Rush Fan Day Interview with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson

hello everyone what a great sight to see this group here in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rush celebration day my name is Greg Harris and I'm privileged to be the president CEO this great museum and on behalf of all of our staff on behalf of everybody here in Northeast Ohio we're thrilled that so many people came here to help us celebrate these Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees rush the museum has now been open 24 years twelve million people have come here they've experienced our mission to engage teach and inspire through the power of rock and roll and there's no better way to do that then they hear the stories from the actual people that made the music that meant so much to all of us right every day special' here but when we have Hall of Fame inductees it's at a whole nother level and today is a special day let me introduce dr. Jason Hanley who runs programming and visitor engagement here at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame he's our vice president he's going to introduce the guys and bring them on stage four okay Jason Hanley all right Wow look at his crowd you guys look awesome out here today welcome to the rocker Hall of Fame it's so exciting to have you all here thank you for braving the possible storm it's starting to snow but we're gonna be fine right whoo all right just to give you a little bit idea what we're doing here this afternoon we'll have about a you know 40 minute or so interview up here on stage and then part of that will include a QA thank you to all of you who submitted questions online beforehand so if you're a lucky one I'm gonna get to pick one of those and we'll get to ask Alex and Getty one of those questions a little bit later I should also say hello to everyone out there watching on the stream thank you for tuning in enjoy it people around the world are watching today [Music] I also want to thank our partner Sirius XM we're recording this for Sirius XM and the rush fan Day special will actually be airing on multiple channels throughout the next week on Sirius XM so thank you so much to our partners there afterwards I'll walk through some of the specifics for all of you for going downstairs and getting your book signed just remember there's a lot of you and we're all in this together just keep that in mind all day all right so without further ado ladies and gentlemen let's give it up for rock or a Hall of Fame inductees Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee [Applause] [Music] [Applause] is this mic on hi everyone you're a beautiful sight out there thank you for coming down today I brought my BFF from Toronto with me I don't know what a nice crowd we don't see one of these in a while I see some familiar faces yeah but still familiar faces for sure yeah definitely why are we here again well we're gonna talk about your book for starters I think oh right right right I'm shamelessly promoting a book yeah and then we're gonna do shamelessly promoting you know I got the book a couple weeks ago I think I got a copy from you and I gotta say I don't know if you've if any of you have the book yet is it awesome honest to god I I love it I think it is so good it's so interesting fascinating information but in such a it's the first installment but it's just a real pleasure to go through that book and read all the interesting stuff but it's done in such a conversational way it's really you know it's not too much geeky Muzo kind of stuff and the photographs are beautiful and and it's also a great weight it can keep stuffed you can exercise with it you can throw it at beat ball and so just don't drop it on your foot exactly so thank you I appreciate I mean it sincerely when you started I mean it's been a couple of years that you've worked on the book yeah how did you lead up to that like what inspired you to to do it was a lot of work yeah I didn't realize it was gonna be so much work of course maybe I would have had second thoughts about it but it all started like this so I talked about this in the book of course but just to do a little bite-sized capsule of it you know back when we were rehearsing I think it was for the Clockwork Angels tour somebody approached me and wanted to trade one of my backup instruments not not a main instrument but you know just one of my instruments for a vintage bass and I had never collected any vintage basis because the only basis I used in my career we're really bases that would fit into the kind of identity and soundscape that I was trying to develop for myself so and that's a story with most musicians right I mean like you use the instruments as tools to give you the tone you want to express yourself the way you need to so I never looked at my own instrument as collectibles I just as my tools just as as you do so I said okay I was kind of curious because one of the bases was a 1953 fender Precision Bass and that's the year of my birth now how ancient I am I'm still yogurt you are younger anyway so it sparked a curiosity and curiosity is dangerous for me because I'm a kind of obsessive personality when I was a kid I collected stamps obsessively when I started getting into music I collected records I still have all my vinyl squirreled away somewhere wrapped up in plastic and you know later in life I became a baseball nut as most of you know and then I started wanting to learn about the history of the game why because of that word curiosity I was curious as to the history of the great game the national pastime and that introduced me to the history of America over the 150 years or so of baseball's existence so these things became these obsessions became windows into the past windows into time and when I got that 53 Fender bass the same kind of curiosity was sparked in me and I realized I had held this instrument of my hands for over 42 years and