Matthew T Grant

I went to see Rush at the Garden last night. It was good, but it wasn’t sublime.

Here’s the thing. I’ve liked Rush since I was a kid and in fact still listen to their music with an, for some, alarming frequency (my favorite album being Fly by Night). However, I never really explored their catalog, which I otherwise celebrate, beyond Moving Pictures, the mega-hit which sold over 4 million copies worldwide and put them on the classic rock map for good.

If I think of things from the standpoint of Geddy, Alex, and Neil, I realize that for them, Rush is everything they have done since they started playing together in something like 1968. In fact, early on in the show Geddy Lee joked that they had “400 songs” that they could play for us.

Unfortunately, for many of my generation—I recently turned 47—Rush actually boils down to the 4 or 5 songs (“Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” etc.) that we’ve heard a thousand times and, if you are a semi-fan like me, choice cuts from the preceding albums (“Xanadu” from A Farewell to Kings or “The Necromancer” from Caress of Steel). Aside from “Subdivisions” off Signals, I couldn’t really name a Rush song recorded after 1980.

It was for this reason, and a couple others, that the first lengthy set Rush played was a bit of the hard slog. Kicking things off with a very corny, though highly produced, film clip that set up the “time machine” theme of the evening, the band launched into one of their biggest hits, “Spirit of the Radio,” and it was exhilarating. When you hear a band play a song that has been kicking around your ears for thirty years it is undeniably powerful and I was, for about 4 minutes and 50 seconds, transported. Read the rest of this entry »