Farewell Tour

As Primus prime movers Les Claypool and Larry Lalonde prepare to set off on a tour that pays tribute to Rush’s iconic 1977 album, A farewell to kings, they check in with GW and — of course — Rush’s Alex Lifeson.

- By Joe Bosso

Claypool quickly points out, however, that at first the band considered paying tribute to their musical heroes by playing that album’s follow-up, 1978’s Hemispheres, but there was one little hitch: “Hemispheres has ‘Cygnus X-1 Book II’ on it,” he says, “and we couldn’t really go out and play that one without doing the first one — that would be a little strange.” For a second or two, the band even tossed around the idea of covering Rush’s grand sci-fi classic 2112, but Claypool thought that such a gesture would be deemed “too obvious.”

“So we decided to play A Farewell to Kings,” he says, “which made sense because it has ‘Cygnus X-1 Book I.’ Plus, that was the first Rush album I ever heard. I remember seeing Cygnus as a kid and watching the Rocinante spaceship flying through the black hole and just ejaculating in my pants and thinking, ‘That’s the greatest thing I had ever seen.’”