RUSH comes to Christmas Island

Another eventful week that was fun but I am glad is behind me. Resolved the day care dilemma by caving in completely to the sweet little old Indian woman. It’s a good thing I don’t do anything important that involves negotiating for a living.

Saw “The Bourne ad infinitum” Friday night. I like Matt Damon best playing himself in the Oceans XX movies. He’s okay in this new Bourne flick, but only paints in various shades of terse. I understand it’s a function of the story, but as an actor it limits him. Otherwise good story that ties up the series efficiently, but the editing and hand-held mayhem left me even more dazed and confused than usual. I think it would have made a better video rental.

Then last night, I fired up the jalopy and me and The Last Boy Scout went to see RUSH (the rock band, not the bloated right-wing windbag of the same name) at some low-overhead outdoor amphitheater out in the sticks.

I’ve seen these guys on every tour since Permanent Waves (ca 1980) and they never fail to deliver the goods. Last night was no exception. They’ve been releasing albums of new compositions and touring in support of them with the same line-up for over 30 years. They’re all in their mid-fifties probably, but these guys still play the living hell out of their instruments. Even the songs I didn’t care for (and their were a couple of them, from more recent albums) were carried along on musicianship and rockingness.

We had seats up in the bleachers, but all shows come with jumbotrons these days. And when The Number One Rush Fan a few rows in front of me occasionally sat down, I could see the stage pretty well without the big-screens. There’s two schools of thought on whether one should stand or sit at a rock show. Online complainers are already writing that at the show the night before, everybody stood for the whole thing, and frankly, that’s my preference too. But when everybody else in your bank of seats is sitting, you have to sit too. Your right to shake your groove thing does not supercede dozens of other peoples’ right to actually see the show they came for. People starting throwing stuff at the back of The Number One Rush Fan’s head, he turned around to glare at everyone behind him (including a giggling me), then he ran to complain to security as his resumed gyrations continued to draw crowd-fire…

Anyhow, it was funny. It was its own little drama playing out against RUSH’s admittedly dated light show, not much changed from its introduction in the middle-seventies. It was legendary in its time (the light show) but has begun to draw ridicule with age.

But everything else onstage has aged well, especially Geddy Lee’s amazing million-octave voice. Considered an acquired taste, he hasn’t lost an iota of his otherwordly vocal range in 30 years. He still hit every glass-shattering high note from their earliest hits.

The drum solo, usually rightly considered redundant if not downright masturbatory in most arena-rock shows, was as usual a thing of sublime beauty. Neil Peart… I suppose there are words to accurately describe his drumming’s grace, power and technical accomplishment, but I’ll leave it to better writers than me to find them. Everbody stood for the drum solo, even the lethargic group I was sitting with.

The first set was composed almost entirely of deep-catalogue crowd-pleasers that the band hasn’t played in years. It was a real pleasure to hear some of my favorite obscure album tracks get the live treatment again after all this time. Prepared film clips of song intros by Bob & Doug McKenzie and the South Park kids were hilarious and well-received.

The second set (they played a 3-hour show) dragged in the middle with the inclusion of a few less than stellar efforts from the band’s current disc, but even the lamer material was redeemed by a fierce, pummeling rock & roll execution. At one point I commented to The Last Boy Scout, “That was a lovely jam in search of a song.” He nodded his assent. The band rebounded nicely, however, with a mini-set of greatest hits at the end. And then the drummer was out from behind his kit and scooting across the stage for the exit like a cartoon bunny with his cottontail on fire.

Here’s the thing about the new material: Too much of it feels cobbled together, not of a piece. Their old songs all have sections and whole movements, time- and signature changes, but they feel complete. They feel like discrete entities. Especially with this new album, though, there’s lots of lovely parts of songs, but few songs that hold together as a whole. Which is why parts of the second half dragged. And it’s too bad too, because the new album’s theme is a worthy and timely one, about how religious zealotry is fucking up the world. I wish they had cooked the tunes a little longer before releasing them.

But quibbles aside (and a couple of weak song-parts in a 3-hour show definitely constitutes a quibble), what a night! What a show!

What a week… and next weekend is booked equally as relentlessly. Come on September...