OK, first off: Montage Mountain is becoming a terrible place to see a show. Well, not a terrible place to see it, just a terrible place to get to and fro. On the way up to Scranton, we got bottlenecked for an hour due to I-81 construction (which I should have looked for before we made the trip – we could have gotten around it faster) and stopped at a Wilkes-Barre Outback to meet up with Kevin and have dinner before the show. After our steaks, we did the familiar crawl up Montage Mountain, and similar to 2004, we were placed in inconvenient bulk parking. More on that later.
The show? The show was great. Spoilers follow…
The show opened up with a funny short starring our beloved heroes. First Alex wakes up from a nightmare about snakes & arrows and realizes he’s in bed with… Neil! Then we find that what we just saw was Geddy’s dream, and he gets a visit from a Scot played by himself. Funny stuff. These guys can do comedy.
They played lots of old (and some rare) stuff before they even touched the new material. I got just a bare whiff of what would be played when I saw someone talk about Geddy playing his Jaco signature bass on “Malignant Narcissism” and his old Rickenbacker on “A Passage to Bangkok”, which showed up in the encore. Apparently they have a fixed setlist so far this tour (reflected also in the fact that the tour book lists background video credits by song). From the Power Windows site (my ticket’s image is the one on file for the Scranton show), with my comments:
- Limelight
- Digital Man (I was blown away by this. They rearranged it to make it shorter, but it worked great.)
- Entre Nous (Couldn’t believe this. I think it’s the first time they’ve played it live.)
- Mission (My favorite HYF track)
- Freewill
- The Main Monkey Business
- The Larger Bowl (with excellent McKenzie Brothers intro)
- Secret Touch
- Circumstances (Look around the web for bass tablature for this song. 😉 )
- Between The Wheels
- Dreamline
-Intermission- (w/ video intro)
- Far Cry
- Workin’ Them Angels
- Armor And Sword (Probably my current non-instrumental S&A favorite.)
- Spindrift
- The Way The Wind Blows
- Subdivisions
- Natural Science
- Witch Hunt (This was great to see again.)
- Malignant Narcissism
- Drum Solo
- Hope
- Summertime Blues
- The Spirit of Radio
- Tom Sawyer (with South Park intro; Cartman comes up with new lyrics)
Encore:
- One Little Victory
- A Passage to Bangkok (excellent!)
- YYZ
I really need to invest in a pair or two of musician-grade earplugs. My ears are fine today, but I think I would have heard the music a bit better if I had plugs in. I heard Geddy’s bass and vocals fine, but the guitars were a bit harsh and distorted. Next time I’m in Guitar Center, I’ll pick some up.
I really liked the S&A stuff live. I enjoyed “Secret Touch” from Vapor Trails as well. These guys rock. I was constantly watching Geddy, made easier by the fact that we were sitting on the stage-left side of the venue.
Short story is: these guys are still one of the best concert deals around. Two hours, 45 minutes of music and all the video, lights, and lasers continue to make Rush a first-class production. If you like the music, you owe it to yourself to see them at least once every tour!
Back to the venue (the Pavilion at Montage Mountain): we had to wait over an hour and a half to get out of parking and back onto the highway. Simply unacceptable. Seeing Rush at Montage Mountain is no longer a slam-dunk for me; I’m going to look into other venues next tour.
Update: MSM coverage: CitizensVoice Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
cygweb 
8 comments
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July 1, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Daryl
Cool. Thanks for the review and setlist. I linked to it from my blog:
http://www.easthollow.com/blogger/2007/07/rush-and-stevie-nicks-montage-mountain.html
July 1, 2007 at 7:33 pm
aharden
Cool, thanks for the link.
July 2, 2007 at 2:20 pm
mclance
I agree with the review- The traffic sucked!!
July 3, 2007 at 7:31 am
rushhead79
I agree. Totally awesome show…that was my 14th Rush concert and they haven’t missed a beat! Usually we go to the Tweeter Center in Camden…but for this show we decided to go to Montage…they REALLY need to WAKE UP and DO SOMETHING about the PARKING and TRAFFIC! We left in the middle of YYZ and only had to wait 45 minutes…got home in Allentown at 1:00…others stayed for the entire encore…which was only an additional 3 minutes…got home at 3:00! That is NOT acceptable! See ya Montage… If there was ever a medical emergency up on that hill….the victim would be DONE by the time they got off that hill!
July 3, 2007 at 7:35 am
aharden
Looks like I’ve touched a nerve with the parking/traffic issues at Montage. Thanks for the comments. Hopefully someone interested in fixing the situation will do something about it.
July 3, 2007 at 10:49 am
DJ Dave
What an incredible show both musically & technically! Three large video screens which accented Geddy, Alex & Neil made the lawn seats worth it! I first saw Rush in 1987 during the ‘Hold Your Fire’ tour. The second show was the ‘Counterparts’ tour. (Both shows @ The Broome County Arena in Binghamton, NY) However, you need to find the perfect lawn seat section early, due to the ENORMOUS tent poles which do the deed of obstucting certain angles of the stage.
How come someone @ Montage Mountain hasn’t figured out a new entrance / exit from a top ‘the hill’. For those making the slow crawl down the hill, I couldn’t help to notice the large, idle front loader next to the housing development, which I was tempted to jump into and start the new exit… Will someone shed light on this situation, or will Toyota Pavillion be blacklisted for future events?
July 6, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Irfan Khawaja
This review was spot-on. My wife and I successfully avoided the traffic by getting to the show three hours early. We were among the first people into the parking lot and the first into the amphitheater.(We were tourists in Scranton, on our belated honeymoon, so we had all the time in the world.) We couldn’t deal with the idea of sitting in traffic after the show, so we just sat in the parking lot for two hours, then made it down the mountain in 30 minutes. Not an optimal situation!
I thought the guitars were overly distorted/reverbed, too–especially in the first set, and especially when Lifeson used the black Les Paul. The second set sounded better than the first, but I’m not sure whether that was the set or my ears.
But all in all, it was a good show (my sixteenth). Good review, too, thanks!
July 22, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Isorski
Great to read your review. Know that traffic issues are not exclusive to PA. I saw the band at Clark County Amphitheater in Portland last night and it took me an hour to get out of the parking lot. Well worth it, though. I posted a review of the show at my Bog at http://isorski.blogspot.com/. Enjoy!