Snakes And Arrows” tour the stage was decorated with stacks of chicken ovens, and on the “Vapour Trails” tour with washing machines. Peart’s drums were fitted with markings tied to the current “Time Machine” tour, and so was his headgear.

The choice of repertoire is interesting, alternating faster, punchier songs with ones that call for a more sophisticated and multifaceted sound. So Presto was followed by the banger Stick It Out, then by the sonically and melodically richer Working Them Angels from the latest album “Snakes And Arrows” (2007). Soon after we go back to “Counterparts” with the one-of-a-kind instrumental Rush classic Leave That Thing Alone, which brought a lovely new twist to the set list. Stunning presence on stage, tight, focused, going full throttle, a gorgeous pacing of the song with the bombastic escapades of Neil Peart’s drum fills. They don’t miss. Not even in their dreams.

Geddy’s voice doesn’t go as high as it used to. So at moments he was careful not to waste his strength. In the opening The  Spirit Of Radio he adapted the vocal line a bit to a lower register in the chorus. The other standout spot like that was Closer To The Heart in the second half of the concert (the chorus again). Otherwise, though, his vocals kept building. At the end of the first set Geddy was excellent especially in Marathon and Subdivisions, while through the whole second set he sang the “Moving Pictures” album brilliantly. The first set also had time for a completely new song, BU2B (in Geddy’s words: “I was Brought up to Believe”), which was among the loudest moments of the concert, since it’s opened by Alex Lifeson’s almost metalized lead guitar phrase. No Freewill, of course, is a no-go, and the real closing “crescendo” of the synthesizer era of Rush’s catalog flooded the hall when Marathon (“Power Windows”, 1985) and Subdivisions (“Signals”, 1982) came one after the other. Here Geddy takes on a triple role, combining keyboardist, bassist and singer in one. The difference is of course in the use of sounds: Marathon is excellent, thundering through the hall on the line “…shot of the gun…”, followed by Subdivisions, where Geddy works similarly to Tom Sawyer and the lead sound is taken over by a recap of the tone of those primitive synths that appeared at the end of the seventies (Oberheim brand), combined with a moog. At the same time Geddy of course plays the bass lines using pedals. Fantastic. The middle instrumental part of Marathon again takes your breath away, a showcase of excellent harmonic togetherness among all three building blocks on stage. In Marathon Lifeson uses a Gibson Les Paul with a built-in tremolo arm. Through a few gorgeous, fully crafted rollings from Neil Peart the last note of the first set rings out, and Rush take leave of the audience for a good fifteen minutes.

During that time a counter appears on the video projection panel, counting down the years from 1974 toward 1980. When the number 1980 appears on screen, the second set opens. A film. Again a full bag of laughs, with Geddy Lee (director Cecil), Neil Peart (cameraman Percy) and Alex Lifeson (manager Ray Danniels) trading the lead roles from frame to frame. Everything revolves around the invention again, and a few conversations bring tears of laughter (Geddy to Alex:  “What a fascinating tuft you’ve got by your nose, can I comb it out?”).

Next comes the performance of the “Moving Pictures” album! In full. Vocally excellent! Of course the hall erupts in euphoria when the trio kicks into Tom Sawyer. The peak of the album’s performance is of course the more complex song Camera Eye, Witch Hunt is cut with a pumped-up metal riff so hard the hall practically flashes, and at the end Vital Signs sounds extremely pleasant, a half-reggae song with an excellent melancholic drama-effect chorus! YYZ stands out in this lineup as the oddball of all Rush oddballs, and the crowd thunderously backs every note of this famous “S.O.S.” instrumental of the band.

The end of the second set is extremely interesting. The new Caravan follows, then a drum solo called “Love For Sale”, which is itself one of the concert’s highlights. If any drum solo is justified at concerts, it’s definitely Neil Peart’s. It’s a solo you can’t get enough of watching and listening to, a solo where you can’t get the feeling that someone is stealing your time. The drums rotate. Neil moves around on them through the number while soloing, since he has percussion stacked on one side and classic drums on the other. Of course the heavy use of the marimba wasn’t missing either.

Finally something for the connoisseurs of Rush in the seventies. Here comes Closer To The Heart, followed by the first two parts of 2112’s Overture, which keep firing up the crowd. The choice of the newer Far Cry as the closer is interesting, with no shortage of pyrotechnics.

The obligatory encore surprises with La Villa Strangiato, where Alex doesn’t allow himself the skit known from the live release “Rush In Rio” (2003), when he introduces Neil as “on skins Mr. Milton Banana” and Geddy as “The guy from Ipanema”, and finishes the skit with the remark: “I hate Getz!”. Too bad Rush didn’t sprinkle that in for Frankfurt too. The band tackles the song in a completely different way again from what we’re used to, and once more that magical stage chemistry of the trio fascinates, embodied in an exceptional performance of this excellent but fairly demanding instrumental. And to finish? Working Man. But in a goofy reggae intro. A welcome twist especially for a band that’s surely sick and tired of playing this song on stages throughout their long-lived career.

The play of lights is one more factor that creates the hypnosis of Rush concerts. Besides the rich film animation, where Rush combine a sophisticated shock element with an innate sense of healthy humor, the visitor gets a constant barrage of a multicolored palette of spotlight beams, lasers and pyrotechnic effects.

It’s ten o’clock! The concert is over. A parody of the comedy “I Love You, Man” appears on the screen, showing the backstage goings-on after a Rush concert, when Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, the biggest Rush fans in the history of planet Earth, finally meet their “trio fantastikus” (Rush). They sneak backstage with fake “Access All Areas” passes (“valid” for three seasons) and among other things ruin Neil Peart’s sandwich.

So, in short. Even when they wrap up the concert, they don’t let you breathe. And that’s that. The Rush world is a true fascination, a musical world that chains you firmly to it with its essence and doesn’t let you out of its hypnotic haze. It’s a feeling you want to last. When the lights finally come on, the feeling just stays. And when you head out of the hall, it’s with you. It’s with you the day after too,…

The “Time Machine” tour continues into the summer, and this fall the band’s new studio album comes out, titled “Clockwork Angels”. Let’s hope Rush will soon come back to Europe on a new tour to promote the new studio album. A Rush concert keeps its pedigree as a major attraction and a synonym for a great concert spectacle. If you want the music on stage to touch the deepest corner of your soul, the only real cure is going to a Rush concert and soaking in the magical world of Rush music. Three and a half hours of out-of-this-world playing by a Canadian lineup of modest size (a trio), steeped in a first-rate sense of healthy rock n’ roll entertainment. The embodiment of pure musical perfectionism on stage!

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Setlist

1.The Spirit of Radio 2.Time Stand Still 3.Presto 4.Stick It Out 5.Workin’ Them Angels 6.Leave That Thing Alone 7.Faithless 8.BU2B 9.Freewill 10.Marathon 11.Subdivisions —second set— 12.Tom Sawyer 13.Red Barchetta 14.YYZ 15.Limelight 16.The Camera Eye 17.Witch Hunt 18.Vital Signs 19.Caravan 20.Drum Solo 21.Closer to the Heart 22.2112 Part I: Overture 23.2112 Part II: The Temples Of Syrinx 24.Far Cry —encore— 25.La Villa Strangiato 26.Working Man

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