Rush Tribute Project’s Sean Jones on keeping the Canadian trio’s flame alive
The Rush Tribute Project. // photo credit Kurt Newgord
The Rush Tribute Project plays the Uptown Theater on Tuesday, September 8. Details on that show here.
When deciding to cover Rush with your tribute band, one must have a certain sense of commitment.
Rush fans are among some of the most obsessive and meticulous to be found outside of the jam band scene. All it takes is a brief dive into Reddit, reading posts surrounding the Canadian power trio’s return to the stage after over a decade away from live performance, to see that set lists, performance decisions, and other minutiae are put under the microscope.
This is to say nothing of comparing the current iteration with new drummer Anika Nilles to Neil Peart’s work.
So, given that not only has the Rush Tribute Project been performing since before the actual band took its hiatus, keeping the Rush flame burning over the last decade, and continuing on to this day, we reached out to see just what it’s been like to cover Rush’s music for this long, as well as creating a show with vintage instruments, multi-camera projection, lasers, and spectacular lighting that captures the Rush experience as near to the original as possible.
Ahead of the band’s stop at the Uptown on Tuesday, September 8, where The Rush Tribute Project will tackle all of Rush’s 1981 album, Moving Pictures, in its entirety, alongside fan favorites and deep cuts, we spoke with bassist and lead vocalist Sean Jones about Rush’s enduring legacy and what he and bandmates Bill Heck (guitar) and Thomas Slawnik (drums) do to honor it.
The Pitch: The Rush Tribute Project started before Rush went on their hiatus. What did hat hiatus do for you all in terms of people coming out, given how religiously you hew to their songs?
Sean Jones: When they stopped touring, I’d say we definitely saw a bump in people coming to see us because they had no other way of seeing Rush live in the area. It’s really cool ’cause were people for a long time–probably the last six, eight years for sure–that would come up to us after a show and say, “I never got to see Rush play live,” and this is pretty much the next best thing, right?
And so it’s actually really cool to see some of them having a chance to see them play now. But yeah, it really did fill a hole for a lot of people, and our goal, really, is to just recreate that show: recreate the idea, the experience of being at a Rush concert from whatever era of the songs we’re playing.
If we’re playing a song from Moving Pictures, we want that experience to feel like the Moving Pictures tour. If we’re playing something off 2112, we want it to feel like that tour, and so on and so forth. The response we got from a lot of fans was overwhelmingly positive. I even have had a couple of them reach out and say, “I finally got to see them,” which is really cool.
What led you to want to cover and perform as one of the most technically difficult bands that has ever existed?
We don’t wanna be bored. [laughs] No. It’s one of those things where it just fell into my lap, as in we would jam these songs and initially, I would try and get other people to sing, and everyone’s like, “No,” so then I started singing. The more you play it, the more fun it really becomes. They’re a musician’s band. When you start playing their material, you realize they wrote this stuff ’cause they wanted to like what they were playing. They wanted to have fun and challenge themselves.
It takes a lot of extra work, and it’s just the choice that we made. We decided we were going to do a really hard band, and so there’s a lot of work that goes into making that happen. But it’s really rewarding when it comes off. When we finish a song and we look at each other and we’re like, “Yeah, that was pretty good,” that’s really what it’s all about. We just really love playing this stuff. It’s a lot of fun to play, and it’s our way of sharing it with everybody.
We’re all fans. We’re all Rush fans like everybody else and so, being able to get up there and play it, celebrate it, or however you wanna describe it, just playing the music live like it was meant to be, listened to–they wrote that stuff that they knew they were gonna get out and go on tour and play it and the biggest reward that we get is just being able to get that connection with fans when we play these songs that we all have a lot of respect and love for.
You feel it when you get done with a tune, and everyone was on that same wavelength with you while you’re playing it; then you get done, and everyone appreciates it at the same level. There’s really nothing better. I’ve played in a lot of cover bands and wedding bands and things like that, and played all sorts of different tunes, and this stuff is different. This is a little more special.
When I’ve talked with bands who decide to play an album in its entirety, they have occasionally had to go to YouTube to remember how they played it 20 years ago. YouTube has become this remarkable resource for musicians, both in original and cover bands, because it’s so much footage that would’ve otherwise just sat on a video cassette in someone’s basement has now made its way out there. How much time have you spent on YouTube preparing for any show or any song?
It’s really funny you say that. So before YouTube was as big as it is, I was a bootleg collector. I would find videos and recordings of whatever shows you could find. I’ve got hundreds, probably close to 1000 of them. It’s really great for me to be able to just, “Hey, I wonder how he plays that now,” and then go on YouTube, find a couple of videos, look for angles where I can see his fingers, things like that. It’s been a lot of fun.
