All The World's A Stage (1976)
1.Bastille Day
2.Anthem
3.Fly By Night / In the Mood
4.Something for Nothing
5.Lakeside Park
6.2112
7.By-Tor and the Snow Dog
8.In the End
9.Working Man/Finding My Way
10.What You're Doing
Although never conceived as such, this album marked the beginning of an unspoken tradition for the band: one live album for every four studio releases. In hindsight, it was a fortunate accident. A band whose relationship with radio could best be described as strained, and whose Top 40 history consists of a solitary footnote, could only properly be judged on the stage. They were, after all, a live act in the truest sense—loud, ambitious, and unafraid.
The decision, then, to commit this 1976 tour to tape was a wise one. A double album, recorded across various North American venues, All the World’s a Stage is rough-hewn and sonically imperfect, but manages to capture the raw immediacy that studio albums could never quite contain. The production is far from pristine (technology and budgetary constraints saw to that), but the playing—young, fiery, and urgent—does more than compensate.
The tracklist reads like an early-career greatest hits package, and for many listeners, that’s precisely what it functions as. The second side boasts most of the song 2112, albeit trimmed due to time constraints. The full suite wouldn’t be performed live for another two decades, but the inclusion here still feels monumental. It remains the emotional centerpiece of the record.
Elsewhere, there’s a spirited medley from the debut album tucked into side four, and this comes complete with a Neil Peart drum solo—something that would become not just expected, but demanded, at every live show moving forward. His playing here doesn’t yet have the polish it would later acquire, but its raw inventiveness is charming, and its grandiosity oddly endearing. Fans loved it then, and they still do now.
Not every track lands with the same precision. A few cuts sound hurried, others slightly off pitch, but what shines through is the sheer hunger of the trio. They sound like a band who understand they’re finally getting a shot to prove themselves to the wider world—and are determined not to waste it.
It’s easy to overlook All the World’s a Stage in light of the grander live efforts that would follow. But there is something undeniably special about this particular moment in time—before the stadiums, before the lasers, before the sequencers. This is the sound of three young musicians on the brink of something extraordinary. And if the edges are rough, they’re rough in the right places.
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