Gary Husband

Former Level 42 drummer, now sideman to John McLaughlin and a host of others, Husband has just released Dirty and Beautiful Vol 1, the first of a series of sessions he did with...get this...McLaughlin, Steve Hackett, Alan Holdsworth, Jerry Goodman, Jan Hammer, Robin Trower.

Not all in the same room (in case we got some Mahavishnu fans' blood pressure up momentarily there, sorry), spread across this quizzical disc as a kind of 70's-hero all star revue. Husband - accomplished drummer and keyboardist (kind of a fusioneer DeJohnette) - is likewise a decent composer, keenly attuned to the nuances of guitar-driven melodic fusion.

Full review coming soon, but as I wrapped up my McLaughlin story for the Weekly today, I thought it was time to actually spin this disc. It's already a favorite, and what in the world would droopy old fusionheads like me do without Abstract Logix?

Catching up

We found ourselves skimming through handy dandy USB flash drive the other day - we use it for everything, and we're notoriously lax about cleaning it off at the appropriate time - and we found a review of the Rush show we caught at Red Rocks last August. It was intended for this site, can't remember why it never made it on, but here goes.

There was a guy we met on the stairs at Red Rocks last night, a gold medal Rush fan, fiftyish and a little bit lubed up on margaritas, who explained about the impressively tenured Canadian trio, "You either love 'em or you hate 'em..."

Interestingly, I countered, I felt myself an exception to that rule, being neither a fan nor a skeptic for as long as I've ever been aware of these guys, which extends back into the mid-seventies. For progheads BITD, like me, Rush was a bit like prog-lite - minimal on soaring, virtuosic keyboard indulgences, fantasy-rag imagery, the requisite bombast of Marshall-stack re-imagined neo-classicism. I was, back in those days, quite smitten by the rich drama of mainstream prog, and Rush always struck me as sort of cultish offshoot. I roadied for a band who covered 2112, but I never bought their records. I neither resisted it nor embraced it - it was always someone else's thing.

The only real point to all this self-professed agnosticism is that I personally felt myself in a somewhat unusual place - being immersed in a Red Rocks ceremony surrounded by thousands of fans - many of whom were seriously hardcore and/or long timers, and not really being one of them. My critic side tends to bristle a bit at hardcore fan devotion as a matter of professional necessity, but I started as, and remain, a music lover too, so I know about this on a personal level and understand.

Anyway...as far as the show goes, a few things struck me about the formidible trio and their three hour/two set show, the second in a two night stand at the Rocks. Impressive set and production design - the video feed was flawlessly timed and directed. The lights were very good, some pyrotechnics and yet another uselessly stationed fog machine on the always-breezy Red Rocks stage. Whatever.

The band itself was just shy of stunning - moving confidently from material as old as 35 years, and as recent as a few months (they have a new record coming out). Geddy Lee's uniquely stirring falsetto struggles just a bit at some of the higher notes (we suspect, although don't know for a fact, that some of the older material is now performed in a lower pitched key to accomodate Lee's voice). The second set featured the entire Moving Pictures album, which includes the single "Tom Sawyer", the one Rush single non-congregationalists are likely to know best. I actually found the album segment surprisingly short, if decidedly well received.

As far as the band goes, there is a certain sense of a forty-year tenured rock institution finding its way between providing its hits and what its fans came for, and keeping the show vibrant and alive. It's a tough thing for anyone (I ask bands about it all the time, and even if everyone has an answer to the question, as if they have answered it for themselves, no one ever seems to have a magic formula) - I've heard and read that the band typically peforms everything more or less note for note, but I did hear some passages (Lifeson's acoustic figure leading into "Close to the Heart" for example) where the band strayed a little from rote catechism, as well as some Lee-Lifeson interplay I suspect was genuinely improvised. But these guys are no jamband, their music can be spectacularly complex, and their fans don't expect jazz. They expect Rush. And I really don't think they struggle with this issue. One thing I can say about these guys; they know who they are and what they do, and always have. that's both a trivial observation and a profound one. Rush doesn't reinvent itself, and few of the prog bands they are compared to can make that statement.

I will say that I grew some admiration for their musical personality, a kind of relaxed athleticism that promotes measured but effective instrumentation aggression, broadly sweeping without succombing to posturing self-indulgence (they seldom let you forget they're actually a rock band, bred from the musical ethics and the aesthetics of the seventies) or showy preening.

Lee's bass playing is genuinely impressive, grounded in standard rock bass but accounting for a large measure of the music's melodic content - Lifeson, on the other hand, ostensibly the guitarist in a power trio, relies heavily on broad and textured chording, sweeping across the rumbling rhythm section, picking solos off here and there but generally painting a sonic landscape more than sketching details. He's a good player, not a virtuoso, and I do think the band's unique personality is due in large measure to his role as a guitarist. He's basically a rhthym guitarist in a rock trio, and quick, name two others. Hell, name one.

And of course, there's Neil Peart. Adherents will tell you he's the greatest rock drummer of all time. I could see a case for that, even if based on personal experience I'd probably land him near the top and no further. Still, he absolutely DID have the biggest kit I've ever seen, and I found his drumming both lithe and thunderous. He has an obviously acute sense of tonal character in his druming and uses that to great effect, building and relasing crescendos with colored runs and fills, and generally building surprising complexity into teh compositions. He could play forty percent less to sustain the material, but the material would suffer - his role is deceptively central to the band's musical personality.

His solo, duly and unapologetically seventies-indulgent, included a very cool big band interlude and a neat Afro-electro segment that I thought brought unexpected and welcomed depth to what could have been a mere display of chops...something Peart, even at nearly 58, still has in spades.

The mix, I thought, was 20% too guitar heavy - from decent seats near dead center of the venue, 43 rows up, I literally couldn't tell in places whether Peart was actually playing, and plenty of segments where I could see (courtesy the video screen) that Lee was playing but couldn't hear a note. I know getting the sound just right at the Rocks is often challenge, and I wouldn't scream for my money back, but yeah...too much guitar in the mix, both sets.

It'd be a litle preposterous to self-annoint myself a Rush fan at this point, but certainly I'd paid again to see this show - it is both a vestige of a brave and provocative rock world I used to know very well, if through different bands, and for all the critic complaints about band's growing and maturing and experimenting - God bless the ones who do - this is a band that has a unique formula, devoted fanbase and a great live gig, and has kept those things more or less the same for nearly forty years, and sorry, but that's a good thing too.

Motet redux

We'd be remiss (actually, we have been remiss) not to mention the brawling, brash and utterly baddass Earth Wind and Fire trib that Dave Watts and Motet staged last Halloween weekend - we caught the Aggie show - see previous post....

With the three singers dressed as - what? wise men? pharoahs? - Watts led the 12 piece group through throwdown funk and jazz jam workouts with nimble turbulence. Watts' drumming, as always, was sharp and robust - the horns were excellent, if a little under-miked at times, and Jans Ingber stood out with hair-raising reach and fully hiphugging-bellbottom emotiveness. The guy is an absolute scary talent, fully at home in 70's soul both soloing and in conjuction with the other two.

Our first trip to the Aggie; the Ft Collins Halloween crowd was predictably weird and well-lubricated, and the theater itself has a rough, almost warehouse-like scruff to it that has a strangely charming appeal.

As for the picture, sorry about the idiot with the plastic light saber - this is the best of the four or five shots I managed to get with my crappy phone camera.