![]() ![]() “But unfortunately I didn’t get to see the guys after the show for whatever reason. “I went to see Rush a few years ago at the Forum in LA and I enjoyed watching them perform,” he explains. ![]() Simmons isn’t trying to kid us that the two bands are still best buddies these days, though. They’re out there doing it, just like we are.” And there are no girls at Rush shows to this day! But congratulations and kudos to them for making it and doing it the hard way, by getting out there and working. “But when Rush went progressive I didn’t know if it would stick, because girls just don’t get prog. “I thought they’d become a big act like Zeppelin or Sabbath,” he says. But did he ever envisage Rush still being together in 2012 when he first saw the band perform back then in 1974? It’s surely pointless asking Gene whether he thought Kiss would survive for 40 years. While both bands went their separate ways after those early days together, both Rush and Kiss are confirmed survivors in an industry that notoriously eats its own. And even with all of the chicks and all the rest of it, they never let it get in the way of what they were doing." You have to hand it to the guys in Rush too. "But I always remembered the hunger I had when we started out and I was living in my ma’s basement. There were chicks everywhere and we were getting paid $5,000 a night, which felt like good money back then. I felt privileged to be doing what I was doing, but if you weren’t careful you could get beguiled and seduced by the lifestyle. "So the only way to get your music out there was to go to the people. Before MTV, cellphones and iPads there were only three or four TV stations and a few radio stations. “It was gruelling! All that romantic talk of how amazing it was back in the day is all well and good, but it was demanding and you had to have a work ethic. ![]() Were those Kiss/Rush tours physically tough? While Gene’s bulging black book attests to the fact that there was plenty of fun to be had back then, touring in the ’70s was also reputed to be notoriously hard work. And Alex wasn’t exactly pulling any Pete Townshend windmills and splits, you know? The stage show wasn’t their focus. So he couldn’t do any Robert Plant routines or anything like that. "It’s true that there wasn’t really what you’d call a Rush ‘live performance’, either, because Geddy was stuck to the mic playing bass at the same time as he was singing. They probably already had a few different time signatures by then, but it wasn’t progressive like it was to become. It was all riff-based blues rock with a lot of bombast. “They didn’t really have their own fans turning up to see them in any numbers at that stage, but they weren’t all that different to us, so they appealed. “They actually went down very well,” says Gene. Were Kiss’s blue collar all-American fans down with Rush? They are Canadians, after all. “I’m pleading the fifth on that one to save their reputations! But they really were sweethearts.” “We were hanging with Rush after the shows, having lots of fun together. Rush toured with Kiss at various points in ’74, ’75 and ’76. To be honest I always preferred the meat and potatoes stuff." Plus he knew lots of big words like ‘condominium’! That was when things started to change. But Neil read lots of books, and started to bring in that sci-fi, Isaac Asimov kind of thing. They were much more of a ‘meat-and-two-veg’ rock band at that time. ![]() "Rush didn’t feel like ‘musos’ at the beginning. But Geddy didn’t have a clue what I was talking about! He said ‘I don’t know what the notes are called. I told him about a bass run that I’d discovered that went from a major to a minor, then to a flat third, a kind of a European scale that then switched to a blues scale. “But you’d be surprised! I remember sitting with Geddy one time back then throwing riffs back and forth. You could have had cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the bill, who’s a way better musician than I’ll ever be, and I would always have backed myself! I was never concerned about who we were putting ourselves up against. "And anyway, you always have to be delusional when you get up on stage. Look, if you’re in the gym and the guy who’s next to you can lift more than you can, then you want to compete with him and you want to be better than him, right? Didn’t that worry Kiss, who for all their many attributes are not and never have been virtuosos? Yet even at that early juncture, the band seemed pretty, well, ‘musicianly’. Neil Peart had already replaced John Rutsey on the Rush drum stool at this point, but hadn’t yet shifted the three-piece towards a more progressive style. ![]()
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