I knew very little about how it came to exist you know I knew very little about all the stories and all the people that went into developing these instruments in the middle of the century so that I said to my I said to Scully I said hey maybe we should just get a modest collection of maybe 12 iconic bases from the guys that I love like Jack Bruce's eb-3 and you know ant whistles Thunderbird etc etc McCartney's 501 violin bass and that's that was my modest goal back then and about 280 basses later here so anyway to directly relate to your question during the collecting of bases like any other obsession you you learn stories you learn stories some of these bases arrive with stories you know owned by one guy for example there's one of my bases that I got from it's a 1964 Dakota read jazz bass and I found it in Dublin and it belonged to one gentleman who played an Irish show band and he played that bass his whole life and when I opened the case you could smell the beer and the cigarettes wafting out and it looked like it had lived a life and so those kind of instruments speak to me and and I started thinking about how people spend their time okay so this was a guy who didn't get to play big arenas like we do but what did he do whenever he could he got a gig and he played with that bass and that was everything to him it was for a time probably a way of him making a living for a time it was how he got his jollies on the weekend so I have great respect for those things so as I started collecting more basses more of these stories started tumbling out and sometimes the stories were stories in acquiring the things sometimes they were the instruments themselves and sometimes they were just nerdy sort of pursuits of why is this bass different in 1967 than it was in 1960 so all those things said to me I said to myself you know what there really isn't a book out there that does my instrument justice and aside from the fact that aesthetically there are beautiful examples of mid-century art and people admire mid-century Furniture mid-century painting but I felt like my bass my instrument was getting a short shrift so that's why I did the book and I had no idea it would be such a monumental pursuit you know we and I put you to sleep no you know we've worked together for what six or seven fifty years we've been writing music together and I've always and hopefully it won't stop I've always thought one of one of the great things about our relationship in a writing relationship is I tend to be kind of impulsive about the things that I do it's first few moments or the first few takes that are probably my stronger work whereas with you you take your time you filter everything you look at all possible options and venues before you finally decide so here you have a big collection of bass guitars lots of photographs structurally for the book how did you approach it knowing that this is kind of your MO that you're gonna spend hours and hours and hours like that must have been grueling for you I would think I think it was more grueling for the people I work with because you know as you know I'm pretty hard on recording engineers because I get really obsessive about details and I think when people signed up like Richard civils who did the most incredible photography that you can see on the screens here I mean he's really elevated the art form of photographing a guitar and basically he moved into my house and in a sense my wife very kindly said oh if you need a place to shoot your instruments why don't you take my art studio because she's a painter and she would hate me saying that out loud by the way and so we transformed her art studio into a severe photographic you know sort of heaven we had different setups for different instruments because different instruments require different lighting to show off their beautiful you know contours and so he what we thought would take a month or so was over a year of him up there and a lot of back and forth and the long-suffering Scully McIntosh my my main man was you know barking at him as he set up all these instruments and it was pretty funny sight and of course I engaged my friend Daniel Richler who's a writer and a sort of a pop culture expert to help me hammer out the word so I got them all in the right order so it was a lot of work it was tough and it was I kind of liken it to doing a documentary as opposed to writing a book because you sort of have a team of people that you have to sort of corral and make sure we have the word the first version of the book when I sent it to my editor she said a couple of things about it she said I that she's never seen a book on this kind of subject played out with such passion on the pages and with such humor which I really appreciated but she also said I've never received a manuscript that was 845 pages before so let's just speak to your point I got a bit carried away and it it took quite a lot of learning on my side for the good people at Harper design basically taught me how to rearrange my book and we got it down to four hundred and eight pages so it's still nine pounds don't drop it yeah that's really quite a task that it goes you were explaining when we were coming down here how you go through so many different levels of editing and a lot of people touch the book and they all have their own way of doing things and what they have in mind and quite often as we've experienced with record company people for example they don't really have a sense of what it means to you and and how important those things are so it's it's got to be hard yeah I was very lucky though because I had such a great team the people at Harper's they really understood what I wanted to do I didn't want this to be a typical guitar book that looks sort of like a pamphlet I wanted it to be I wanted to elevate the instrument to its rightful place you know I loved the bass man and they're they're beautiful instruments and when