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Subject: 10/18/92 - The National Midnight Star #540 ** Special Edition **
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The National Midnight Star, Number 537
Sunday, 18 October 1992
Today's Topics:
Article: Guitar World, April 1988
-----------------------------------------------------
Subject: here are some articles I typed in
From: Erik <habbinga@rintintin.Colorado.EDU>
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 92 9:39:21 MDT
Alex Lifeson Geddy Lee
Together Again in Rush
By John Swenson and Matt Resnicoff
Printed Without Permission From
Guitar World April 1988
The power and the glory, ladies and gentlemen. We give you
two-thirds of a power trio that continues to slay 'em in
Sheboygan. But what's their musical bag these days?
The first snowfall of winter sweeps across Central New York
driven by fierce Canadian winds, but it is another product of the
northlands that entices rock 'n' roll fans off the farms on this
blustery night to Utica's Memorial Auditorium.
Diehard fans of Rush, Canada's most distinguished rock band,
mingle with newer converts in a minor league ice hockey arena
turned rock festival for a night. After the McAuley Schenker
Group completes an ear-splitting opening set, fans mill around
looking for the best vantage point in the general admission
house. Sightlines are important because Rush tours have featured
filmed backdrop accompaniment for years.
Suddenly the house lights dim and a surprise intro--the Three
Stooges theme, a zany variation on "Three Blind Mice"-blares over
the public address system. The band launches into its set just
as the theme ends and the crowd is on its feet for the better
part of the next two hours.
The set is an intense. high-tech demonstration of the band's
evolving arrangement strategy. The emphasis has moved gradually
away from the power trio format that characterized early Rush
toward densely arranged melodic slabs of sound played with
surgical precision. Most of the set is drawn from recent albums.
Guitarist Alex Lifeson plays with discipline and concentration
despite the fact that his guitar sound is fluctuating wildly in
the mix. On highlights like "Red Sector A", "Tom Sawyer" and
several songs from the band's latest album, _Hold Your Fire_,
Lifeson manages to slice through his technical problems with
spirited playing.
Bassist-keyboardist-vocalist Geddy Lee is forced to
concentrate even more. It's been a long time since Lee has been
able to lay back and slam out bass patterns--he's doing three or
more things in order to evoke the complex textures of the
recordings. The rewards are there on such lyrical excursions as
"Force Ten", "Time Stand Still", "Open Secrets", and "Turn the
Page" from _Hold Your Fire_.
Toward the end of the set, when the band returns to material
from earlier records, Lifeson and Lee kick out the jams on
extended guitar-bass raveups fired by Neil Peart's most unbridled
drumming. The audience goes nuts.
The crowd reaction doesn't help the band's spirit after the
show. Lifeson, a musical perfectionist who's constantly tried to
refine his sound over the years, has introduced a whole new
series of effects for this tour and is irate over what he
perceived as a system breakdown during the set.
"Last night it sounded 98 percent right," he laments, "so I
thought another few minor changes might make it perfect.
Instead, everything fell apart. After struggling through most of
the set, I gave up and went back to the old setup."
Lifeson's sidekick, bassist Geddy Lee, is sympathetic to his
partner's plight. "Getting the perfect guitar sound is a never
ending quest," he explains. "No matter how good the sound gets,
a guitarist will keep fiddling with it, looking for something
extra. It's a frustrating process."
"The temptation for me is to make it better," Lifeson
explains. "It's not just to keep up with the latest thing. I
just wanted it to be _better_. Actually, Geddy started this
whole thing with me. He said, 'Why don't you get an AMS? It
sounds great, so throw out everything else.' The T.C.
Electronics 2290's, I think, come very close to the AMS. The
frequency response specs out pretty much the same. While they're
not a fraction of the cost, they're certainly cheaper than an
AMS, and in live application they're great."
"The problems that I'm having now don't really have anything
to do with the equipment, the effects that I have, it's with the
switching system. The great thing with the T.C. Electronic
equipment is that it's quiet and it's true. What's coming out of
the unit is the same as what's going in."
"Although there are lots of manufacturers of that kind of
equipment, I don't think any of them comes close to achieving the
kind of performance of these particular units. I used Roland for
a long time and I really liked it, and Yamaha and all that, but
they don't quite make it compared to what this stuff does."
