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Neil Peart - Farewell to a King
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As always, click on images to see the full-size versions.
Cygnus X-2 Presents: Farewell to a King, a Show for Neil Peart
Hey everyone, Ryan here again. I'd like to talk to you about a show I am producing and playing in a couple weeks, but first a little background...
I started playing drums nearly twenty years ago at age eleven, after banging on pots and pans in the kitchen for years, and I got my first drum kit that following Christmas. It was a magical morning, finding one drum under the tree with a string running down into the basement, where the rest of the kit was set up without cymbals. The cymbals came later that morning.
Two things happened that morning: I stopped believing in Santa Claus for good, and starting believing in the power of the drum kit. That belief was reinforced when I got my first Rush CD, a greatest hits album called The Spirit of Radio. I must have listened to that CD 500 times over the course of the following year and change, and it quickly made me a Rush fan. There are very few drummers in rock and roll history who spent as much time truly composing a drum part as Neil Peart; combine that with the fact that he wrote all of the lyrics (minus a single-digit's worth of tunes here and there) for the songs Rush made with him in the band, and you have a very rare variety of person.
Neil Peart passed away on January 7th of this year, and it hit me harder than I thought it would. I'd heard a rumor about ailing health, so I knew something was coming, but the news still caught me off guard. I never met Neil, and I'm convinced only about twenty-five people have in his 67 years (a joke!), but with amount of writing he produced, it's easy to feel connected to him.
So when I heard the news that the Professor had passed, I set the ball in motion to put a tribute show together, to get our local Rush nuts together, and celebrate the work of one of my heroes. I have my own Rush tribute act called Cygnus X-2 (we seem to have an effect on some people...), and I have invited several of my musician friends around town to join us with their bands, and also again with me for the "Fear" trilogy. The show will feature plenty of the classic Rush favorites, as well as readings from Neil's writings - lyrics, articles, passages from books. This is going to be a really great show.
Geddy and Alex posted on the Rush website that if anyone wished to pay tribute to Neil Peart, that they should donate to brain cancer research. It just so turns out that we have a phenomenal research center in the Triangle, so we will be donating proceeds from ticket sales to the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke Hospital. They will have representatives and a booth at the show, and one of their glioblastoma survivor patients (a fellow Rush fan!) will be speaking after the intermission.
Oh, and Rob decided it was a good idea to purchase a 38" Paiste Symphonic Gong like this one (the same model John Bonham played! no I'm not setting it on fire!) for the show, to replace my own crummy brass gong, and we're currently working on building our own gong stand with the help of our downstairs neighbors SuperDroid. So there's that. I'm going to make him play it during the intermission.
The show is called Farewell To A King and it's all going to happen at The Pour House Music Hall in downtown Raleigh on March 11th. Doors open at 7 and the show starts at 8. Bring ear plugs and get ready to shriek your lungs out!
- Ryan Masecar
That's it for this week!
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