Tony Geranios
“Music was the first thing that affected my senses in a positive way,” says New Yorker Tony Geranios, who used to go to sleep listening to his older brother’s doo-wop collection. In his teens Tony started learning to play instruments, but he graduated towards doing the sound for local bands. “It was easier to do that, than to get round some of the egos,” he says. Night after night for several years he learned on the job, ploughing the local circuit. Meanwhile, his brother had also become a technician, but at a more professional level. It was through his brother’s gig with Blue Öyster Cult that Tony got to work on bigger stages, when the opportunity came up to be a guitar and keyboard tech.
Before long, Tony realised there was a bitter pill in his chalice. The guy he replaced had been well liked by band and crew alike, and Tony was never quite allowed to fill his shoes. Not only this, but the spirit of camaraderie was sadly lacking. “It was very competitive among the crew,” says Tony. “The circumstances of me coming in did not help my cause, I found myself being taken advantage of.” The band didn’t help matters – “They’re the ones who set the tempo.”
It was through Blue Öyster Cult that Tony first met Rush, and it didn’t take him long to realise that things were very different in the Rush camp. “They opened several times in ‘75 and ‘76, I got to know them pretty well,” he says; before long, they were talking about how he could join them. “They had to make a position for me,” he says. Indeed, they needed his help. “The backline was expanding, they had Taurus pedals and keyboards and no-one wanted to deal with them.”
Tony joined the crew on the ‘A Farewell To Kings’ tour, as assistant to technician Liam Birt, with whom he was said to have a passing resemblance. “We both had long black hair and moustaches, we were both working stage right, we were both young, beautiful and thin!” As keyboards became more and more part of the act, for the ‘Hold Your Fire’ tour Tony and Liam (who moved on to stage managing) handed guitar duties over to Jimmy Johnson. “By that time, my guitar tech duties pretty much came to an end,” says Tony. “The keyboards were so complex and bigger than anything else, they took up all my time.”
By now an engineer of standing, Tony was invited back to tour with Blue Öyster Cult on more even (and friendly) terms. In 1988, he contributed growling vocals, “this ‘seven, seven, seven, seven’ thing,” to the album ‘Imaginos’ and in 2001 he worked on two songs for a tribute to Blue Öyster Cult stalwart Helen Wheels, who had died prematurely the year before.