Lee, on the other hand, has avoided changing his bass set-up
for years. "I tried to change my bass gear around," he admits.
"I've been using the same bass gear and amps for years now. My
roadie, Skip, and I said we'd better compare it, because there's
all these new kids in town, all these new amps and stuff. We
brought 'em in and compared 'em, but the old dinosaur beat 'em
all out [see Axology]."
"They all sounded good, but there didn't seem any point to
change just for the sake of change. The big difference for me is
using the Wal bass this year, which is a much easier bass to get
the sound I want out of. It's really great to play, really
rewarding. I just feel like I play better on it, like there's
more definition to the notes."
When Lifeson and Lee began playing together nearly 20 years
ago, things were a lot simpler. At the time, the hot new sound
was Led Zeppelin. Five years later, when Lee and Lifeson asked
drummer-lyricist Neil Peart to join up, Rush was a power trio
that bore more than a slight resemblance to that British quartet.
But now, 13 years into a career that has made the group one of
Canada's best known cultural exports, Rush is nothing like the
heavy metal kids they once were.
"It doesn't seem like we've been together for 19 years,"
Lifeson says as he leans forward on a metal folding chair in one
of the backstage rehearsal rooms.
Lee points out that he could never have envisioned the current
incarnation of Rush. "After we made _Hemispheres_ (1978), we
might have said, "This is the point we wanted to get to." But
now, every record is a surprise to me.
Few bands have mirrored rock's stylistic changes over the last
two decades as effectively as Rush. From the early seventies
heavy metal albums _Fly By Night_ and _Caress of Steel_, the band
developed a Pink Floyd like space music for the science fiction
concert albums _2112_, _A Farewell To Kings_ and _Hemispheres_.
Rush dramatically altered its style on the 1980 album
_Permanent Waves_. All the arrangements were tightened up as the
record moved away from the concept approach in favor of shorter,
thematically unrelated songs with clever melodic hooks. Suddenly
Rush was commercial--"Spirit of the Radio" was a hit single and
is now one of the most recognizable anthems in the live show.
Then, with _Moving Pictures_, Rush began playing with more
complex arrangements as the individual players adjusted to the
sophisticated musical climate of postfusion rock, where ideas
that would have been classified as jazz in the past are now
routinely assimilated into rock arrangements. Rush sounds like
nothing so much as a fusion group on _Grace Under Pressure_,
_Power Windows_, and now _Hold Your Fire_.
"I don't know," Lee said. "I guess it's closer to fusion
than anything else that's around. We just don't seem to fit into
any category anymore."
"It's certainly closer to that," Lifeson added, "than Bon Jovi
or Cinderella."
"I think it's more melodic," Lee continues. "I was listening
to the opening act on the tour [_Michael Schenker_], which is
sort of like a metal band, and I was thinking how far we've come
from that. Just in comparing soundchecks."
"You hear all these melodies and all these vast arrays of
notes that we're playing now and compare to the harmonically
limited style of metal; that's when I feel like we don't fit into
that category anymore, that's when I feel more closely aligned to
something like fusion. If not so much the immediate sound of it,
than the attitude, a search for notes. That's the most exciting
prospect of being in this band, the compositional challenge.
"I think the writing stage is the most important, and
everything else revolves around that. I don't think that was
true 10 years ago. It was _playing_ then, but now I look at
myself more as a musician in the compositional sense than a
musician in the playing sense. This is the part that makes it
really worthwhile, why I still do this.
"I definitely wouldn't be doing it if it were still just Led
Zeppelin takeoffs. As much as I love to play, if you're just
gonna play, it doesn't have to be like this. There's a million
ways to play. I love those two hours when we're onstage, but
everything else associated with touring I don't really like that
much anymore. But there's a great satisfaction when you walk
offstage after a great show and the crowd is responding and you
know you've played well enough to deserve that response. It
doesn't always happen that way. It's a great feeling when it
does."
Lifeson agrees with Lee that the songwriting process has
become the most rewarding part of the band's routine. "The
greatest feeling is to write a good song." he says.
Lee goes on to describe the band's painstaking method of
constructing songs. "First, we all work on little bits and
pieces on our own," he explains. "Alex and I have a writing
complex which we use to save time. It's a matter of happenstance
whether the music or Neil's lyrics come first. If he has lyrics,
he gives them to us, otherwise we have the music first."
