During the song, each band member intended to make an individual, grand exit across the catwalk. But the Edge took a bad step and fell off the edge of the catwalk on his way out (Bono did his best to keep the show moving, and kept on walking while the crew attended to his bandmate).
The set list:
“The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”
“Out of Control”
“Vertigo”
“I Will Follow”
“Iris (Hold Me Close)”
“Cedarwood Road”
“Song for Someone”
“Sunday Bloody Sunday”
“Raised by Wolves”
“Until the End of the World”
“Invisible”
“Even Better Than the Real Thing”
“Mysterious Ways”
“Desire”
“The Sweetest Thing”
“Every Breaking Wave”
“Bullet the Blue Sky
“Pride (In the Name of Love)”
“The Troubles”
“With or Without You”
Encore:
“City of Blinding Lights”
“Beautiful Day”
“Where the Streets Have No Name”
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
This coming October, progarchy will turn three years old. Quite amazing, really. If you’re interested, here are our most read posts since we began in the fall of 2012. Looks like Rush and Neal Morse are pretty popular!
You’d think a band celebrating 40 years of touring and making music might sound a bit like a band that’s been touring and making music for 40 years.
Not so with the seemingly ageless Rush who is arguably more relevant now than at any time of their career.
The power trio hailing from Toronto, Canada that may or may not be calling it quits at the end of their current R40 tour got off to a stellar start on Friday at the BOK Center in Tulsa, OK in front of a mostly sold-out crowd that watched them stroll back through their extensive catalog of albums starting with the present and ending in a makeshift high school gym.
Singer Geddy Lee, at 61 years young, rocked his vocals the entire night and seemed to be having way too much fun on bass as he traded-out guitars on nearly every song. Lee…
In interviews preceding Rush’s 40th anniversary tour, vocalist and bass player Geddy Lee hinted the tour may be the band’s last.
Say it isn’t so, Geddy.
The Canadians — Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and percussionist Neil Peart — proved again Sunday night at Pinnacle Bank Arena why they are three of the greatest rock musicians to ever grace a stage.
Rush, performing the tour’s second show, played nearly three hours, offering up two sets, with a brief intermission between them, and a four-song encore.
“We have all kinds of little goofy things for you this evening,” Lee told the audience after Rush opened with three songs from its “Clockwork Angels” album: “The Anarchist,” “The Wreckers” and “Headlong Flight.”
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege (I don’t use that word lightly here) of attending Marillion Weekend in Montreal, Canada. For those who aren’t familiar with the weekend conventions, the band play three straight nights, each with a different setlist and theme.
Friday night featured the Anoraknophobia album in full, plus a few extras. There was a well-intentioned attempt to open the weekend with “Montreal,” a love letter to the city and its fans, but a blown fuse in the venue cut the performance short. (Not to worry, we eventually heard it during Sunday’s encores.) Unfazed, the band returned to the stage after a few minutes and launched into “Between You and Me.”
In my experience, Anoraknophobia is an album best enjoyed with headphones on a quiet evening, so it doesn’t exactly make for the best live album. Still, “Separated Out” and “If My Heart Were a Ball” were obvious standouts. The encore performance of “This Strange Engine” was one of the highlights of the weekend, as Steve Hogarth’s final lyrics – “is true, is true” – rang through the venue long after the lights came up.
On Saturday, the band performed the entirety of Marbles, probably the most beloved album from the Hogarth era. And unlike Anorak, nearly every song on the album lends itself perfectly to a live show. After the opening performance of “Invisible Man,” I looked around the venue and saw people literally holding their heads in disbelief, still in awe at a song they had likely heard hundreds of times. And it went this way for most of the night, from “Ocean Cloud” to “Neverland.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that everything – lights, sound, atmosphere – is in its rightful place at a Marillion concert, and the Marbles night showcased this perfectly. At the end of the show, I remarked to friends that the band’s lighting tech (whose name I embarrassingly can’t recall)* truly gets every song. The performances are as visually striking as they are transcendent.
On Sunday night, the band returned to fan favorites with a “charting the singles” theme that reached all the way back to 1982’s “Market Square Heroes.” I snuck a look at the setlist from the band’s earlier conventions in Holland and the UK, so I knew what songs were to come, but it was obvious from the reactions in the room that many other fans had waited to be surprised. As the band counted up the years from “Garden Party” and “Kayleigh,” they revisited a few rare tracks: “Sympathy,” “These Chains,” and the alternate, more hopeful version of “The Great Escape.”
