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| They deserve to be happy, dammit. |
If you tied me to a chair and compelled me to listen to the Rush album
of my choice, it would be their first album. So, on the grounds that my
favorite Rush album basically is not a Rush album, I am deeply unqualified to comment on them. I wanted to start there.
That said, someone asked and I was thankful for the opportunity on a couple levels. First, and most obviously, Neil Peart, Rush’s legendary drummer, and a rock icon if there ever was one, died quietly and gracefully earlier this month. The second level cuts deeper: a friend of mine from high school and a decade after, now long passed, loved Rush with the heat of a thousand suns. He loved everything like that, not quite uncritically – he had a rotating hierarchy as to which was his favorite album – but his overall enthusiasm for Rush (and The Rolling Stones’ harmonics) was sincere and unwavering. I can still hear him singing "the Keith parts" as we walked around school...
Rush was a large part of the background music for my high school years because of that relationship, but he wasn’t the only vector: I liked (and thought I) related to “Tom Sawyer” as much as your average lightly-alienated teenage male, but “Limelight” was always my special jam (and, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Red Barchetta”); Moving Pictures dropped for all of us, basically, but, turned on as I was by (first) classic rock, then college/punk rock, I wouldn’t have heard anywhere near as much Rush as I did because of that friendship (as well as several others, which, happily, continue to this day).
I had my favorites – e.g., “Spirit of Radio,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Trees” (why? you got me.) – but I effectively checked out after Moving Pictures. I have dim memories of “Subdivisions,” and I have a loose/possibly concocted memories of my departed friend’s bafflement at Roll the Bones, but my memory isn’t reliable and I have no means of confirmation, so I’d say my personal book on Rush started and ended with Moving Pictures and their most radio-friendly material…which, as I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, probably wasn’t their artistic focus.
Moving on to the music, I look at Rush the same way I look at classical music. I understand its appeal and respect the holy hell out of the technical side…but, even after a couple weeks’ listening, it doesn’t do anything for me. The biggest barrier is simple: the things that interest them don’t interest me; moreover, even when they touch on something that does interest me (e.g., feeling like an outsider), I don’t connect or even relate to the how they think about it. To speak ill of the dead, I’d rate Peart as one of the more tin-eared lyricists I’ve ever heard: they stick to a rhyme scheme, but the lyrics sound like someone reading a book (and a dense one) over the music, instead of playing with it, against it or off of it.
That said, someone asked and I was thankful for the opportunity on a couple levels. First, and most obviously, Neil Peart, Rush’s legendary drummer, and a rock icon if there ever was one, died quietly and gracefully earlier this month. The second level cuts deeper: a friend of mine from high school and a decade after, now long passed, loved Rush with the heat of a thousand suns. He loved everything like that, not quite uncritically – he had a rotating hierarchy as to which was his favorite album – but his overall enthusiasm for Rush (and The Rolling Stones’ harmonics) was sincere and unwavering. I can still hear him singing "the Keith parts" as we walked around school...
Rush was a large part of the background music for my high school years because of that relationship, but he wasn’t the only vector: I liked (and thought I) related to “Tom Sawyer” as much as your average lightly-alienated teenage male, but “Limelight” was always my special jam (and, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Red Barchetta”); Moving Pictures dropped for all of us, basically, but, turned on as I was by (first) classic rock, then college/punk rock, I wouldn’t have heard anywhere near as much Rush as I did because of that friendship (as well as several others, which, happily, continue to this day).
I had my favorites – e.g., “Spirit of Radio,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Trees” (why? you got me.) – but I effectively checked out after Moving Pictures. I have dim memories of “Subdivisions,” and I have a loose/possibly concocted memories of my departed friend’s bafflement at Roll the Bones, but my memory isn’t reliable and I have no means of confirmation, so I’d say my personal book on Rush started and ended with Moving Pictures and their most radio-friendly material…which, as I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, probably wasn’t their artistic focus.
