Laura Secord Secondary School, St. Catharines, Ontario, May 15, 1974


"In the basement of Anthem, Rush's Toronto management company, there sat an old video tape in an obscure mid-1970s format. It was apparently labelled 'Pinkpop,' referring to a Dutch music festival, but no one was sure. But that one old video tape was so outmoded - using an early cassette standard called EIAJ-II - that it had to be sent to Los Angeles to be transferred to digital video. What came back was the Holy Grail of Rushdom. It wasn't from a performance at Pinkpop. It showed the band, still in its Led Zeppelin phase and with original drummer John Rutsey, playing in front of an audience of high-school kids at Laura Secord Secondary in St. Catharines, Ont. The band is rockin', if generically so, and barely older than the kids clapping along." - TheGlobeAndMail.com, April 15, 2010.

"With the gradual rise in stature that airplay conferred, my mother began to look kindlier on my chosen profession. And after we played a rousing show at Laura Secord Secondary School in St. Catharines that was televised on Canadian Bandstand, broadcast from CKCO in Kitchener, if anyone asked what her son did for a living, she could say with no small measure of naches, 'Oh, yes-he's an entertainer. And he's on the television.' It's a curiosity I urge you to look up on YouTube if you haven't already seen it-if for no other reason than to clock the earliest video documentation of my first Fender bass (before it was carved into a dune buggy sky-blue teardrop shape), my groovy ear pendant and Alex's necklace, Rutsey addressing the listless teenage audience from behind his drum kit and the spectacle of the emcee in his natty plaid suit." - Geddy Lee, My Effin' Life