Video 22 September 1976 - Dome Arena, Henrietta, New York [Audience 8mm]

[Rush Archives]

Downloads:​

• 1976-09-22 - Henrietta (near Rochester), New York (8mm)

Song Segments Captured:​

COMING SOON​

Notes:​

• This footage was shot by Chris Young. A first-time audio sync of this footage will be coming in the future by Grommet2112.
• For many years this footage (along with 8mm from the same venue on December 20) has commonly been spread around erroneously labeled as being from the Caress Of Steel tour, which is 100% wrong, often with the Rockford 1975 audio completely out of sync. There is no known footage existing from the Caress Of Steel tour. Despite the visual clues that make it clearly not from the COS era, and the correct dates being repeatedly posted around online for a good while now, unfortunately it has proven extremely hard to set the record straight. Hopefully these audio syncs will help spread these facts into public consciousness.
• As with any 8mm audience footage from this era, full songs and concerts were not able to be captured due to the short length of the film reels.
• Also as is the case with many 8mm reels of the era, the film used did did not concurrently record audio, so the resulting footage was silent. However, in our present day era, it is fairly easy to sync these old silent 8mm film clips with audio recordings. Since there is no known audience audio recording of this date, audio from another show will be used to sync and bring more life to this very rare footage of Rush.
• A brief history from "Analog Kid Audio Video":

For years, people referred to the Dome as being in Rochester, NY. It's only been recently that folks have started listing it as Henrietta, NY (probably because Skip and Eric referenced Henrietta in their book), but indeed, the venue is technically in Henrietta. The commonly available Super8 footage that has been in circulation on VHS since the 1980s was shot at the Dome on 9-22-76, with additional footage shot at the Dome on 12-20-1976. People have long mislabeled the dates and location of that Super8 footage. I've even seen it listed as being from 1975, which is ridiculous, but as I mentioned above, once folks start to believe misinformation, it's very hard to set the record straight.

This footage was shot by a guy named Chris. Chris is good hearted guy who loves music. Despite people's claims that Howard Ungerleider appears at the beginning of the Super8 footage, that's actually one of Chris' friends in a field of marijuana plants. Chris shot the Rush footage not only because he's a Rush fan, but also because he intended to produce a short film based on the story of 2112 for a school art project; however, I don't believe Chris was able to shoot all the footage he envisioned, so he ended up duplicating segments and overlaying bits of film to pad out the footage to last the full length of the 2112 suite. This may also be why, in some versions of this footage, you'll see a clip of Jimmy Page's famous scene from The Song Remains the Same where Pagey is playing his guitar with a violin bow. Chris filmed that clip off of an old cathode ray tube TV and he included it with the Rush footage to visually illustrate the Discovery segment of 2112. Long story short, Chris' short film did not earn him the art scholarship he'd hoped for...

Fast forward to sometime in the 1980s. Chris took his Super8 film to a local video shop to be transferred to VHS. The live 2112 performance from All the World's a Stage was added as a soundtrack during the transfer to VHS in an effort to re-create Chris' original intent with the film. I seem to recall the guy who did the transfer was a bootleg concert video collector/trader... And I believe it was from that guy's VHS transfer that all surviving copies of the footage originated. Sadly, Chris lost his original Super8 reels around 2005 or 2006, so we will never see a quality digital transfer.

Every Rush collector in the early 1990s had a copy of Chris' Rochester footage on VHS. Various people attempted to edit out some of the duplicate scenes and/or the Jimmy Page scenes, and some folks added different audio soundtracks. To further the whole mess, when people began transferring their old VHS monstrosities to DVD, they also edited scenes and added in different audio soundtracks. This is why there are so many different Frankenstein monsters of the Rochester footage floating around.

Preview:​

• Until we create proper audio syncs, all versions of this footage are plagued by various quality differences and visual edits to one degree or another. This silent preview is one of the lesser edited versions, albeit perhaps not one of the best quality versions available. We plan to eventually create a new transfer from an old VHS copy for our "definitive" audio sync.
• Segments with Alex in the black shirt and Geddy in the white shirt are September 22, those with Alex in the kimono top and Geddy in the stripped shirt are December 20.

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