you hold them and you look at the men in the light that I have come to look at there I wanted that photo into photography to reflect it and Richard really did nail that and Daniel put up with my incessant you know that commas in the wrong place and and he was the two of us were sitting there researching and researching for months and it really turned into be quite a magnificent adventure and a journey for me so the photographs are stunning Richard did an amazing job yeah thank you really did he brought so much character in the instruments and and a unity there's a really there's a real emotional response when you look at those those pictures which leads me to the next question you you interviewed a lot of different people a lot of different bass players and collectors and the one that that that stands out for me is John Paul Jones you know we have such a history with Led Zeppelin and the heat sounds like such a wonderful person yeah but he says in in that interview that how he used to go to a little music shop in Soho and stare at this red yeste precision I think it was for five or ten minutes just staring at it yeah and then he would go home and dream about it yeah how does that how does that sense of passion and interest in and that longing for something like that how do you respond to that kind of emotion and how did you find the commonality of all the people that you spoke to where their beginnings were were they similar very much so and I think that was my favorite part of the book really was talking to these chaps and you know I say in the book I could have easily done a book of nothing but interviews with these cats because they were so interesting and for the most part so lovely and it's a shared passion you know when when John Paul Jones is talking about staring at that Fiesta red bass I know that feeling I remember going downtown Toronto and looking at the Rickenbacker 'he's hanging in in Long I McQuade in Toronto I remember seeing mosrite guitars in this weird little shop downtown and I thinking wow what an evil shape that is you know they look like they landed from another planet to me so but every one of those guys and the guys that I decided in the end to interview were from a real variety you know I could have easily interviewed every great player but the book really isn't about playing per se it's about that period of time that these instruments were being made it's about collecting and the mania for collecting and it's about the atmosphere that surrounds the love of these instruments and each one of these guys shines a light on a different aspect that connect to the theme of that book and a period of time from 1950 through the mid mid 70s so it was just so fun and to be on the other side like you are with me today you're interviewing me can you believe that he's and I had to learn how to interview these guys and the first interview I did was with Bill Wyman and that was at a restaurant in Chelsea in the UK and you know I was a rookie at it I was I was a little nervous and you know Daniel was with me and he had met him before and and you know he's a tough cat to interview from two perspectives because number one he's so interesting and he has so many interests he's a amateur archeologist he's a photographer he's written like eight nine books he's even written as a mystery novel so he wants to talk to you about everything but bases and I'm like but but but I'm here to talk about that to keep you know corralling him back to the subject and I thought was that what it's like interviewing me I don't know but you know it turned out to be a fantastic afternoon and we got of course what we needed to but it was a real edifying experience to meet some of my fellow base folk as I like to refer to them as the collection grew what sort of shape were that were the guitars that did he get to require a lot of work to get them playable I'm guessing that they were all pretty pretty decent in even though they have you know years on them but generally was there a lot of work involved in Gangnam that's a great question there's two types of collecting and anyone that's here that collects anything will know this most collectors want that what we call a closet Queen right that's that's a an instrument that looks like it's been in a time capsule for 60 years you know that's what most collectors want no matter what it is whether it's a bass or whether it's stance or you know whatever they want that untouched piece of time like it's been locked away and I collect those and there's a number of them in the book but I also like the ones that when you look at them you go oh my god if this thing could talk the stories it would tell you you know and as I alluded to earlier they represent a lot to the person that owned them so sometimes they arrive and usually the ones that have been under a bed for you know sixty years are a little stiff they're not natural you know playing instruments because no one's played them you know my friend Colin likes to say when he describes these instruments he said well Johnny wanted drums for Christmas but he got a bass guitar so it ended up under his bed for 60 years but the ones that are beat up and have really lived a life generally feel great when they arrive and and they were the real players did you play all of them we got every single one that's cool it's like Christmas whenever one arrives you know you open it and you have to plug it in and and daniel was really good at saying you know record your your thoughts that how you feel playing them it because that's another insight into the instrument and I really wanted the book to be conversational sort of like us now just sort of although this is a one-way conversation but you know just I want people to understand the experience of making the thing who made it where did it come from why does it exist and what does it sound like you know in the hands of a player what did it mean to that