Moving on to the music, I look at Rush the same way I look at classical music. I understand its appeal and respect the holy hell out of the technical side…but, even after a couple weeks’ listening, it doesn’t do anything for me. The biggest barrier is simple: the things that interest them don’t interest me; moreover, even when they touch on something that does interest me (e.g., feeling like an outsider), I don’t connect or even relate to the how they think about it. To speak ill of the dead, I’d rate Peart as one of the more tin-eared lyricists I’ve ever heard: they stick to a rhyme scheme, but the lyrics sound like someone reading a book (and a dense one) over the music, instead of playing with it, against it or off of it.
What I like or don’t aside, Rush rewards the hell out of close listening. You hear the quality of the composition at the top level – i.e., what you get when you half-listen – but if you tune your ear to one specific instrument, it still holds up. That’s what I found most interesting about listening to them – e.g., keying on Geddy Lee’s bass, what Alex Lifeson added when they dialed back the guitar, paying more attention to what else Peart brought to percussion besides drums. To float a theory, the more you like you like mechanics, the more you’ll like Rush.
Opinions aside, I did a (very) little poking around Rush’s history to see what I didn’t know and to pick some lazy assumptions. To start with the latter, it sounds like Peart took over lyric-writing duties the second he joined the band, because who knew a drummer could write lyrics? (I’d always assumed it was either Lifeson or Lee, also, just to note it, a guy named Pye Dubois from a Toronto-based prog-rock band called Max Webster wrote the lyrics to “Tom Sawyer”). That Peart “joined” Rush at all was another surprise, but they started with a guy named John Rutsey, but he hated touring (also, diabetes), so in comes Peart…and a totally different band. The rest of the story tracked based on what I knew of Rush: I knew about (and avoided) their “epic fantasy” material (e.g., “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” “The Fountain of Lamneth”…”Rivendell”?), and I felt the pivot after Moving Pictures in something like real time, but would have interpreted their change in sound through one hard lens (i.e., they sold out to the 80s) instead of one with cleaner focus (i.e., they liked experimenting and got new toys for doing it), but Grace Under Pressure remains my least favorite album.
Because I stopped paying attention…more or less completely by Power Windows, I had no idea Rush continued writing original music after the mid-80s (because how many bands tour for decades on a stale catalog?). It’s a miracle they kept going really, especially with Peart losing a daughter in 1997, and then his wife in 1998. He tapped out for a while, but Rush still put out three albums after that (for the record, Vapor Trails, Snakes and Arrows, and Clockwork Angels). I wound up liking Rush’s later material as much as anything else; it’s less extravagant, or maybe looser and, personally, I think Lee’s a better vocalist when he doesn’t…y’know, swing for the fences.
That’s all I have to say about Rush, what I think of them, and how much of it is them versus me (I’m happy to all it 40/60, because they put in more work). In reviewing this, I went through all their studio albums, Rush to Clockwork Angels, while skipping their (reasonably celebrated) live albums. I pulled two songs from each of those studio albums and linked to them below, along with light commentary. For those wanting deeper (and probably better) reading on Rush and all their works, the guy who suggested this (@JfwellsPDX) forwarded a thrillist article that ranks all 180 of Rush’s songs. If you’re a fan, you’ll get more out of that than what’s below. But, here are the songs I kept, and why they got me.
Rush: I chose “Working Man” for the mullet-rock angle (this song killed in Cleveland, apparently), and went with “In the Mood” because I couldn’t get over Geddy Lee looking to get busy.
Fly By Night: “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” on the grounds that I still can’t believe they didn’t lose the audience with that one, and “Fly By Night” because…well, I’d call that the first proper Rush song; that’s when they sounded most like what they would become.
Caress of Steel: “Bastille Day,” for the bizarre theme (who sings about the French Revolution?), and “Lakeside Park” for a familiar theme (nostalgia), but also over-the-top delivery by Geddy on both.
A Farewell to Kings: “Closer to the Heart” as one of Rush’s easier/cheesier songs (it shows off their essential, and fundamentally appealing, earnestness), and “Xanadu” because it contains a musical passage that still feels like quintessential “Rush” to me (even if it only kicks in at 2:53.)
