Tag: Neil Peart

Tough Morning So Far

I went to sleep really late last night. It was almost 1:00am. I slept for less than six hours and it was pretty crummy quality. I got out of bed a little before 7:00am and started my 30 minute exercise only to have to stop after 10 minutes because we had an air conditioner tech coming out to service our central air and our mini-split. He left just as I was starting work so it didn’t interfere with anything in a problematic way, it just messed with my routine. At least I was able to put the laundry away and do the dishes and setup the PlayStation 4 in the rearranged living room. There will be surround sound Rush blu rays spinning in the near future.

My stomach is a bit of a mess today. I was short on my protein counts yesterday so about an hour before I went to bed I had about an ounce of peanuts to get myself over the 60 gram goal. I finished over an hour before I conked out for the night, but my stomach still feels off. Maybe peanuts late at night is a bad idea. I did eat some scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning and boy am I gassy now. The burps are seismic. Let’s keep an eye on this today, shall we?

Speaking of Rush, today would have been Neil Peart’s 70th birthday. His brother asked fans to wear Rush t-shirts today in his memory. I am partaking, but should I need to join a conference call with a customer I’ll change into a collared shirt.

On the topics of weight loss and collared shirts, I bought some new clothes on Saturday. Two office appropriate shirts and two pairs of jeans. The shirts are one “X” size smaller than what I bought pre-surgery. The jeans are four inches smaller on the waist than the last time I bought jeans, and eight inches smaller than what I was wearing pre-surgery. I’m wearing new jeans right now and boy does it feel nice to wear clothes that fit. Oh, yes.

Okay, back to work. Talk to you later, kids.

Cookie

Rush did a song on their first record called In the Mood. It was a dumb Little Rock and Roll song that doesn’t fit in stylistically with the band they morphed into a short time later but it’s fun and it became a concert staple that appeared in set lists off and on for most of their career.

The hook includes the brilliant, Geddy Lee penned (ad libbed?), line “hey baby it’s a quarter to eight, I feel I’m in the mood” (fucking epic).

On many bootlegged occasions over the decades the word baby was changed to something that sounded like “cookie.”

Now Alex has an Instagram and he posts this:

Was the line changes to cookie or Chuckie? Did they mess with the line to make it about Al’s wife?

I don’t know, but…. Fucking epic.

Rutsey’s Last Show

I stumbled across this on the tweeter yesterday.

July 25, 1974.

Centennial Hall in London, Ontario.

Opening up for Kiss.

The last Rush show with the late John Rutsey on drums.

Why, after all this time, is this interesting?

Because there are pictures.

I’ve been on this site a few million times before. It has a list of every show Rush ever played. Well, as complete as can be put together, at least. Cygnus-x1.net Check it out.

The list says they had another show booked for the next night but it was cancelled. Was it cancelled because Rutsey was leaving, or was there another reason and then Rutsey left afterwards. Whatever the reason, the next show was August 14th in Pittsburgh opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Man. That was Neil Peart’s first show. My favorite band has had four members. Two drummers. They’re both gone.

Neil Peart Article in Rolling Stone

For decades, Rolling Stone seemed to have a bias against Rush. On the rare occasions when they mentioned the band it was usually negative. It lead to most of us having a pretty bleak opinion of the magazine. Granted, there was a lot more to make Rolling Stone irrelevant and unreadable, but for a Rush fan there was that little irksome thing on top of everything else.

In the waning years of the band’s career that started to change. Rolling Stone started publishing articles on Rush that were positive and seemed to imply someone in the company “got it”. They were fair and seemed honest, but left me and my fellow Rush fans feeling good about the universe and that was a nice thing.

Yesterday, on the first anniversary of Neil Peart’s passing, they published this article. I would recommend you give it a read. It’s long, but worth it. They take a guy whose public image was one of a grumpy dude who didn’t want to deal with you or anything you cared about and turned him into a human. Good work. Thank you.

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