person yeah it really comes across that way very very casual and inclusive you know good so where do you go from here I know you have a couple of other things like this planned but longer-term what do you what do you plan for the collection well I've got a couple of longer exhibits plan in various parts of North America and I really like that idea like we have a small exhibit here of about eight instruments but there's one we're working on in Canada and another one I'd like to do an exhibit in our hometown of Toronto and you know I'm gonna try to get out and do some more book signings and meet you folks because it's fun if my hand will put up with it and after that I don't really have plans and you know obviously they're making me feel really guilty when I go in my studio and they're all staring at me these these fine fellows so they're saying well maybe I'll come over and help ya stare at them they're making me feel guilty but I have to say and I'm sure you appreciate this after you know 42 years together and doing all the great things we did together and always knowing that your life is sort of scheduled I kind of like the scariness of having no schedule it's a really it's a nice thing for my family to have me around I think and it's nice to not know where what's next for me I'm really digging that and I know it invariably I am a musician at heart and so when I feel that there's something I have to say musically that I'll attempt to say it and if it's any damn good then and other people will hear it but you got my number yeah so anyway so that's great that's what's great so thanks thanks so much thanks lurks Alex Lifeson what a fine interviewer well thank you guys thank you we've got some questions now from this audience that they submitted ahead of time as well as some of the folks out on the stream but one thing I wanted to ask probably one of the most important questions we could ask today is Alex how did it feel to interview getting for the first time it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be I might do it more often on the road with them again as an interviewer okay relax [Applause] well you I like your your rate that you charge your rates are reasonable I work cheap alright so um we had a question here from Sarah who's out there somewhere who wanted to know Geddy how does a bass become one of your favorites if you think of your number one or number two bass why do you pick an instrument and kind of stick with it why does it become a favorite instrument to play that's a good question so okay so my first face which is downstairs my my first Rickenbacker the 73 that got me through all those early tours I'd always dreamed of having a Ricky ever since I heard Chris Squire play and so when when we got our first record advance when we signed our deal thanks to the good people of Cleveland responding true story you guys responded to workingman on the radio and that led to our first record contract which led to our first advance and with that advance you and I went shopping and I don't remember you I don't remember what you bought I bought I bought a Les Paul the right it was like a deluxe or something with the with the lipstick pickups okay and I bought that Ricky that I dreamed of and I had to make that sound the way I wanted it to sound of course I thought I'd plug it in and I sound just like we're squared which doesn't work that way it comes from these things so not having Chris wires fingers I worked on my own sound and and I was talking to Brian Koppelman about this and and I really think it's true I think you develop your own identity due to a couple of things that have to happen one of them is failing to sound like your heroes that failure of that sends you in a direction when it's combined with your own personality that gives you your sound so so to answer your question more directly that's how it started for me and every time I change to a different base it was because I had an idea of a tone that was no longer being satisfied by the base that was my present number one and and that happened so many times in my career and most recently when I bought my first 1962 jazz bass the one that I played at the Hall of Fame induction when I played with YES on that on roundabout that is starting to become my current number one because it has a tone that just blows my mind so anyway I hope that answers your question yeah another question along those lines Dana out here somewhere wants to know what do you look for what's sort of your holy grail of bass guitar is if there's one that you are waiting to collect that is not in that collection of basses you have an hour's or something you still want to get of course collecting is it doesn't make sense it's hard to rationalize some people would even go to the extreme of doing a book to rationalize their on Sanibel I have to buy it it's for the book so yeah there are a few I haven't been able to found the search is part of it you know sifting through you know all the contacts I've made through the internet through through meeting collectors I mean the world of collectors is pretty fun and you learn a lot and then you want to share that and we have a little group of Toronto nerds collecting nerds and we get together and my god it would bore my wife in about 30 seconds but it's so fun to talk about it but yeah there are a few instruments out there that I still have not unearthed and I hope too we had a question for you Alex Andrew out here wanted to know would you any time soon be putting together the great gorgeous guide to guitar is that in your future I just watched this guy go through this with two years there's no way I can do it for you Ghost Rider you know I most of my guitars are tools like you know getting I'd mentioned earlier I do have some collectible guitars that I have collected over the last several years but there are some really great guitar books out there like released uh Johnson's