Countless times in my life I have hummed along with Geddy Lee's stereo voice "...the point of the journey is not to arrive", but this time I was determined to disagree. The flight from Nea Anchialos to Brussels and the road trip from there to Amsterdam, early on Sunday 2 June, had a single purpose in curbing religious fanaticism, however much it went against the rationalism of the "holy trinity" of progressive rock...The black hard rectangular mass of the "Ziggo Dome" appeared as we turned towards the underground parking lot under the "Amsterdam Arena". Leaving the car in the still empty parking lot we walked hurriedly past the "Heineken Music Hall" and took the metro to the city center. The blue sky that day periodically contained several patches of harmless clouds and its distant hurried impression had a visual "grace under pressure", at least for us who had started to push our pseudo-tourist steps for good, "under the influence of purpose"... The few hours of free time passed just as we wanted, G-R-H-G-O-R-A, and the more the group's fans of all kinds of nationalities crowded into the centre while filling up the largest collection of T-shirts, the more impatient we became... We returned to the Ziggo venue a little more than two hours before the official start of the concert. The beer-cafes in the nearby venues, already full of decorated fans were playing Rush, some incessantly, others alternating one Rush song with something else, as if they were doing a bizarre musical crash-test... We stood relatively quickly in the queue that started to grow long and quickly touched the wall of the Arena...About an hour before the start the doors finally opened to the cheers of a core of hard-core hardcore who kept shouting slogans and waving Canadian flags. Very quickly we found ourselves inside and crossing the spacious main hallway we stopped at the merchandise area to take our time to browse the rather "tweaked" temptations that were laid out before us. In this area we met other Greeks who had also made the trip exclusively for the band and all those discussions of the automatic familiarity offered by the common purpose began, with the disagreements about preferences during the Rush periods simply confirming that they were a huge band throughout their career...After traditionally wetting our throats with beer we found ourselves in the Ziggo arena having a pretty good contact with the scene. The audience was, as expected, of a fairly high average age although the Rush legacy was often passed from father to son or daughter in beautiful moments of shared "costume" despite the generation gap...As we found out in brief chats with those around us - who quickly asked us where we were from - almost everyone had a respectable double-digit number of gigs with the group and one guy next to us had seen them twice a night.
The beautiful, old-fashioned, self-deprecating video of the introduction raised the fever...The three shadows seemed to move on stage, the voices got louder and the geometric pentagram of Rush was spread out in all its glory: "Subdivisions", awe and goosebumps...The crowd, a little more than 10000 faithful welcomed them as they deserved to the only guarantors for what would follow for more than two hours ...Rush's performance has two huge parts that interact and complement each other. The first is the technical, organizational part with the huge stage ,the lighting, the video projections, the effects, the addition of the string orchestra in the second part of the show and of course the overall, mythical sound with an incredible clarity. But all of this exists to support the reality, the heart of the matter, the fleshy truth of what is code-named "R-U-S-H": three still hungry musicians who have the infinite depth to feel their compositions in live performance, three musicians whose virtuosity still supports with equal consistency and precision the choice of an entire career on a whimsical, demanding path. It ultimately makes a huge difference to feel the human breath and anguish of a trio of people who are finally reining in, harnessing the technocratic beast they have built around them and coaching it to serve their own truth. The first fascinating realization of this evening is that Rush are still real, alive, powerful, not hiding behind prefab shows, because they simply have nothing to fear, not even the weaknesses of their own audience... The second fascinating finding of the night is purely personal and has to do with my own obsession with the 80's period ,the keyboard period for some...The setlist of the night gives the lion's share to that period, excluding of course the presentation of "Clockwork Angels" in the second part of the live. Always in that huge personal musical bag where the technocratic approach coexisted in harmony with emotion Rush had the lion's share and their brave futuristic albums stretch my perception forever along with Queensryche's "Rage For Order", Fates Warning's "Perfect Symmetry" and Sieges Even's "A Sense Of Change"... Messrs Lee, Lifeson and Peart brought to life the spacey excellence of the still misunderstood "Powerwindows" with a timely physicality that was beyond question...The Big Money, Grand Designs, Territories and Manhattan Project! !!!...To be honest, I went reading but the dusty setlists from the previous nights were not enough to temper the excitement when the entire stage was awash with musical equations...The only thing missing to meet with God inside Ziggo was the legendary Middletown Dreams who rotated through the setlist and ultimately didn't sit down with us. But there were more than a few moments that lifted us higher than