Profile of Alex Lifeson on Famous Like Me

Alexander Zivojinovich OC (b. August 27, 1953, Fernie, British Columbia), better known by his stage name Alex Lifeson, is a Canadian musician, best known as the guitarist of Rush. ("Lifeson" is a literal translation of "Zivojinovich".)

The son of Serbian immigrants, Lifeson was raised in Toronto, Ontario. Lifeson's solo album, Victor, was released in 1996. He plays guitar and composes for the rock group Rush.

Outside of music, he owns and operates a small consumer product design engineering and manufacturing firm The Omega Concern, as a gourmet chef is part owner of the Toronto restaurant The Orbit Room, and is a licensed aircraft pilot and motorcycle operator.

Along with his colleagues Geddy Lee and Neil Peart, Lifeson was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on May 9, 1996. The trio were the first rock musicians so honoured.

During 2003, he played himself on the Canadian smash hit mockumentary Trailer Park Boys in which he gets kidnapped by Ricky as punishment for not being able to get tickets and requests him to perform a private concert back at the trailer park.

The Naples Incident

On New Year's Eve 2003-2004, Lifeson, his son, and his daughter-in-law were arrested at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Naples, Florida. Lifeson, after intervening in an altercation between his son and police, was accused of assaulting a sheriff's deputy in what was described as a drunken brawl.

On April 21, 2005 a plea deal was met between Lifeson and the prosecution by which he would be spared a custodial sentence if he agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of resisting arrest without violence. Lifeson was required to spend 12 months on probation and to pay all court costs.

According to the band's official website , Lifeson is currently pursuing legal action against the Ritz Carlton and the Collier County Sheriff's Department for what he calls "their incredibly discourteous, arrogant and aggressive behavior of which I had never experienced in thirty years of travel."

Trivia

Bandmates often call him by his nickname, "Lerxst," which also appears in a subsection of La Villa Strangiato (an instrumental based on images of Lifeson's famously vivid nightmares) from Hemispheres, titled "A Lerxst in Wonderland."

Tone and Gear

In Rush's early career, Lifeson used a fairly standard rock rig: a Gibson ES-335 guitar, various phaser and flanger pedals, and a Marshall "Plexi" amplifier. Beginning in the late 1970s, he increasingly incorporated twelve-string guitar (acoustic and electric) and chorusing in his sound. While Eddie Van Halen is usually credited as the inventor of the "super-Strat," Lifeson actually adopted a key super-Strat component — the Floyd Rose locking vibrato system — before Van Halen. By the time of the 1982 Rush album Signals, Lifeson's primary guitar had become a hot-rodded Stratocaster with a Bill Lawrence high-output humbucker (a type later made famous by Dimebag Darrell) in the bridge position and a Floyd Rose bridge, and as the '80s wore on he switched from passive to active pickups and from vacuum tube to solid-state amplification, all with an increasingly thick layer of digital signal processing. (Lifeson was the primary endorser of the now all-but-forgotten Gallien-Krueger solid-state guitar amplifier line.) In the late 1980s he switched to Carvin guitars in the studio and his short-lived Signature brand guitars onstage.

When recording 1993's Counterparts, Lifeson returned to rock guitar tradition: he used Paul Reed Smith guitars and Marshall amplifiers to record the album, and for the subsequent tour. He maintains this "classicist" stage rig today, although his signal processing chain is still so complicated as to make Pat Metheny's processing rack or Robert Fripp's "Lunar Module" look minimalist. Lifeson currently uses PRS, Fender, and Gibson guitars, and Hughes and Kettner amplifiers. In 2005, Hughes and Kettner introduced an Alex Lifeson signature series amplifier; $50 from every amplifier sold will be donated to UNICEF.

Awards

• 1983 - "Best Rock Talent" - Guitar for the Practicing Musician
• 1991 - Inducted into the Guitar for the Practicing Musician Hall of Fame

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