"It's become a lot more efficient in the last few years,"
Lifeson adds.
"Every year, we take more and more time to write," says Lee.
"This year we took two months just to write the demos. We work
every detail out before we go into the studio. The more records
we make, it seems to make sense to do that. We have that time to
concentrate on our songwriting and we realize how important that
is to us."
"In the old days, we used to write on the road, in cars,
dressing rooms, wherever we could get 10 minutes. We couldn't
take two months off to record, or we wouldn't be able to
survive."
Lifeson works out melodic fragments and ideas for songs on his
own in a portable home studio. "I have this Teac eight-channel
tape recorder," he said. "I set up a little studio in the
basement. It's a good little exercise. You set up a drum
pattern, and I have a guitar synthesizer so I can put on
different lines, a bass line, a string line, and I have an
Emulator down there which I try to use as well. I try not to get
too caught up in the gadgets. I just try to get the basic ideas
down, like bits of songs, a chorus or a verse--not whole songs."
"We work in so many different ways," Lee points out. "We
record all of our soundcheck jams, and we jam at every
soundcheck. At the end of the tour, I'll take them all home and
catalog them. Whatever ideas I think might be good for verses,
choruses, I'll develop. Instrumental, wild jams, a lot of them
are just good for what they are; you can't get a song out of
them. Some of them are just great spontaneous energy, and you
can hear how pissed off you were that day, but a lot of them
are really good starting points for songs. We write together, so
a lot of our ideas start out together like that."
"A lot of times we'll arrive at different times for
soundcheck. Once a tour gets going and the gear gets up quicker
and quicker, you start coming in a few minutes earlier and just
jam for 20 minutes or longer, them we'll do our regular two or
three songs to check everything out. You get really frustrated
playing nothing new by the end of the tour. A few years ago, we
realized these jams were good, then it just sort of became a way
of writing, now it's a matter of course, 25 cassettes at the end
of the tour. We never discuss what we're going to play in
advance--we just break into it, basically thinking out loud."
Several moments on "Hold Your Fire" originated in those
soundcheck jam sessions. "Open Secrets' was like that," Lee
says. "The main bass riff that opens up "Turn the Page" came
directly from a jam. The main ideas are spontaneous. It's the
final arrangement that you sort of hone and craft, but the
initial burst is some kind of spontaneous energy."
Lifeson explains that those tapes form the first part of the
songwriting process, but are soon eclipsed by a more hands-on
approach. "We spend a couple of days going through the tapes,
but a lot of it is just Geddy and me sitting down together,
playing for about an hour, and the ideas just come out. We say,
"Let's put that on tape", or "Let's develop that.""
"I like going through tapes," Lee agrees, "if were stuck or
if we're looking for something specific, but I like to start
fresh, especially if we have lyrics to work with."
Lee sees _Hold Your Fire_ as a potential turning point for the
band. "I feel really good about the album," he claims. "This
album says something different to me from the last few albums.
It marks a point to me that almost says we are a different band
than we were. Every once in a while we do a record that says to
me we're evolving into something. This is an arrival record,
like we climbed up a hill and now we've gotten to the top and we
have to decide where we go from here. At the time we did _Power
Windows_ we thought that was the kind of record _that_ was, but
it never felt like it afterwards. We learned a lot; it was an
arrival in terms of production, but not in terms of songs, and I
think this record is, in the same way that _2112_ and _Moving
Pictures_ were.
"There are very few records that sound really cohesive, and
this one has that," says Geddy. "I think that's because we've
put so much effort into our songwriting. To me, it's a miracle
every time I can sit down and write a song with Alex and Neil--
yesterday it wasn't there and now it's there. I just feel so
proud that we can do something that's worthy enough. At this
stage when we work on something hard enough, and it's a part
that's good, we all _know_ it's good. I just feel really
rewarded, like it's what I'm here to do. This is the part that
makes it really worthwhile, that makes me want to keep doing it."
