Time/Songs:
(5:12) The Spirit of Radio
(6:48) Red Barchetta
(7:44) YYZ
(3:47) A Passage To Bangkok
(3:09) Closer To The Heart
(2:34) Beneath, Between and Behind
(8:47) Jacob's Ladder
(1:37) Broon's Bane
(5:50) The Trees
(12:10) Xanadu
(5:33) Freewill
(5:01) Tom Sawyer
(9:38) La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self-Indulgence)

Exit... Stage Left Tour

Tour Dates

Album Notes

On the cover of Exit...Stage Left

Exit ... Stage Left is probably your most ambitious cover to date, what with it reprising all your previous covers.

Hugh Syme (1983 interview): "It was shot in a condemned theatre here in Toronto, which shall remain nameless. We decided to go with the girl pulling the curtain back on the front instead of the back. It was originally intended to be the other way around, so when I flipped the photograph over, I had to write "RUSH" on the equipment box in the foreground, and I had to strip out the information on the Stage Door and write in the word "EXIT," because the album was called Exit ... Stage Left."

Is the stage shot actually from a Rush concert?

"Buffalo shot, yeah. We went out to get that, too. We really wanted the band-. Believe it or not, we went to about 15 shows, trying to get the band saying "Thank you, good night," and at the same time, and walking towards the camera."

Exit..Stage Left reflections against All The World's A Stage

Neil Peart (From "Success Under Pressure): "Such as it is, we're all very proud of this one. Everything has improved so much since our last, somewhat uneven live effort -- that was by a different group. Once again, it's a kind of anthology album; a summation of the live highlights of our previous four studio albums and a couple of older reincarnations."

Why did the band decide to make another live album?

Geddy Lee (From "Success Under Pressure"): "I guess there were a whole lot of reasons. One was that we felt our live sound had changed so much that we figured we needed to up-date it on record. I mean, All The World's A Stage was a whole lot different. But doing a live record is also a great device to get a sort of hiatus between albums and we really wanted that. We wanted to have a longer gap before going back in the studio so that we could do some writing on our own."

Alex Lifeson (From "Success Under Pressure"): "Live albums are always a difficult thing. It's hard to get excited about them. In terms of a live recording, Exit is very good and I'm happy with it in that respect. As an example of our show, it's not as good as it could have been or possible should have been. Live albums give us some breathing space to cleanse ourselves and start on something fresh and new. When we were in the studio doing Exit, Geddy and I were in another studio working on "Digital Man" and "Subdivisions" from Signals. We were already geared up for another record. I think that had something to do with the fact that we don't go crazy over live records. I don't know if you'll ever hear another live album from Rush. We enjoy the studio recordings much more than we do the live ones."

(Editor Note: As we all know, Rush did eventually do another Live Album)

Geddy Lee/Neil Peart talk about Exit..Stage Left

Geddy Lee (1984 interview): "I really didn't enjoy doing the first live album and I didn't enjoy doing this one any more. I thought I would, but I didn't. It's a very tedious affair for a guy in a band, and if you notice the credits in the album, we didn't produce the album, we didn't have anything r--, well, we were there and we sortof observed and we, you know, we put our opinion in when we thought we should, but generally, most of the chores were handled by Terry. I don't enjoy it, and I don't think the other guys enjoy it really, either."

Neil Peart (1984 interview): "Yeah, there was an awful lot of difficulty there, first of all because it encompassed two complete tours' worth of material and we wanted to span all of the last four albums, you know, fairly equally, and also the fact that there were some tracks that we had good record- ings of that we weren't able to put on, notably, I can bring to mind, Camera Eye and Vital Signs we really had good versions of, but there just wasn't space, I mean, we had to figure out so many long songs and so many short songs and songs that were almost mandatory to get on there because they were better than the original versions."