Contents Under Pressure: 30 Years of Rush at Home & Away is a detailed history of the exhaustive road experience of Canadian rock icons Rush. Celebrating the band's 30th anniversary, By-Tour features in-depth original interviews with Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Together, history's loudest Order of Canada recipients conjure the sights and sounds of their strange journey: one that began in the microscopic, sometimes hostile clubs of Ontario and culminated in hockey barns, arenas, and stadiums all over the world. Rush have been headliners for over 20 years. The announcement of an impending Rush tour is major entertainment news all over the world, and a cause for celebration for the fanatical following the band has created with their grace, humour, intellect, focus, and spellbinding musicianship. A visitor to this book will be justly rewarded with fresh, exclusive insights about this enigmatic Canadian institution. Martin Popoff is a full-time music journalist. For ECW Press, he has authored The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time and The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time. He is also the author of Riff Kills Man! 25 Years of Recorded Hard Rock & Heavy Metal, The Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal, 20th Century Rock and Roll: Heavy Metal, Goldmine Heavy Metal Record Price Guide and Southern Rock Review.
The early history of what can arguably be called Rush is actually quite a long one, reaching back a good five years before that first wollopingly Zeppelinesque album on Moon Records. At times a four-piece with a revolving door of players, the band wouldn't actually become something worthy of the tag "the grandfathers of progressive metal"(!) until well past Neil Peart's arrival, until, that is, the three amigos committed their special purpose to wax with a little something called As alluded to in the introduction, this book is neither the time nor the place for a detailed history of the band, but it is indeed a celebration of the art, science and sheer luck of constructing records and playing live. In that spirit, I offer a few words from Alex Lifeson (born Alex Zivojinovich), Geddy Lee (born Gary Lee Weinrib) and Neil Peart (just born, but not really as a drummer - that took 13 years) on the formative years, when pushing air to small tribal gatherings was all they had to confirm their very existence.
"Well, let's see, we started in September of '68," begins Alex. "We got a gig in a United Church basement where they had a drop-in center on Friday nights. We played this gig, and we knew maybe seven or eight songs - mostly Cream and Hendrix - and we would just play them over and over, repeatedly throughout the night. And through the rest of the week, we would get together and rehearse and learn more songs.
"We started writing right from the beginning; I think we wrote our first song within a few months. The first original song we wrote was called Losing You, and it was kind of an up-tempo bluesy thing.
"And we continued doing that gig pretty much on a weekly basis until the spring of 1969. The first gig we played there, there were probably 30 people. By that spring, there were about 200, 250 people. I mean, the place was packed! And we had two solid sets of material, and that was a real treat; it was so exciting."
World domination was drafted, says Alex, shortly thereafter. "We got ten bucks to do that first gig. And we went to Pancers, a deli at Steeles and Bathurst; the gig was in that area, ten minutes from there. And we talked about, you know, what we were going to do now, where were we? [laughs]. At what level were we in the world of rock bands? We figured we were like number 10,680, even though we only knew a few songs [laughs]. But it was so exciting sitting in there. I can still visualize what the place looked like and the booth we were sitting in and how excited we were.
"And by the spring, we were getting 3 5 bucks a week to do that g
