The five minutes Jeff Garcia spent online last May purchasing tickets to an upcoming Rush concert resulted in nearly nine hours of illegally downloading every song the group has ever released.
Garcia, a casual Rush fan for about three or four months after the release of the Power Windows album in 1985, has not listened to a single Rush song in its entirety for almost five years and has on several occasions changed the radio station if a Rush tune was playing. Prior to the massive downloading spree Garcia had not even a single Rush song among the almost 4000 selections on his Ipod and no friend or family member was interviewed that would have ever considered him a fan. Yet after learning by random chance that Rush would be playing in San Antonio as part of their Time Machine Tour, Garcia signed onto a well-known concert ticket website and bought two tickets to attend the September 23rd concert. The reasoning behind the purchase is as yet, completely unknown.
Immediately after the sale was completed, Garcia logged into his LimeWire account and began what would be a marathon search and downloading session the likes of which he hadn't embarked since the 2009 six hour Great Michael Jackson Search which had been spurred in large part due to the singers untimely death. Garcia initially struggled to remember the titles to the lesser known Rush tracks, but quickly consulted Wikipedia for album listings and other information that proved useful in his assault then got to work.
As was expected, the most famous songs such as Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, Working Man, and others were easy to come by and quickly snatched up. Unfortunately, since the LimeWire service is based on a peer to peer style network of individual users some selections were either unavailable or attempts to download were unsuccessful. Eventually, Garcia's patience won out. Using a clever combination of partial spelling or complete misspelling of a number of tracks Garcia was capable of obtaining a sizable portion of the Rush catalog eventually compiling an amazing array of music encompassing more than thirty years. He would even come back to a song title hours later and try again, meeting with success only after multiple attempts. His drive and dedication to purpose guaranteed his ultimate triumph. Once Garcia completed the epic task, he leaned back in his chair, yawned and turned off his computer. Looking forward to catching up on Rush's last nine studio albums plus maybe rocking out to the classics once or twice, Garcia planned to upload his new and quite illegally begotten jams to his Ipod the very next day.
Now four months later and despite his initial plans, Garcia has only listened to about eight or ten of the dozens of tracks now at his fingertips and only really added Ghost of a Chance, Middletown Dreams, Mystic Rhythms and 'maybe' 2112 to his Ipod although he can't remember for sure. With the concert date only six days away, Garcia is not convinced that he will actually get around to building a lasting appreciation for the varied style, timeless contributions and rich musical history of the Canadian progressive rock trio although he is still willing to give it a shot; at least right after he finishes downloading the latest Lady Gaga for his twelve year old daughter.
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