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.

Motet

We had a great chat with Dave Watts a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for what might be their Motet's most demanding and ambitious trib show ever - Earth Wind and Fire. Three nights - Aggie, Ogden and landing at the Fox for Halloween. Piece ran in the Weekly yesterday (Thurs).

Faced with an indifferently uncooperative Fox publicist (did I say something about the BT/Fox merger being basically invisible??) and an editor busy with his own job, I found myself suddenly without a GL spot for Sunday's Fox gig.

Called the nice girl from the Aggie (Cornelia - my new bff) and she slapped me on their list + 1 for tonight; no begging/pleading/'don't you guys have a laminate?' bullshit. To and from Ft Collins will be a bit of a pain, but this show I want to see,

Which...gave me an idea. We'll be following up on this soon.

I'm still a little perplexed how I got to the place where I have to compete for one night's use of a communal BW/Fox laminate, for a show I actually covered (led the section), in a paper I've written for for 16 years, about a band I've covered for a decade....with people who have never covered a Fox Show, ever, once. I swear I'm doing something wrong.

RIP T

We just happened across the terrible news yesterday that keyboardist T Lavitz died last Thursday Oct 7 unexpectedly, in his sleep.



T was a breathtaking player, one of the few keyboardists bred from the soils of seventies fusion who could bind sheer firepower and uncommon warmth in the same bar. In the early Jazz Is Dead incarnations, T always struck me as the band's connective tissue, able to reach into the elusive soul of the original material and give it substance and challenge for the jazz-fusion players around him. Multi-lingual.

He always struck me as a friendly guy, a bit of a nerd and a reluctant virtuoso if there ever was one. One of the few guys at that level I never cringed over interviewing.

We were fortunate enough to interview him at least twice, and we'll include a paragraph from a 2000 piece we did on The Dixie Dregs, quoting T.

“But, you know what? Ever since I joined this band, when I was 22 years old, I have never, ever gotten tired of playing this music. There’s just something about Steve’s writing that makes this material so challenging and so much fun to play. It’s just incredibly orchestrated – I find that after a few days of playing a set, I know exactly how many seconds I have to change the settings on my keyboard for the next tune, how many seconds I have to towel off, scratch my nose, everything. Thing about this stuff, if you miss a bar someplace, you have to sit out a long time before you can jump in again, it all goes by so fast.. It’s fun, and it’s a workout.”

RIP man. Jeez, way too f-ing soon...

The Kids are OK

In reminiscing about their Hamburg days, Paul McCartney once recalled to an interviewer that the Beatles used to hear shouts of "macht shau! macht shau!" ("give us a show!") from the drunken and cynical nightclubbers they played three two hour sets a night back to in the day, a call to do a little more than stand like rail-thin scousers and strum their Rickenbackers, and even if their career led them to places where the talent to make the same 60 songs entertaining onstage was ultimately shelved in favor of studio extravagance, they never really lost that sense of projecting charisma.

We're not ashamed to to admit that, as smitten as we've become with their videos recently, we had some reservations about what kind of a show OK Go was going to deliver at the Fox the other night. If video killed the radio star, broadband dances on his grave.

So, we were pleasantly surprised when the Chicago-founded quartet's first Fox appearence delivered onstage, and with barely a passing reference to their storied video artistry, a fun, solid and energetic set. Keenly tapping references from skinny-tie post-wave pop, techno-dance Prince channeling and indie-rock agita, OK Go bears its influences unapologetically twelve years down the road, having survived their early years dismissed by tastemakers like Pitchfork as lame Weezer-wannabes and maturing into sly popmeisters, balancing craft with spontenaiety, and showman's cheese with craftsman's beef.

We are more partial to thir later material - "This Too Shall Pass" and "White Knuckles" - but even their earlier material like "Invincible", "WTF" and "Here It Goes Again" (the latter sounding like an early Ocasek-Orr thing) came across with stout and confident resolve, with singer Damian Kulash up-front striking his best Doug Feiger poses, belting out post-slacker anthems of ennui and puny redemptions as if, holy smokes, he really means it. And yeah, they had a video feed running behind them, but no dogs and no Rubes and no treadmills, and after it was all said done, they could have delivered just as well without it. The confetti cannons and odd interludes (they did one piece, I didn't know it, straight a cappela, accompanied only by hand bells; a neat and deeply musical trick and an endearingly touching surprise) were unforced and well-timed.

For a band relatively unknown to the routinely insular Fox audience (the show didn't look sold out to me), they turned thier crowd into instant believers, and us too. My wife asked me what "indie rock" really meant as we were walking back to the car, and in the context of OK Go, I was more or less at a loss. Not on a major label? Not beholden to mainstream tastes? Who knows, because if these guys are the reigning poster children of indie-rock, they sure don't seem reluctant to become whatever indie is supposed to be a reaction to. They appear to be just hitting their stride and ready for their closeup, an ironic thing in a broadband world where careers are made and lost at download speeds.

Someone obviously keeep reminding them that just showing up isn't the point. It's "macht shau", isn't it?

Leon and Elton

It was a little surprising hearing the lead track to Elton John and Leon Russell's new record, The Union on KBCO the other day. Just heard a little but may download the thing.

Anything to put a little of the soul back in Reg's singing, and anything that foists the Space Cowboy into the spotlight again, has got to be a good thing...the added benefit of T-Bone Burnett behind the dial probably helps. Neil Young, Brian Wilson and Booker T guest on it - sounds crowded, but like I said, it's always nice to hear from Leon.

And, I guess, Elton....

Game jones

Been drifting into Diablo 3 news and vids of late. Also, although I hadn't been paying much attention, there's a new Fallout game coming, due on shelves in the US Oct 19th. May just jump on that.