Getty Image / Scott Legato
In the latest episode of a Drumeo series where professional drummers listen to songs where the drum track has been removed so that the person listening is only hearing vocals/guitar/bass/keys/etc and not drums, the drummer from The Mars Volta plays ‘Limelight’ by Rush and crushes it.
This is a very cool series. Seeing professional drummers pick up songs in an instant and play true to the original without ever having heard the original while also putting their own spin on it, well, it’s been awesome to watch the series unfold. For this one though, I feel like I have to really go out on a limb to believe that a successful professional drummer *has somehow never* heard ‘Limelight’ by Rush, one of the most popular Rush songs and a proper Classic Rock anthem.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest we can all bask in the glory that is Mars Volta drummer Linda-Philomène Tsoungui. I once played Ouija board, or something like it, after a Mars Volta concert in 2008 at Terminal 5 in NYC and I (1) didn’t have a backstage/VIP pass but (2) walked through the wrong door and wound up hanging out with the band but was so spun out on cactus-related mind enhancers… I’ll let you use your imagination on that…
The members of The Mars Volta who were playing this Ouija-style board game recognized how spun my roommate and I were and wanted us to stay as entertainment. The night got weird. I’ll share some more details on that below after the video. Her ‘final’ performance starts around 5:22 in the video:
Side note, I managed to track down some concert footage from that 2008 Mars Volta show at Terminal 5 where I was out of my mind with the band. This video looks like it was filmed using a potato:
To pick the story back up, my roommate and I were out of our minds after the time due to cacti (IYKYK) and we somehow walked through the wrong door and were playing game with the band without any real awareness of how we got there. After a brief flash of clarity I realized I no longer wanted to be in that room so I walked out another door and the one I just walked through locked behind me. So then I ran through the next door, and the next door, and the next door with each locking behind me until I somehow ran in what must’ve been a large cirlce and wound back up in the room with the band.
This took all of maybe 10-15 seconds but felt like it lasted a lifetime. When I saw my roommate it was immediate relief and I was like ‘we gotta go now’ so we left and walked to the subway, still completely unaware of the bustling world around us.
We were so oblivious leaving the Mars Volta show that we walked right past all of the ‘police line do not cross’ tape in the subway and managed to make it to the platform before seeing like 30 cops and a body covered in a white sheet. Someone had evidently wound up on the tracks and lost their life. I turned to my roommate and said something to the effect of ‘I can’t look at this right now, we gotta go’ and we took off running.
Next thing I know there’s a security guard flashing his Maglite in my eyes at the Trump Hotel on Columbus Circle asking me ‘where do you think you are right now?’ not in a threatening way but genuinely concerned with how detached I seemed from the world. It was in that moment that I snapped back to reality. I looked down, apologized, asked him ‘please don’t call the police’ and walked back to the Upper East Side with my roommate as we came back to earth.
And that concludes the one and only time I ever saw The Mars Volta in concert. The night left quite the impression on me.