book is beautiful one hundred and hundred and eight rockstar guitars that's definitely a book to own yeah we're lucky enough to be to be in that book and it's it's really a stunning book I don't know it's a lot of work I'd rather just play them and leave it at that is there a sort of favorite guitar that you have in your collection that you really enjoy owning well the the iconic guitar for me is the white 355 that I got in 1976 that's on so much of our material from when I got it right up until the last album I have a 59 reissue strata Telecaster that I bought in I think in 1983 they traded an SG for it I never liked the SG the neck always felt like it was this long on it so but that that Telecaster I took the finish off the neck so it's raw wood and I've probably written 80% of my Arrangements on that guitar yeah getting someone want to know that now that you're an author Jeff here in the audience asks would you think of writing anything else so you're gonna become an author would you write a history of Rush Noda biography does that interest you at all right it does interest me actually I hate to admit it was a lot of work but there was something very satisfying about expressing myself in a different way I mean I've always used music and my partnership with this cat here to express myself but when you're hammering out words you get a different kind of precision out of it and so I don't know I have some ideas and maybe I'll find the time to do that but I certainly wouldn't jump into a book project right away after this one give a little space yeah a little space right out there on the stream that we had Rick em wanted to know he mentioned that loving you sitting in with yes getting inducted where the two of you did the actual induction which was a great speech and then getting you sat in on bass filling Chris Squires part there yeah any interest in playing with those guys again in any capacity did you enjoy that night how did that go I really did love playing that song with them it was bittersweet for me because Chris Squire was such a huge hero to me and the fact that he wasn't there was a vacuum that no one can fill properly and I felt for his you know his family because I know that that's all that was on their mind that day so I felt a a real weight to pull it off so I practiced as I usually do like a like a crazy person to make sure I didn't embarrass Chris by my performance and the guys were really sweet to me the guys in the band and you know they've gone through their own provides they're sort of those two versions of yes and I guess they had a schism at some point so that was the first time they've been together again as a band and quite a while and so it's a bit of a little awkward at a few moments but they all came together and they were very kind and indulged me when I kept wanting to play the song over and over again there's a lot to play in that song too there's a lot of notes per second in that song yeah another question a few people acted had actually asked about both on the stream and here was the idea again similar to Chris Squire that you're such an amazing melodic bass player and a singer at the same time is that something that you find difficult or is it now just part of what you do it's always difficult frankly you really have to split your split your ends as the Troggs used to say I find that when when I'm writing a song I don't pay attention to anything but what basepart suits the song best and the same thing when I'm putting the vocals together I do what suits the song best when you come to reproduce that live sometimes it's like what was I thinking oh my god how am I gonna do this so what I do is I would shed until I can play the bass part pretty much without thinking about it and then I started introducing the vocals and the song the anarchist on our last Rock workout was probably the most difficult bass vocal song I've ever had to play live I realized that after I had written it that the kora is so diametrically opposed rhythmically to what the vocal is doing that my god it was so hard to learn but anyway I figured it out finally and you guys open the our 40 tour with that joy I think most of it shows yeah yeah get it out of the way first our occasional opener yeah Daniel here in the audience said would either of you ever think about working as producers or doing anything like that with other artists taking what you've learned over the years in helping them make albums well we have done that it's a little different now I think the whole industry is quite different I mean a lot of artists now do have a whole group of producers that do all the work for them I have to say for me personally probably not so much so anymore I did enjoy it when I did it but currently I like to play more and I've been playing on a lot of played a lot and you know guesting on a lot of different projects really a wide variety of things so it keeps this going and it keeps these going and and that's really what I'm after you know after not you know ending our careers as a touring band there's a whole east of fear of well what's next what am I going to do next and I think that probably informed the book a lot for you yeah that's still connected to music and your instrument and all of that that was really therapeutic and for me I started getting offers you know a couple years ago to just guest on a few things here and there and that grew into a broader thing which is really satisfying for me we were talking last night about you plane was made right a little bit right yeah the same thing as for me I did some production some producing a number of years ago and although I enjoyed it it was frustrating to a certain degree because you're sort of in charge of a project but you're not it's someone else's project so it's great to tutor young people and to help them achieve what they want to achieve but it's also a little frustrating because in the end you