Word: rushes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sure did, while the ramble lasted. Then the national enthusiasm for folk music faded to its customary polite murmur. Rush was still fairly successful, but that was fairly disastrous in the platinum-or-bust pop-music world. Punk was big; should he dye his hair purple and wear Spandex? Or mess around with country rock? A couple of years before, he had bought a shaggy, overgrown 600-acre farm in the southern part of New Hampshire, his home state. He had a good view of Mount Monadnock and enough money to hide out for a year. As the fat years...
...moves since then seem logical enough now, but at the time they took some nerve. He began to talk things over with David Sykes, an old friend who teaches a course in entrepreneurship at Boston University. Sykes believed that Rush's fans were still out there, 15 years older and living in better neighborhoods. This audience was still receptive to the music it liked, but not in sports arenas with 20,000 screaming kids...
This made sense to Rush, and so did Sykes' idea of how to be an entrepreneur: "Leave skid marks at the edge of the cliff." Rush was about to leave some. The year before, 1980, he had failed to fill a 500-seat rock club in Boston for a Christmas show, at $7 a ticket. Now he booked the city's classiest concert house, the 2,600-seat Symphony Hall, for a year-end performance at $15. It was a $20,000 gamble, and it paid off in a sellout. A year later, when he repeated the concert, Bostonians talked...
...Chaos describes it nicely," says Rush, but when it works, it means that Guitar Wizard David Bromberg, for example, doesn't just appear, do a three- song Bromberg bubble unrelated to anything else and then vanish. Instead he may back up Rush later on slide guitar and improvise a number with the gifted white Bluesman John Hammond. This season's featured guest was the formidable black Rhythm-and-Blues Pioneer Bo Diddley, whose major weapon is a five-speed turbo electric guitar built in a startling rectangular shape...
This winter, unless he had played the night before, Rush heaved out of bed at 5:30 a.m. He would be on cross-country skis at first light, breaking trail on his logging roads. By 7:30 he had showered, and driven his sons Benjamin, 11, and Richard, 4, to school. He ate breakfast with his wife Beverly, and by 8 a.m. was busy at his desk in an office partitioned off in what must have been the hayloft of his barn. Then...