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When I think back to the heydays of the Ottawa Bluesfest I can only shake my head in wonder, and not only because acts like Bob Dylan, The Hip, Lady Gaga, The Flaming Lips, KISS, and Van Morrison played just a short, pleasant bike ride away from my own backyard…Nay, what amazes me most, what makes my heart skip a gleeful beat is the astounding fact that I had received an all-access Bluesfest lanyard for all of those years! And for free no less! All I had to do in return was write little daily reviews of the festival which, as you must know by now, I probably would’ve done anyway.
Okay, “all-access” might be overstating things a little; it’s not like I owned the place or anything. But back in those earlier lanyard years (say around 2005-2007 or so) the organization’s ragtag organization coupled with the uncoordinated coordination between security personnel meant that with my pass dangling around my neck I could go pretty much anywhere onsite and I generally did. I was perennially in the photo pit or watching bands from sidestage…it was so, so awesome. Even when my all-access was subtly downgraded to some-access I still managed to get remarkably close to acts like Jeff Beck, Drive-By Truckers, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, Edie Brickell and lots more too. Ahh, it was all so amazing; a concert junkie’s fairy dreamland.
Which brings me to July 11th, 2010, a mid-fest Sunday near the end of the Bluesfest salad days. For some reason I shunned the afternoon and only made it onsite for Strippers Union, who played shortly before Rush.
Strippers Union was (is?…I hope they are still together) a fun pop-rock Canrock supergroup consisting of the rhythm section from The Odds and the keyboardist from Doug and the Slugs playing behind the two frontmen and songwriters: guitarist Bobby Baker from The Tragically Hip and singer Craig Northey, also from The Odds. I had seen them at Barrymores on their CD release tour and I’d liked them then, and here I was liking them again. They even had a horn section playing with them this time, which was pretty cool.
But any excitement I had garnered for Strippers Union was completely eclipsed by the massive, nearly hysteric elation I was feeling about seeing Rush for the fifth time (I ended up seeing them just once more, again at Bluesfest three years later). Even with The Hip’s other guitarist Paul Langlois sitting in, at the very most Strippers Union’s set could only be a distraction from the night’s main event.
I just can’t overstate how important Rush was to my personal musical history. Before I discovered Rush I was only familiar with AM radio top-40 tripe, disco, Elvis, and truck-driving country music. When our family moved to Richmond Hill, Ontario Rush exploded onto my thirteen-year-old consciousness and all the music that came before was instantly swept away*. I became a one-band man for the next several years. I knew Rush’s first twelve albums inside-out, backwards, and forwards. For a long time those dozen tapes were literally all I listened to (in chronological order of course), along with a fair dose of CHUM-FM and the mighty Q107. And because I was living in the same basic area that the band members were living I longed to see them up close and in person at the mall or on the street somewhere. But I never did.
Suffice to say, Rush to me was like a basketball to Tyrone Shoelaces. I had a jones.
And here I was with what was essentially a backstage pass. Talk about a childhood dream come true! And as I sit here typing to you I can’t recall or imagine why-oh-why I didn’t use that pass to position myself in a spot where I would’ve been bound to run into them. Like, what a crazy, crazy regret to have! The fourteen-year-old me will never ever forgive the forty-two-year-old me. Never. And to think that I don’t even remember why I didn’t…I can only hope that there was some sort of backstage pass blackout for the Rush night (which happened occasionally; ZZ Top and Tom Petty come to mind).
However I did watch the entire show from the photo pit between the band and the crowd, and the fourteen-year-old me would’ve been thrilled to merely high-five someone that was in the pit for Rush, let alone dream that it would one day be him (me). I was utterly beside myself; it was nothing short of dreamy.
And what a concert!
The tour was billed as the “Time Machine Tour” and they started the show by presenting a really funny, well-done video on the bigscreen which cast Geddy Lee as the proprietor of Gersens Haus of Sausage and Neil Peart as a cop sitting at the deli counter. Both were complaining about the horrible music coming from a stage in the back of the Haus of Sausage, where mini-Rush members were playing Spirit of Radio on tuba, accordion and a small trap drum kit. Alex Lifeson was dressed up as real-life Rush manager Ray Danniels, and he pulled out a machine that altered the song to make it sound like polka, then disco, then country & western. Finally the machine hit upon the authentic Rush version and the real band hit the Bluesfest stage to thunderous applause and played the song live before our very eyes.
And thus began their Time Machine show. It was epic.
The first set bounced through mostly new stuff**: Presto, Marathon, Time Stands Still, that sort of thing. They dipped back into their classic material just once in the set, for Freewill, a song the band played almost every time I saw them. The song is a fist-raising anthem for the geeky pocket-protector crowd and I love it.
The second set started with a complete run-through of Moving Pictures and while you can easily find several instances of me poo-poohing complete-album sets I obviously had no problem giving Rush a free pass here. I mean, it was Tom Sawyer (the opening track) and Limelight (which closes side one) that first flicked my Rush switch back on that fateful day when I first heard both of those songs emanating from the jukebox in my new local arcade. I pumped as many quarters into the jukebox that night as I put into the Defender machine, playing those two tracks over and over again. I bought all of Rush’s albums the next day.
And not only that, I like side two even better! So yeah, having Rush play Moving Pictures top-to-bottom while I watched from a dozen feet away in the pit? No complaints here.
And then…it got even better.
After they finished the album there was still plenty of time left. You know, for, like, the drum solo! Six times did I have the honour of watching Neil Peart perform one of his legendary drum solos, and every one of them was a gift from the musical gods. Thank you Neil (1952-2020).
The end of the set was peppered with more classics, including Closer to the Heart and a couple of sections from 2112.
Would I be lying if I said that the encore was the best of all? I don’t think so. Two songs, their epic instrumental “exercise in self-indulgence” La Villa Strangiato, which they hilariously started as a polka before reverted to the prog power trio sound that made them one of the world’s most famous bands and careening through the song like hounds drunk on instinct chasing a rabbit though Times Square.
The final song of the evening was the song that launched the band’s career, the song a disc jockey in Cleveland somehow discovered and played the hell out of way back in the way back, the song that had critics selling them off as nothing more than Canada’s Led Zeppelin, the lethargic low-E riff-fiesta Working Man. It was the end of our ride through Rush’s time machine, and it landed us right back at the beginning. Cool.
Part of me landed back in 1982, a breathless, excited teenager walking out of the photo pit(!) after taking in a simply astounding Rush concert from just feet away from the band.
It was the sort of night I hadn’t thought possible. Thanks Bluesfest.
*Except Dr. Hook. I never stopped loving Shel-era Dr. Hook.
**To me anything after 1982’s keyboard-laden Subdivisions album is “new” Rush.
Todd Man Out 