One Hit No More, No. 34: Zager & Evans & the Year 2525

Gives a man time to think...

The Hit
Rick Evans wrote the lyrics for “In the Year 2525” in 1964 (using the old film, Metropolis, for a backdrop), sometime after he met Denny Zager at Nebraska Wesleyan University and sometime before they parted ways for a while - Vietnam, life, etc. When they reconnected again in 1968 and Evans played his pass at the song for Zager, who found a lot in the lyrics, but less in the music. In Zager’s words:

“Rick (Evans) said he wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes in the back of a Volkswagen van after a night of partying and a lot of Mary Jane. He tried the song with a few bands he was playing with at the time, but the music wasn't right and it wasn't working. I thought the lyrics were intriguing, so I rewrote the music so it blended better with the lyrics.”

The reworked version became such a hit around the Nebraska /concert college circuit that an owner at one of the venues fronted the money to record it - with another Evans-penned tune (“Little Kids”) as a b-side, and the single blew up from the regional market to holding the top spot in the Billboard Top 100 for six weeks near or around the moon landing (so, July 1969). Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s a heavy tune that reports from a future dystopia over a burned-out riff on hippie-rock. To flag two takes on “In the Year 2525’s” meaning:

“…a Randian dystopia where, in one instance, people's actions, words and thoughts are preprogrammed into a daily pill.”

Or, more specifically:

Crash Course, No. 18: A Rush of Rush (and Other Things)

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.