All The World’s A Stage
A quick note from the future: I’m not going to post individual song links for the live albums, I think. Quite apart from it being somewhat of a pain to do, it will make the posts somewhat unwieldy, and probably not offer much in the way of illumination.
History
I love live albums. I think I tended to buy live albums rather than compilations, since they were at least different versions of songs, and – to my mind, anyway – a better indication of what a band could actually do. Also, there tended to be interesting stuff on them which you couldn’t get elsewhere – I’m a completist, remember?
This was the first live Rush album I owned (by the time Exit Stage Left came out, I already owned everything else), and for a time, it was my favourite Rush album. After a while, though, I noticed that I didn’t play it much at all – probably because I preferred the newer stuff, but also possibly because I think this is an uneven selection. Looking at it now, it seems to me to be a record company-driven exercise in getting people to buy the back catalogue. (at the same time, I’m not sure that’s true, because I imagine this is a pretty faithful representation of the live show at the time.) I’d love to know (yeah, I know – it’s on the web somewhere!) how much of the recorded show never made it on to vinyl; interesting to know what the full show was like. Or maybe this is the full show – sets would have been shorter in those days, I guess.
Anyway, I’ve been debating with myself how to approach this – I’ve only just finished talking about most of these songs, so I think this will be slightly more cursory than usual. I’ve got plenty to say about A Farewell To Kings, though, so that should make up for it.