The Sunday night show confirmed what I suspect those of us in attendance already knew: how deeply personal much of Marillion’s music remains to the fans, as long as 30 years after first release. As the crowd continued singing the last lines of “Easter” – “forgive, forget, say never again” – well after the song had ended, it was obvious that all of us in the room, band included, felt and appreciated the truth of those words.
Even weeks later, all I can think of is how grateful I am – grateful to Marillion for revealing elements of the human experience that are so often lost and obscured, and for helping us to remember that such experiences are still there to be had.
Edit: Marillion’s lighting designer is Yenz Nyholm, who deserves serious recognition for the lighting production.
Following in the wake of an epic May snowstorm, high winds, flooding, and tornados, my two oldest kids—Nathaniel (16) and Gretchen (14)—and I began our nearly eight-hour journey across the Great Plains about 8:45 yesterday morning. We arrived in Lincoln around 5, checked into our hotel room, and I immediately had an hour-long radio interview with two wonderful women out of Denver.
Scrambling as Kronos devoured the minutes, we headed across town in search of our pilgrimage site, The Pinnacle Arena.
We found it, and we were in our seats by 7:10. The show was supposed to start at 7:30, but it ran about 15 minutes late.
A nearly packed arena revealed a far more gender-balanced Rush audience then I’d ever seen before. Almost certainly because of Beyond the Lighted Stage, wives and girlfriends (it was pretty obvious that most of them were newbies) made up a significant part of the crowd. I’m sure there were women there on their own as well, of course, but most packs I saw were men only. Still, probably ¼ to a 1/3 of the audience was female. Impressive, to be sure.
1970s classic prog from Kansas, ELP, Jethro Tull, and Yes blared from the speakers as we awaited the Canadians.
Rush, May 10, 2015, Lincoln, Nebraska.
A typically bizarre video introduced the band, detailing its journey from 1974 to the present, actually having Rush arrive in Lincoln, Nebraska. Alex even showed up on stage in a wheelchair, rather hilariously.
From the opening note to the last, three hours in all, Rush performed without flaws, as tight as ever, and as humorous as ever. I’ve never seen Neil smile so much. Throughout much of the evening, he kept making strange faces at Alex, Alex egging him on. Alex also said several things to the audience, but I couldn’t catch them all. The highlight of his hilarity, though, came toward the end of the evening, when he and Geddy traded places on stage, Alex mocking Geddy’s 1975 Zeppelin-esque screams.
I can honestly write: this was the single finest rock concert I’ve seen in my life. It was the absolute dream of a Rush fan and a prog fan. Everything, simply put, was perfect.
The music, the song selection, the videos, the lights, the lasers. . . . Every. Single. Thing.
Peart’s second of two drum solos. As my 14 year old daughter said to me after the concert: Peart was the best part.
***Here, there be spoilers!***
If you’re not interested in what the band plays, please stop reading here. There be spoilers below! You have been warned.
I made sure NOT to find out what Rush was playing. A close friend had posted the name of one song online, but, otherwise, I refrained from reading anything about the tour. I’m really glad I did. So, again, if you want to be stunned—and you will be—don’t read below.
Geddy. From the Wizard of Oz.
The entire show went exactly backwards. Rush started with three blistering songs from CLOCKWORK ANGELS and then progressively (regressively?) worked back to 1974. They played songs from every album except Test for Echo, Presto, Hold Your Fire, and Power Windows. Ten songs long, the first set included the three songs from CA, Far Cry, Main Monkey Business, How it Is, Animate, Roll the Bones, Between the Wheels, and Subdivisions. Amazingly enough, the Rush guys turned the rather geeky rap section from Roll the Bones into one of the best parts of the evening. Even I won’t spoil what they did, but it had all three Birzers in stitches.
As excellent as set one was, it was set two that floored me. Tom Sawyer; The Camera Eye; Spirit of Radio; Jacob’s Ladder; Cygnus X-1(!); Closer to the Heart; Xanadu; and the nearly-complete 2112 made up this glorious set. I actually cried during the middle of Xanadu I was so moved.
Rush departed the stage for probably less than a minute. For the encore, the band came back as though it were 1975, complete with a set from the gymnasium of Rod Serling High School. Geddy even introduced the band as though Caress of Steel had just come out. The encore: Lakeside Park; Anthem; What You’re Doing; and, of course, Working Man.
I’m getting chills just thinking about it all. . . .
I’ll post more photos later. At the moment, I’m on a terribly slow connection.–BB
[Brad is one of the three founders of Progarchy. He’s rather goofy, and he has a book, NEIL PEART: CULTURAL REPERCUSSIONS, coming out this fall from WordFire Press]
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