When Lee and Lifeson began playing together nearly 20 years
ago, they were taking their first steps not only as ensemble
players, but also as individual musicians on the threshold of
cultivating highly recognizable playing approaches. Time has
seen that virtuosity meld into two highly complementary musical
sensibilities. "I guess my first real bass influence was Jack
Bruce," recalls Lee, "just his aggressive style. Very rarely did
he have your basic, standard, mellow bass tone. His sound was
very aggressive, almost distorted, and as a result he stood out
when he would wander around the neck; there was constant action
on the bass. Being in a three-piece, his role as a bass player
was to be very busy and take up a lot of space. Then came John
Entwistle, who's very bright and toppy, and had an aggressive
style that was very important to me as well."
While many contemporary lead-bass players rely in great part
on thumbing and snapping, Lee remains faithful to his rather
singular fingerstyle, using three right-hand fingers to blend
percussive snaps with powerful and complex lines. "When I snap
and pop my strings, I don't use my thumb, I use my fingers. On
the right hand, I use three fingers a lot of the time and if I do
want a brighter, harder sound, then I'll use one finger, and I'll
use my fingernail to get a little more edge on the string. I
know Entwistle used a pick from time to time, but I never felt
comfortable using one--I just used my fingers. Everyone used to
say you can't get that bright kind of snappy sound without a
pick--not true. That's _my_ sound, the style I went after. I
think Entwistle wasn't using a pick on some of the better things
he was doing anyway, but his influence held me until Chris Squire
came along."
"In the last few years, the person I admire most as a bass
player is Jeff Berlin, whose is quite a different style. The
kind of fusion he plays stands because he's got a rock sound. He
can play the jazziest lick, but he'll play it very aggressively,
and I think that's what all those players have in common, and
what has helped me develop my style of playing."
One of the biggest problems posed by the increasingly complex
song structures developed by Rush is reproducing the material on
stage. Since the band is a trio, the interlaced synthesizer
parts have to be triggered during the performance.
"Mostly I play the keyboards and synth parts," Lee says, "but
what happens is that by the time you get to the tour, there's
usually such a heavy workload of synths and sampling and triggers
and sequences that I can't handle it all. There are moments when
Alex doesn't have that much guitar to play, so he's doing more
and more of it."
"There's two schools of thought," Lee explains. "You can look
at the arena as a different interpretation of the same song, or
you can try to interpret it as accurately as possible. That sort
of haunts us, because the challenge now is 'Can we pull it off?'
At the same time, it's limiting because you can be trapped by all
these pedals and sequencers."
"I prefer the song as it was recorded," Lifeson notes, "but as
Geddy says, it _can_ become restrictive. You're standing in one
spot, and both feet are going." When Geddy goes for the
keyboards, Alex keeps the bass line going on foot pedals.
"It's a real concentration game," Lee says, "a real
choreography in a way. When there's a song where you don't have
to do that you can really let it all hang out. You can run all
over the stage."
"That's the great thing about the end of the night," Lifeson
laughs, referring to the encore section, where seriousness and
arrangement are thrown to the wind, and the lads do a lot of
fooling around on stage. "The last few songs we do are all old
songs, there are no synths, and we go mental. We have fun,
laughing, singing stupid lyrics."
Although the trio has enjoyed the loyalty of a rather diehard
following that discovered the band through the sophisticated
guitar/bass/drum interplay of their early to mid-seventies work,
a number of the band's critics have yet to come to terms with the
transmutation of their sound. The chorused, spacious guitar
splashes against Lee's obese synth-bass foundation are a far cry
from their gritty, odd-time excursions of yesteryear. The change
sits well with the band, but not _that_ well, as Lee explains.
"I'm constantly torn between being a keyboard player and a bass
player. I don't really consider myself an accomplished keyboard
of any kind, and keyboards have always been sort of a necessary
evil for me. I enjoy playing them, but they've always detracted
from my bass playing, and I consider myself a bass player
_first_. Arrangements in the past have always been such that
wherever there was a keyboard part happening there would usually
be a bass pedal part, and when the keyboards stopped, I could
jump in with my bass. Usually I tried to overcompensate by being
as busy as I could [_laughs_]! On the last record, we said,
'What the hell,' and we had the bass almost consistently through,
with the keyboards as well, and we dealt with it. Alex is taking
some of the keyboard responsibility from me onstage, and this
frees me up to play a little more bass. But as far as our
_style_ of playing goes, that type of riffing we used to do, I
think its just a natural evolution. We have that ability to
throw in those kinds of riffs when we need then; by no means have
we forsaken that style of bass/guitar duet kind of riffing.
