Over a year ago, every rocker's favorite Canucks, announced a tour where they would be playing their most celebrated album, Moving Pictures, in its entirety. I had known about this show for months, but was a bit put off by the ticket prices, and the venue, the Erwin Center.
I guess the show wasn't sold out by Sunday morning, so one of my friends had diligently waited for the late tickets to go on sale. I got a call around 1:30PM, as they were waiting to a purchase a group of seats 10 rows off of stage left, at stage height. It appears that the late bird gets the worm every now and then, too.
My friends and I arrived at the arena, just in time to take our seats. The show started fairly close to the advertised 7:30PM time. Rush had prepared a somewhat humorous video to introduce the show. In the film, Alex, Neil and Geddy appeared as characters in the film, watching a band playing various arrangements of Spirit of the Radio
in various genres, including Polka, and Country. A clock was used to set up a time travel motif.
Very cleverly, flash-pots went off, and the band segued almost seamlessly from the video, to playing Spirit of the Radio, live on stage, right as the clock advanced to the current day. This kicked off the first of two sets, lasting approximately an hour each, with a 15 minute intermission between them.
I was not surprised to see that the setlist for this show was available by 7:00AM in the morning. I was surprised however, at how good the sound was, particularly sitting on one side of the stage.
This show was pretty much what I expected. Their musicianship is still first rate. The only minor criticism I could make is that Geddy is no longer able to reliably hit the high notes vocally, that he is famous for.
I took a few pictures, but even from this advantageous viewpoint, the iPhone was not really up to the task of taking photos in this lighting.