Hemispheres: “La Villa Strangiato,” mostly because someone warned me off it (but also because it’s quality prog rock that shifts between multiple phases), and “The Trees” for the obvious, yet still tight, metaphor.
Permanent Waves: “Jacob’s Ladder,” for its “prog-lite” approach (was this the beginning of dialing back the excess?), and “Spirit of Radio” because it’s a legit good song, my favorite by Rush by a long-goddamn-shot (yes, even with those lyrics.)
Moving Pictures: “YYZ” for the raw jam aspect of it, plus it shows off Peart’s versatility as a multi-instrumental percussionist (I’ve heard tell of a 10-minute drum solo, which, fwiw, would move me to leave the venue), and “Limelight” for nostalgia’s sake; I still love that riff.
Signals: “Subdivisions” for the familiar theme of fear of not fitting in; “Digital Man”…honestly, for no particular reason besides liking it more than the rest.
Grade Under Pressure: “The Enemy Within,” for how different it sounds from everything they did before, and “Kid Gloves,” because it returns to Rush’s recurring theme of alienation.
Power Windows: “Territories” because I like how slashing it sounds, it’s a really nice guitar-forward sound; and “Emotion Detector” for the way it typifies their synth-heavy era.
Hold Your Fire: “Time Stand Still,” because I think it’s their best song from their synth era (the vocal assist from Aimee Mann fills in a blank); “Lock and Key” for reasons of composition.
Presto: “Superconductor,” which is why “Footloose” has been in my head the past few days, and “Red Tide” for the more subtle (and, for me, welcome) return to a guitar-forward sound.
Roll the Bones: “Roll the Bones,” for the actual rap…esque passages (at 3:13). Respect for putting your own spin on it – seriously, you can do that so much worse - but, also, don’t do it ever again. Outside that, it’s an over-produced hold-over of 80s iffs. “Neurotica” because I’m not actually sure where it’s going; the backing vocals sound sleepy.
Counterparts: I like “Cut to the Chase” for being one of those songs that starts slowly, but adds pieces and dimension as it goes, and “Alien Shore” because I think the lyric “Sex is not a competition/sex is not a job description” caught my ear...especially in context.
Test for Echo: “Dog Years” because it kinda rocks (and yet is still nerdy somehow), and “Virtuality” for the same reason (both of them, with an emphasis on the latter).
Vapor Trails: “Secret Touch” for its hints at a band with serious potential to age well (then the funk-bass explodes, and that’s OK); “Vapor Trail” as a nice, early-2000s update of the “Rush sound.”
Snakes & Arrows: “Bravest Face” for the glimpses of how they could have aged into something interesting; “Malignant Narcissism,” for a virtuoso’s take on industrial rock (I actually dragged this one to a playlist).
Clockwork Angels: “Seven Cities of Gold” because it continues “Malignant Narcissism’s” vein (industrial+), “The Garden” for a better version of the same.
2112: You were wondering where it was, right? The answer is “2112: Overture/The Temples of Syrinx/Discovery/Presentation/Oracle/Soliloquy/Grand Finale – Medley,” which I include to show Rush’s excess (and buried at the end of the playlist), whether you like it or not, and neither position is a crime. I chose “Lessons” from a combination of pure exhaustion from the "Overture," but also because I like how the guitar kicks in at 1:08, but also that care-free rhythm leading up to it. You could roller-skate to that shit.
For what it’s worth, everything I listened to this week improved my opinion of Rush – and that holds even if I’ll never listen to them again. They are a very good, thoughtful, and – this is big for me – unique band, three guys who did something no one else could do, and they did it well. Rush means a lot to a lot of people, including someone I once knew very well. It’s affecting and strange to wonder how Matt (that’s my friend) would have reacted to losing a life-long idol like Neil Peart. I hate that I can’t have that conversation with him, and I hate that he’s been gone for 20 years (or so), but I’m also happy that I took a couple weeks to listen closely to a band he loved, and to think of him again.
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