sheer potentiality

So I got “Rush Replay X3″, a DVD re-issuing of three Rush concert videos: Exit…Stage Left (1981 Moving Pictures tour), the 1984 Grace Under Pressure tour, and A Show of Hands (1989 Hold Your Fire tour).

• During the 80’s, Geddy Lee developed an incredible mullet. And in these videos, you can see it grow stage by stage. In Exit…Stage Left, the Geddy-Mullet wasn’t even a mullet per se, just long hair with bangs. By Grace Under Pressure it had developed into a true mullet, but (in parallel with the decline in Rush’s new album output), A Show Of Hands featured a horrifically bad ponytail-mullet.
• Speaking of the decline in Rush’s new album output, the first half of A Show Of Hands (where they play songs from Power Windows and Hold Your Fire exclusively) is pretty much disposable, except for a couple good songs. The second half features such classics as “Closer to the Heart”, “La Villa Strangiato”, and the opening two parts of 2112 is pretty cool, but you can kind of tell they’re not fully into it. Well, watching Geddy and Alex interact on stage is entertaining enough.
• On “Vital Signs” from the Grace Under Pressure DVD, Geddy clearly sings “aboot”. On “Tom Sawyer” from A Show Of Hands, Geddy clearly sings “catch the fish”.
• “Xanadu” from Exit…Stage Left—Alex double-necking the 12 string, and Geddy double-necking a 4 string bass and 6 string guitar, as Neil plays atmospheric chimes and bells. Virtuosity. Pure virtuosity.
• “Closer to the Heart”. I never got why it was so popular (although now I’m getting more into it), but they played it on like, every tour ever since it was written.
• “The Weapon” on Grace Under Pressure was introduced by Count Floyd, who strangely asserted that the song was “scary” and exhorted the audience to put on the 3-D glasses (”if you don’t have your 3-D glasses, you’ll only be seeing this in…one-half D!”), for no apparent reason. This made little sense to me, until I learned (from that actual Wikipedia link, oddly enough) that Count Floyd was a Canadian TV character whose schtick was comedically insisting that non-scary things were actually quite scary, and shilling 3-D glasses. Oh, Canadians.