Neil Peart Featured on CBC Television Spot

One of rock’s best-known drummers, Neil Peart of Rush, was recently featured in a short piece on CBC by Rick Mercer.

What really struck me about the piece was that Peart just seemed like a regular guy off the street. He doesn’t seem that impressed with himself like you might expect a rock star to be and he didn’t seem to be putting on any kind of rock star act at all.

My brother used to be involved in the local music scene around Boston and got to know a guy who was studying engineering (sound) at the time, who has since gone on to be a very successful sound engineer who is in demand by some of the biggest touring acts.

This engineer has had the opportunity to work with Rush and once told my brother that they are all just the nicest, down-to-Earth guys you can imagine. Not the stereo-typical rock star types at all.

Just another reason to be a Rush fan, if you ask me.

Check out the CBC piece on Neil Peart here.

Classic Rock Search Engine

This is the first of the new features I have added to the site. At first you might think something like: “Yet another search engine. Big deal.” Well, this one is different.

What’s so different about this search engine is that it is not full of garbage. The major search engines do a great job of indexing the web’s content, but since they use automated procedures (often called “spiders” or “bots”) to seek out content, they tend to gather up a lot of junk along with the good stuff.

With millions of web sites out there, it would be impossible for any search engine to have people sitting there filtering the garbage out of their index. Maybe some day they will have programs smart enough to do it, but they ain’t there quite yet.

The other advantage is that this search engine is targeted. Very targeted. The only sites you will see results from are classic rock-related. I control where the content comes from so you will not see spam pages. You know, you’ve seen the crap that some idiots are tossing up on the web with little or no useful content and tons of advertisements.

If there seems to be enough interest in this, I may put up some other search engines as well. Maybe some that are targeted for certain bands, like a Rush (of course!) search engine where I would include all the best Rush web sites and blogs so you can search them all in one place and avoid all the usual crap you have to wade though when searching for stuff.

With a search engine targeted to a specific group you could search for almost anything and just about all your results would relate to that band. Say you were a drummer who wanted to find out what kind of ride cymbal Neil Peart is using in his new recording kit. You could go to the “Rush search engine,” type in “ride cymbal” and get a bunch of info about Peart’s ride cymbal without getting results for Steve Smith’s or Bill Bruford’s ride cymbals. You get the idea.

Go ahead and give the Classic Rock Search Engine a try. Like any other search engine, it’s free to use.

A New Direction For Real Rock News

I admit this site has been through more changes than it probably should have endured since I first brought it online. Since my last post was back in August, it is obvious to my visitors that I have not been adding a lot of content.

The truth of the matter is that I have a lot of other things going on with other sites that contribute a lot more towards my efforts to keep my bills paid these days. As a result, I just don’t have the time to be scouring the net for news to write about here.

That does not, however, mean that news is going to stop appearing here. I will do my best to post something I consider newsworthy once in a while, but more importantly, I have bigger plans for this site that won’t take up as much of my time once they are in place.

A while back, before the most recent site make-over, I indicated that I was going to transform this site into one that would help you find the classic rock information you were looking for and not focus much on original content. A while later, I decided to stay more focused on original content and managed to find the time to post here fairly regularly for a while.

Well guess what? Yes, I am going back in the other direction with some new features I am working on for this site that I think you will find very useful. I don’t want to say too much right now since some of these plans are still evolving, but I will says this:

Think up-to-date and automatically updated news feeds for your favorite classic rock bands. I also plan to add a feature that will give you access to the best classic rock info available on the net with some cool features that will cut through all the crap on the net that you don’t care about and take you straight to the stuff you do care about.

Hell, I might even add a classic rock store with classic rock CD’s and stuff. Probably through a partnership with Amazon, where I personally buy all my books and music.

That’s all I want to say about it right now. If any of this sounds like anything you give a damn about, check in here from time to time. I’ll post here as new features are turned on, so if you are watching the RSS feeds, you’ll hear about it.