There's always room in our music for that kind of thing to come
back.
"You go through phases of learning about yourself as a
writer," Lee continues, "and compositionally, this where we're at
now, using those spacious chords and that type of arrangement. I
think it's very important for an artist/musician not to limit
himself at something even though he does it very well. He has to
push himself into different areas and learn how he plays in that
style, and discover what benefit that is in his compositional
repertoire."
The years may have given Rush perspective, but not a clear
distinction between album and album, tour and tour. "It starts
to run together after awhile," Lee admits. "It's sort of been a
gradual change. This tour feels different. The selection of
material is more new-sounding Rush and a lot of the older things,
a lot of the older vocal styles particularly have fallen by the
wayside. It's getting a more relaxed feel to it this tour.
Musically, it feels richer. That's one thing I've been feeling
about the last few gigs."
Rush has been around long enough and changed dramatically
enough that the band has lived to see a host of copy groups
playing on its past glories. "We hear about them all the time,
and it's weird," Lee says. "There's a band back in Toronto that
claims they sound more like us than _we_ do. It's just such a
weird thing to say, a weird thing to think about. I think
they're called Void. They play the older stuff. Their attitude
is they're more faithful to our sound then _we_ are.
"It's like these bands come out, on the first and second
record you can hear a sound developing, then on every record
after that, they seem to be imitating themselves. That's real
disappointing. It's like athletes talking about themselves in
the third person. I've never gone into the studio and said, 'I
need a Geddy Lee sound for this part.' There are certain things
that do repeat, and that's what a real style is--instinctive
repetition. But when you're making a concerted effort to repeat
yourself, that's when things go bad."
Geddy's Chain:
According to Skip "Slider" Gildersleeve, bass technician with
Rush for almost 13 years, Geddy Lee's rig remains "pretty basic."
Lee is currently operating two systems, Systems B and C, and
either's selection is dependent upon the bass needs of a given
moment. System B runs a four-string Wal bass through a Telex
wireless unit and into a Furman preamp. That signal is processed
through an API 550 unit and fed into a custom switching box which
directs it to Geddy's choice of two BGW amplifiers driving an
Ampeg B4B bass bottom and a miked Tiel double 15 cabinet. "The
Ampeg cabinet is the oldest thing on stage," Skip notes. "On
this system, a Boss eq pedal is used as a boost for solo
sections, but only about three times during the set, for when he
goes up the neck."
Lee runs the Steinberger four-string bass through System C,
which--except for the lack of a Boss eq--is identical to B. "if
he breaks a string on System B," Skip explains, "all I do is hit
system C, pass him another bass, and he's off and running." On
both systems, DI's are taken right off the pickups, between the
wireless and the preamp.
Although both systems are fully operable and accessible, Geddy
has relied on System B, the Wal system, almost exclusively for
the _Hold Your Fire_ tour. He finds that minor adjustments in
technique, combined with the inherent qualities of the Wal
instrument, afford him the most control over his sound. "You get
a stronger, tighter, twangier sound," Geddy explains, "if you
pluck back by the bridge, and you get a different kind of top end
when you play over the pickups, and I've found that that's very
important to me, moreso in live concerts than on records. I'd
rather play around with that than change eq's drastically
onstage."
"I like both Steinbergers and Wals a lot," he elaborates.
"The Steinbergers with the new eq's are really good, and it was a
very difficult choice for me as to which bass to use for this
tour. When I started using the Wal, I used it almost exclusively
on the last record [_Power Windows_] because the recording
engineer I was working with found that he could get a great sound
with it very easily. When it came to playing live shows, I
wasn't sure which bass I was going to use. I started playing the
Wal, and our concert sound engineer said the same thing, that
there's something in the midrange sound of that bass that makes
it easy for him to get it to sit in the mix. Plus, the width of
the neck is a little greater, and somehow, I was playing a little
quicker on it. I fully intended to use the Steinberger during
the show, but what's happened is that I've just gotten so
comfortable using the Wal, and I've got so much on my mind during
the show as far as keyboards go, that I can't be bothered to
change. It's also quite a change from the big Wal neck to the
slimline neck of the Steinberger, so right now I'm using the
Steinberger as a backup, but not because it's the lesser of the
two." Lee also owns a five-string Wal which he played on the
track "Lock and Key" [_Hold Your Fire_]. "It's a very difficult
bass to play," he says, "and it's not something I plan on using a
lot because it's really heavy and cumbersome, although it enabled
me to get quite a different sound on that track, and get a
different perspective on the bass."