This is actually very timely. We just had a conversation about “YYZ” and how Geddy’s playing the solo breaks in the middle because they’re not like on the album. We went on YouTube, just looked up five or six different performances, and figured out what he was doing, which was really cool.
Am I gonna play it like that? I’ve been practicing the album version for a long time, so I’m probably not gonna play it like that. But yeah, it’s wonderful. I think it’s a great resource, and it’s also a way to introduce this stuff to people who may have never seen any of this before. Kids can get on it and see this is what a show was in 1980-whatever. It’s great.
From the videos I’ve seen, your show is not just you getting up there and playing the songs. It is a full production. How does the research for that inform the stage performance?
We try not to wholesale-copy what they did, partly because, like in 1981, they did not have the capacity to do what they could in 1991, and ditto for 2001, and so on and so forth, so we try to get the feel. We’ve totally looked at their live performances and said, “All right, in this song, this is really what they were doing, and this is what they were accenting.”
Our lighting guy is fantastic. Aaron does an amazing job. He’ll program stuff. He’ll take our notes. He’ll watch video and come up with something that’s generally not what they did, but trying to get that same feel down ’cause, yeah–it’s very much a big multimedia show. Again, we’re trying to recreate what the Rush concert experience would be like, and to do that, you gotta have all the trappings that they started adding throughout the years.
You’re touring doing Moving Pictures, which is probably arguably their biggest, most mainstream album. Why do you want to do Moving Pictures on this tour?
This is our first full tour doing an album. We’ve done album shows before. In fact, we’ve done album shows from 2112 up through Grace Under Pressure. We’ve done them all. This particular tour is the 45th anniversary of Moving Pictures and the 50th anniversary of 2112. This tour, we’re basically celebrating that. We’re playing all of Moving Pictures every show. We’re playing a good portion of 2112 throughout the show, but we also have to fit other songs in.
It’s a good way to enter a new market. We’re not playing three hours of obscure material. We’re playing stuff that people are gonna recognize and wanna hear.
How’d you get introduced to Rush in the first place? What was the first Rush song you remember hearing?
I heard them on the radio growing up. Boy, what was the first one where I said, “That was Rush”? Probably would have been “The Trees,” but I was pretty young at that point. I knew who they were. I liked them, but it wasn’t until high school that I started digging into them and getting into stuff. That was the mid-to-late ’80s.
But the Moving Pictures album was one of the first ones that I actually gravitated to and listened to religiously. That one and 2112, actually. So yeah, it’s always been there for me. My family is huge music fans, and so I had been going to rock concerts since I was, like, two, and so I grew up listening to all this kind of stuff.
The first tour I went to was Presto because I could finally go myself, and not have Mom take me to a show. That was my first show, which was an amazing tour, but it was certainly not my first introduction to them.
Balancing their later, more epic material such as “2112” or “YYZ” with something like “Working Man” or “Finding My Way”–how do you work those into the set? Is it a big flip to go from keys and time signature changes to just playing really heavy rock?
So yeah, it’s funny. I’ll answer two different ways. As far as putting it on the set list, we make a conscious effort to cover a pretty good span of the eras of stuff they’ve done. We will almost always have a bunch of stuff from early on, and then some stuff from later on, too, and as far as performing it? It’s not that bad because we go back and forth throughout the show. We’ll play newer stuff, we’ll play older stuff, we’ll play newer stuff, we play older stuff.
I think for the audience it might be a bit of a gear shift, right? We finish something like “Xanadu” and now we’re playing “Finding My Way,” but because it’s all Rush and because everyone goes in kinda knowing this is what we’re gonna get, and everyone’s going in there expecting or hoping to hear their favorite song, and you got 1000 people in there–I don’t wanna say 1000 favorite songs, but yeah, it’s gonna cover the gamut, right?
They’re just waiting for that era, for what they consider to be “real Rush,” so there are always people who are digging or getting into whatever next tune that we’re playing. It actually makes it easy for us to keep the crowd going and the show flowing.
I think the weirdest part is sometimes the singing is just getting myself geared up: “All right. I am now singing something really high. Okay. Now I’m not singing something really high.” But it’s not that bad, honestly. It’s actually fun to spread it out like that.
Now that they’re touring again, are you making any attempts to see Rush on the road?
Yes. We already saw them when they were in Chicago in July. It was just a lot of fun. They can obviously put on an excellent show, play really well. Anika sounds amazing. She fits right in with what they’re doing. It was a whole lot of fun to be able to to be able to see them get up on stage again and play this stuff, and play it really well, in all honesty.
Do you get to write that off as a business expense?
No. I wish.
The Rush Tribute Project plays the Uptown Theater on Tuesday, September 8. Details on that show here.