can put your heart and soul and spend 24 hours a day in the studio and it they can always say now we don't like that so I'd rather put that effort into my own stuff like Alec says another question that was really common and a lot of people submitting was about the fact that we're here in Cleveland right now and you mentioned it at the beginning you know a town that you know helped you guys break into the bigger scene with rock and roll and of course Time Machine recorded here in Cleveland as Cleveland still kind of hold a special place in your heart at all that you remember this town and Mike coming here without question you know I wouldn't be sitting here without the good people of Cleveland as I said earlier I mean their response to working man changed our lives so that that can never be taken away and and that will always be for something that Bond's us to this this town thank you one of the first gigs we played in America was here with John originally we played with John ROTC yeah theater yep opening first what was that June or something June of 74 that I don't know and then we were with the Agora numerous times and then all the other gigs that we've done here Richfield and some of you guys at the Agora gigs here we got one anyway yeah the rest are in retirement homes okay I had one or two others here and then we'll keep moving because we've got a lot of stuff for you guys to do today I think it's pronounced a Linney on the stream want to know if there's any other artists current music that you really like now is there stuff that's grabbing your attention that you're interested in what for me I've been diving into the past I've decided that there's certain jazz artists that I've never known enough about and I'm sort of studying some of those players Bill Evans one of them and of course he if you listen to some of the bass playing on those Bill Evans records oh my god they're so good and they're playing these big stand-up mothers so so I'm sort of burying myself in the past and I don't really keep up with too much contemporary stuff logs for the past lately I after at first I thought you know obviously the influence of Led Zeppelin but it's it's a new time for them you know so many decades later so they're developing their own audience but what really struck me about them is their musicianship their desire to become better players their Arrangements all of those things as young players I think they're all in their early 20s there's a real great future for them as they develop their own style much like we did I mean we were a bar band really we had our influences since certainly Zeppelin was a big influence for us but once we got out without a chance to play and develop our own stuff and start writing our own material you know we well know that's history and I see that with them too they're young enough that they're there can carry that banner for a rock band into the future yeah more rock bands more so the last question I'll ask on behalf of the Rock Hall what did it mean to you guys that night out in LA when you got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was that you know I know beyond the lighted stage you know the fact that you weren't inducted in the Rock Hall was the end of the film how did it feel to finally be up there and get welcomed into the house is this like your Barbara Walters mom are you trying to make us cry on stage daddy tell me about your most emotional moment in the induction well I think I can speak for you but you can speak for yourself blah blah that did everyone see that coming everyone here saw that coming I think it took us by surprise and I think it's largely due to new people we had become sort of what would you say indifferent about it because it was a question that was asked for so many years how do you feel about it how do you feel about not being in the Hall being home so we we sort of had our tongues firmly in cheek when we arrived that day we didn't know what to expect and we thought ok we'll see what happens and when Yan winter got up there and just alluded to some band from Canada and you guys responded the way you did well you know it sort of took our breath away and we couldn't believe how long it was going on it felt like 20 minutes it was only a couple minutes but it really and he and he was overwhelmed and it suddenly said to me in that moment that why I'm there and and what I have to pay heed to and what I have and who I have to appreciate for that honor so it from that moment on it became a very I think special and more serious moment than we had anticipated absolutely well Getty the book is amazing it really is both a beautiful beautiful book to look at but the history and the work you put into it in the passion you mentioned earlier it absolutely comes out you know we were joking you couldn't put it down reading it right I mean it's it keeps pulling you in about the history of the instruments I'm so excited that all these folks will be able to get their copy and get it signed today yeah so if you folks don't mind I'm gonna ask everybody to stay right where you are I've got a few things I want to review with you about the process but in the meantime so we can get him in where he needs to get going let's give it up for Alex Lifeson and Getty lead of rush thank you guys [Applause]

Channel: undefined

Views: 247,123

Rating: 4.9200401 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ZrstPbrL1ss

Length: 43min 56sec (2636 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

Why didn’t Getty ever ask Neil about writing a book Neil is a beautiful author and all the books he’s written each one is so articulate in the information that he expresses through his travels I’m sure he could’ve helped Getty express the bass guitarIn a very beautiful way just wondering

[u/inpacevenio]

I have the ever-gnawing sensation that Neil was never part of their band, despite making music with them for decades.