What happened to System A? "That used to be a stereo
Rickenbacker system," Skip notes. "Part of the reason Geddy
abandoned it was that it was stereo, and we didn't want to bother
with stereo transmitters. Also, the Steinberger was not only a
good bass, but also good for portability, for playing around
keyboards and three mic stands."
"I loved the sound of the Rick for years and years," Geddy
recalls, "but I think I got a little bored with it, and that's
why I started using the Steinberger. The sound of the
Steinberger really impressed me, and at the time I was starting
to use more keyboards, and the Rick was very awkward onstage. I
just grew away from it, into a slightly more complex, warmer
sound. Now, with the Wal, I've got a combination; the twang of
the Rick, but with a warmer, almost funkier lower midrange and
bottom end."
Every two gigs, Skip replaces the Wal's Funkmasters and the
Steinberger's La Bella Hard Rockin' Steels with custom-gauged
sets measuring .030, .050, .070 and .090, high to low. "New
strings are Finger-Eased, heavy duty, with a towel, so that they
don't squeak."
Although Lee operates an extensive keyboard set-up onstage
with Rush, Skip keeps a safe distance, concerning himself only
with the bassics. "The bass stuff is easy, and Alex's guitar
stuff is kind of complicated, but the keyboard stuff is _unreal_.
They've got nine Akai samplers, some [Yamaha] DX7's, MIDI
routing...I call the bass system the 'dinosaur' because I've had
it for years and years. We've had parades of amps come through
rehearsals; all kinds of stuff came and went, but we stuck with
this."
_Plus ca change..._
Lifeson's Lifeline:
Alex Lifeson is carrying only five guitars with him on Rush's
_Hold Your Fire_ tour. His four solid bodies are custom made by
a Canadian company called Signature, and each is equipped with
three active single coil pickups and a locking tremolo system.
One of the Signatures is tuned up to F# for the set's opening
song, "Big Money," and an Ovation 1985 Limited edition six string
acoustic is mounted on an Omega stand for the intro to "Closer To
The Heart."
In their quest for the optimum guitar sound, Alex and guitar
technician Jimmy "J.J." Johnson have been experimenting with a
variety of effects. Alex's current guitar setup finds his signal
transmitted from a Nady 700 wireless system to a Gallien-Krueger
2000 preamp. The preamp's send signal is split five ways by a
Rane mixer and fed into two T.C. Electronics 2290 digital delays,
a Roland DEV 5 and Dimension D and a Yamaha SPX90 effects
processor, which are controlled by an SES switcher. The preamp's
line out, along with the effect's stereo outs, feeds another Rane
mixer, where the wet and dry signals are channeled into stereo.
That output is choursed and flanged by two T.C. Electronic 1210s,
and D.I.ed to both the house and a Bryston power amp. "It's
probably unique that a guitarist would use one of these amps,"
J.J. observes, "as it's used in a lot of studios as a recording
amp." That amp's parallel input drives four GK 2x12 cabinets,
two of which are miked by a Sennhheiser MD 421.
Lifeson operates his two racks with a custom pedalboard which
includes an on-board switching system for the GK preamp's chorus,
compression and gain functions. His floor system revolves around
a set of Moog Taurus pedals and a pair of Korg MPK 130 pedal
units which are MIDIed into an offstage bank of Akai 900 samplers
and Yamaha DX7's. These samplers are also accessed by a Yamaha
KX76 MIDI controller keyboard, which, along with a second set of
Taurus pedals, is removed from the stage after the song "Time
Stand Still." A GK 250ML is placed far stage right and serves as
the technician's monitor.
The Signature guitars are strung with Dean Markleys, gauged
.009, .010, .016, .028, .038, .048. The Ovation uses Markley
medium light bronze. Like Geddy, Alex is a fan of Finger Ease
string lubricant. "Cases of it," laughs J.J. "It's all he lets
me use."
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Copyright The Rush Fans Mailing List, 1992.
Editor, The National Midnight Star
(Rush Fans Mailing List)
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End of The National Midnight Star Number 540
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