Rush, the band

Post by **Tero** » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:05 pm

It was in September 1968 at a Toronto venue named The Coff-Inn. The band line-up was Alex Lifeson on guitar, John Rutsey on drums and Jeff Jones on bass and vocals. Geddy Lee would replace Jones for the band's second gig.

Alex Lifeson: "John and I had been playing together for three years in a little basement band called The Projection. We were as psychedelic as 15-year-old kids could be - in our paisley shirts! And we played covers: The House Of The Rising Sun, I'm A Man, stuff like that. But we also jammed with other people, and when we got the offer to do this gig at The Coff-Inn, I called up a bass player I knew, Jeff Jones. Jeff had his own band, but I said, 'Do you want to do this gig for $10? You can make three dollars. It'll be fun.'

"It was actually John's brother Bill who suggested we use the name Rush for that gig. We thought The Projection was a pretty cool name, but Bill said: 'You need something shorter and to-the-point, something with energy to it. How about Rush?' And we were like, 'Okay, that sounds good.' And it stuck.

"The Coff-Inn was in the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church. It was two blocks from my house and it was a drop-in centre, a place for kids to hang out safely, drink pop and watch local bands play. There was no stage - the bands played on the floor at one end of this fairly large room. You could fit about a hundred people in there when the room was packed. But there were probably 20 people there at that first Rush gig.

"We didn't have a lot of equipment. We didn't have a mic stand so we used a standing lamp and taped the mic to it. And we had a little crappy PA system with two small columns with four eight-inch speakers in them. It was very basic, the bare bones.

"We played Fire and Foxy Lady by Hendrix, Spoonful by Cream, Snowy Wood by John Mayall. We knew about seven or eight songs, so we played them over and over. I don't recall whether those 20 people were impressed or not. I'm guessing that they weren't! But we had fun. And after that first gig we got an offer to come back the following week.

"Jeff couldn't make it - he had commitments to his actual band. So that's when I called Geddy and asked him if he could fill in. I'd known Ged for a couple of years. He might not have done the first gig as Rush, but he was there for the second one. And after that we would play at the Coff-Inn once a month. The last time we played there was in the spring of 1969, and the place was packed. I can still picture what it looked like. Just before we started, I looked at the lights shining on our equipment and the room full of people. That was so exciting."

Although Geddy wasn't in the band for that first gig, the cheeky sods borrowed his amp.

"Alex was a mooch," Geddy says. "So every time he called, I knew he was going to borrow something off me. But he did actually help me when I bought the amp. It was the dead of winter, and we were schlepping this giant amplifier on a bus and then pushing it to my house on the ice."

Post by **Tero** » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:14 pm

Paul Stanley was with Kiss

Post by **Tero** » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:18 pm

Geddy the singer wrote lyrics on just a handful of songs. Peart became the band lyricist. One of his early lyrics.

As a teen Peart lived in London for up to a year, the song describes a "flight" to the UK from Toronto.

Post by **Tero** » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:33 pm

You know your band has hit big time when South Park does a parody of you. But this is near the end, touring stopped 2015

Post by **Tero** » Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:36 pm

Rush was always know as a band that guys came to see. A Rush fan in the UK was attending several concerts. In one city he was in the pub, and got to talking to a girl. What are you doing in town? He was there to see Rush. She said "me too," so he married her. He was not going to find another one.

(Rush myth, the band had an amazing, faithful fan base, I talked to some of them. Most of them were pretty weird.)