Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: rush

  • Neil

    When I was a kid, I was a fan of pop music, mostly because of the insular community where I grew up. We had one pop FM station out of Notre Dame University, which wasn’t a “college rock” station, but played the standard hits. (There were two stations if you had a really good antenna…

  • Rush – Feedback (2004)

    A Rush album of covers? Okay, I didn’t buy this when it came out, because I’d already seen all of the car commercials that featured these songs. It’s always amazing how old hard rock goes from the AOR stations to the brokerage commercials now.  I mean, I love Led Zeppelin and The Who, and I’m…

  • Rush – Roll the Bones (1991)

    Ugh. For Rush’s sophomore effort on Atlantic records, they slid further into mediocrity with more standard hard rock numbers, an unusually bright and bland production, and a general lack of noteworthiness that got them an album that somehow peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200, but failed to do anything interesting musically. Let’s face it:…

  • Rush – The Story of Kings (1992)

    I’m a sucker for “unofficial releases” that are nothing more than a journo’s taped interview with a band, later set to CD-R boot. And here’s a classic example of this non-canon release: a half-hour chat with Alex Lifeson. Although the internets give this a release date of 1992, the conversation dates it at 1987-ish, around…

  • Rush – Fly By Night (1975)

    Following a self-titled debut of Led Zeppelin-clone originals and immediately before a tour, John Rutsey, the drummer of this Canadian three-piece walked away from the band, citing health reasons and/or a lack of interest in touring. This could have been the end of the struggling band, but a dude selling tractor parts with his dad…

  • Rush – A Show of Hands (1989)

    The first concert I ever attended was Rush at the old Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, supporting the Hold Your Fire album. Imagine my amazement when I found that the exact tour I saw was released as a live album! They didn’t record the same show (thank god – the sound at that place was similar…

  • Rush – Caress of Steel (1975)

    Okay, before I start, I remembered this tiny bit of trivia, and it took me forever on google to confirm it, so I better just paste it in. This album, in the original LP form, had a bunch of city names under the names of each track. Turns out that the album was written on…

  • Rush – Rush (1974)

    Every band has to start somewhere. What’s amazing about Rush, after listening to their self-titled first release, is that it’s so far removed from their later core releases, and they went through such a giant transformation by their second album. If you take their second or third album and remove the monster-solo prog-rock geekfests and the…

  • Rush – Grace Under Pressure (1984)

    When I first got into Rush, my friend Derik Rinehart (now an accomplished prog-rock drummer) made me a tape from his LPs, with this on one side and Moving Pictures on the other. Of course, I played the hell out of both sides, and I probably liked Moving Pictures a lot more because it rocked,…

  • Rush – Moving Pictures (1981)

    You can divide the history of Rush into different discrete eras – in fact, the band did a good job of this themselves by putting out a live album exactly every four studio albums, wrapping up their career into nice little leather-bound volumes of history that chronicled their change from a Zep Clone band on…