Oh, goodie, another Rush live album. Not just any ol’ studio album-tour-live album-live DVD, rinse-cycle-repeat variety live album, either. No, no. Why buck band tradition with something like that during the holiday season when a non-concert compilation of many shows through the years will be more than enough, thank ya kindly.
Please, Geddy, Alex and Neil, don’t make it even half-interesting with at least two or three oddities or deep cuts from the tours. Put on a slightly different version of “One Little Victory” (allegedly previously unavailable, but here in the ever-present-to-suck-you-in “never before available but now with an extra drum-kick or four, unlike on on two other prior live discs and Retrospective, Vol. 3” status) and let the rest of the songs, which have been on practically every live album or greatest hits album or retrospective volume you seem to release with the change of seasons, do the trick. No one’ll notice much, right?
Cripes, even Motley Crue and their umpteenth greatest hits collection (also with nothing new but a remixed prior track) doesn’t reek of crassness as badly … and its title has dollar signs not-so-ironically subbing for “s.”
God, do I love the holidays!!!
Despite our never seeing eye-to-eye on favorite drummers (she’s Neil Peart, I’m Stewart Copeland), my lovely wife endorses the above 100%.
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Come on E. It comes with a 2010 Rush Calendar! That’s brand new. Bitch and moan!
Damn, my bad, though maybe I can get milady the calender with the Rush/R:30 that’ll be under the Christmas tree.
Meh. Much as I like prog rock, Rush has always bored me silly, but I do feel your pain. It drives me nuts to wait five or seven years for a new album from my favorite dinosaur band, continually having to put up with at least two greatest hits CDs in between. It wouldn’t even be that bad if they’d put out some B-sides collections, but practially no one ever does that, I don’t know why.
After thinking about it a bit more, it occurs to me that when a band gets in this kind of a rut – be they Rush, or Boingo, or Cheap Trick or whomever – I think it means the spark is sort of gone, you know? They’re not releasing new material because they’ve lost the creative spark. They’re not creating anything because they’ve lost the ability to do so like they did when they were younger and more fascile of mind.
Thoughts?
Republibot 3.0,
I’ll be writing reviews on biographies of Beethoven and Mozart soon and I’ll touch on this very topic. I’m not sure “facile of mind” would be the term I’d use (although if I did I’d spell it correctly), but there is a common thread of age that runs through a lot of genius throughout history. The late 20′s to early 30′s seem to be a window of opportunity for genius, especially with men.
As much as I hate to admit it, Rush’s last three studio albums were pretty damn good (Snakes and Arrows, Vapor Trails and Test for Echo). Took 25+ years for Geddy’s nerds to drop and the lack of nasal does the band (and my ears) well. Still, far too much of the aforementioned repackagings for me not to snap.
Cheap Trick’s last two have also been better than expected, especially Rockford from a couple years ago. I’d easily put that one in the same sentence with their 70s output, and yes, I know that’s a bold statement.
To settle the battle of the Porvaznik’s; Peart is a better drummer, Copeland is a more innovative drummer. While there are almost definitely things Peart could do that Copeland could not (when both were in their prime), Copeland took drumming further than Peart. I still hear Copeland’s influence in modern music. Peart’s drumming sounds like the ’70′s.
In art I typically put a lot of emphasis on “less is more.” If one has true talent one doesn’t have to make a lot of noise. There is no technique that Peart didn’t think could be improved through quantity; two toms sound good, then 20 roto-toms have to be better. Two cymbals sound good, then a series of bells, chimes and an enormous gong have to be better. One bass drum sounds good, two have to be better…
Copeland could play sparingly well; only playing what the song needed, and nothing more.
Well, I’m not making a blanket statement about everyone getting old and loosing the spark, but there’s a lot of “Huey Lewis & The News” type bands out there who theoretically are still around, but basically just tour to support their greatest hits, and haven’t put out a real album in decades.
There’s people like Johnny Cash, who ran out of life before he ran out of songs, and then there’s people like George Harrison, who ran out of songs long, long, long before he ran out of life. Even bands that remained relatively prolific after their heyday (INXS seems the prime example, through the ’90s up until Hutchance’s death) seem to sort of loose the pulse of the people, and where they could effortlessly crank out endlessly chewy stuff, they’re still putting out material, it’s just not…y’know…as good.
As for drummers, I’m annoyingly non-dogmatic. On the one hand, I love the super-dynamic sound that Slim Jim Phantom and the amazing and underated Victor DeLorenzo got out of basically two drums and a cymbal, and the Femmes have sounded like crap ever since Victor left, but on the other hand nobody can tell me that the over-the-top style of Cozy Powell, or the really intricate and involved complexity of Terry Bozio wasn’t great. Also, I really like Gene Krupa.
I never cared for Keith Moon, though. Nor John Bonham
Krupa, Moon and Bonham were all greats. I’m not much of a Zep fan but I think Bonham was by far the most singularly talented of the three. Keith Moon was very good when The Who were new and young, but he got somewhat pedestrian towards the end. Goodness knows he was battling a large set of personal demons, so maybe it wasn’t his talent running dry so much as an inability to focus with all the other difficulties besetting him.
I think some folks; Moon, Belushi, Eliot, Bonham, Farley… create such larger than life, two dimensional personalities the public won’t let them escape their myths. Keith Moon never really was “Keith Moon,” but I think he felt an immense obligation to be “Keith Moon.” Nobody can be “Keith Moon,” just as nobody could be “Elvis,” or “Belushi.”
Well, I can’t speak for Belushi, but I think Elvis pretty much *was* Elvis 24/7, which was the cause of a lot of his problems in the second half of his life. Elvis clearly didn’t have a distinct public personality (As opposed to say, “Cary Grant,” the public face of Archibald Leech)
It’s funny. I once met Danny Elfman backstage at a Boingo concert a long, long time ago. He was tired and worn out and wasn’t expecting anyone to be there, and he saw me and my friend, and before we could even say antything to him, he put a finger up and said “Just give me a sec to get in character” and then his whole face changed and he became…well, you know, the creepy/funny “Danny Elfman, TM” character such as you’d see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LkjLjQzsZU
I would imagine most all “famous” people are not 100% themselves when in public, and that can be a big problem depending on what your public persona is. If you’re Jim Morrison, John Belushi, T.S. Eliot, Jimi Hendrix or Keith Moon that can be a big problem when you go out in public. You are expected to live up to a mythical standard that nobody really can live up to. Larry the Cable Guy is a great example of a guy who can proably no longer be himself in public, ever.
However, there are probably a lot of “famous” people who are 99% themselves when in public.
Who can tell? I’ve met one or two famous people who seemed completely unreserved, and I’ve met a few others who clearly were faking it. The larger group is the latter.