Rush
“No need to Rush.”
Rush was a progressive rock band from the wayward land of Canada. The power trio consisted of high-pitched wailing vocalist/bassist/keyboardist/violinist/sitarist/banjoist/samisen player/Minimoogist/Oberheim Polyphonist/Moog Taurus bass pedalist Geddy Lee, 6- and 12-string distorted wall-of-sound guitarist/wizard Alex Lifeson, and 4/17 jazz time 154-piece drummer/triangle player/percussionist/hat enthusiast/glockenspiel player/bell tree player/cowbellist/crotales/gong/orchestra bells/temple blocks/timpani/tubular bells/vibraslap/wind chimes/woodpecker noise-maker/part-time libertarian Neil Peart. Geddy and Alex are cool dudes; even Neil was pretty cool, despite also being kind of introverted. Rush is known for their complex sometimes-prog sometimes-pop musicianship, and whimsical adolescent lyrics drawing on fantasy geek themes such as hobbits, elves, slaying dragons, and defeating overlord super-sharks who wear silky capes and eat people. Despite (or perhaps because of) its cheesiness, their music can't help but make you feel awesome every time it rushes through your ears.
Rush accomplished a lot in their 21^12 years on this Earth. They traveled time and met Tom Sawyer, battled and defeated the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, defended By-Tor from raving snow dogs, spent a day in the limelight, made big money after becoming working men, single-handedly invented progressive metal, and done so many other things that only hardcore Rush fans care about. Their musical style is considered the prime inbred cousin between Iron Maiden and Yes, and they are, along with Dream Theater, one of the most famous examples of non-British musicians who make progressive rock. Rush called it a day in 2018, and Geddy and Alex reaffirmed the band's dissolution after Peart's death in 2020.
History[edit]
1968–73: Formation[edit]
Rush's original lineup, comprising lead vocalist/bassist/frontman Jeff Jones, drummer John Rutsey, and Guitar Jesus Alex Lifeson, was formed in 1968 by school friends in Willowdale, a neighbourhood of the vast canned foods aisle that is Toronto. Jones left the band to join his fellow Christian rockers Ocean and was replaced by Gary Lee, renown for his gargantuan nose and Ozzy Osbourne-esque glasses. Due to a fatal Canadian mishap called dialect, the band pronounced it "Geddy" and this version stuck. The band went through several phases, at one point changing their name to "Hadrian" and replacing Geddy and Alex with bassist/singer/hoser Bob McKenzie and guitarist/bartender Doug McKenzie, before looping back to the name Rush and the Lee/Lifeson/Rutsey lineup.
Before releasing an album, Rush worked venues where barflies threw beer at them, as a Led Zeppelin tribute band. Their first single, released on their own Moon Records label, was a cover of the Buddy Holly song "Not Fade Away". Ironically, it faded away quickly. There are rumours of original Rush songs pre-1974. Unfortunately, it is hard to cover a rumour.
1974–76: Singin' the blues[edit]
With engineer Terry "Broonsie" Brown, Rush recorded their debut album Rush (1974), originally titled We Refuse to Have a Self-Titled Album. The album showed promise, but songs like "Finding My Way" and "What You're Doing" were hints at the band's own grope for identity. "In the Mood" (with the Glenn Miller Orchestra) made listeners yearn for some real Zeppelin instead. But "Before and After" hinted at Rush's prog future. The band found moderate success with "Working Man", a blue-collar anthem Geddy wrote about his grandpa who was too senile to realize he could retire. It sold enough to fund a second album. But Rutsey quit because incipient diabetes made him drum too slowly to keep up with the rest of the band; apparently, Lifeson forgot to close their apartment refrigerator properly, leading the drummer to ravage the leftover cake.
Rush's replacement drummer was Prof. Neil Peart, a walking, talking, and occasionally hallucinating drum machine. Peart also wrote the lyrics, as Geddy would only write about stuff in fairy tales. Later, Mercury Records offered Rush a contract after watching them try out for Canada's Got Talent and promoted Terry Brown to producer. Peart shook everything up, sneaking science fiction and libertarian themes into Fly by Night (1975), such as "Rand-them", a tribute to Peart's idol Ayn Rand, and their first epic "By-Tor and the Snowdog". However, the band had not quite shed their Zeppelin mold yet, as shown by the title track and "Best I Can". The album's title was inspired when Peart lost his ticket to a daytime flight to their next concert. The cover artwork depicts a mighty Canadian owl. The legacy of this album is on a map of Canada in The Onion's book Our Dumb World. An X over the Northwest Territories says, "Crowd from 1975 'Fly by Night' tour still waiting for Neil Peart to finish drum solo."
“That's not bread...lemony cake!
There's no end to what they'll take.
Flaunt the fruits of noble birth,
Wash the salt into the earth.
But they're marching to Bastille Day.
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize!”
“Let them eat cake, she said, just like Marie Antoinette.”
The beginning of Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign resulted in the equally lacklustre Caress of Steel (And Other Various Metals) (1975). The title emerged when Terry Brown brought Geddy to the zoo and they saw seals trapped in steel-encased pools This particularly shocked Geddy, who had seal relatives in Winnipeg. The album is Rush's first true jump into long-ass music, with epics "The Necromancer" and "The Fountainhead of Lamneth" occupying the majority of the record. However, the other songs on the album were less progressive: "Bastille Day", a French Revolution version of Independence Day (Bienvenue sur Terre!); "I Think I'm Going Bald", a Kim Mitchell diss track; and "Lakeside Park", a college nostalgia song. Critics complained that Rush had still not mastered the art of making songs really really long. Caress of Steel was mostly remembered for its rad album cover. Robert Christgau gave the album a "dud" rating, saying "Caress proves that, if anything, awful cockrock will take over the world and outlaw good music, but perhaps in the future, there will be a lone hero to restore the musical order." Rush apparently keyed off this review for the concept for their next album.
After the low-selling Caress of Steel, Mercury pushed for Rush to create something "a little more accessible." The rebellious band gave Mercury the middle finger and wrote their most sprawling epic yet, 1976's 2112. Fans shocked Mercury by snapping up copies. The album boasts a 20-minute suite about a boy in a dystopian future where music is outlawed. The boy finds a stray guitar and is banished from society, but returns and overthrows tyranny using only virtuoso riffs and Ayn Rand quotations. Despite being a concept album, only half of it actually explores a concept; the second side comprises generic blues songs like "A Train Passage to Bangkok" (evidently about drugs) and "Tears" (evidently about Curt Smith).
1977–81: Progressive bloat[edit]
“God DAMN what a Rush!”
Invigorated by the successful 2112, Rush delivered 1977's A Farewell to Kings, Queens, and Other Dignitaries. The album nostalgically reviews the Medieval days, where instead of a psychotic, wanna-be President, there were monarchs laughing at your peasant ass. "Closer to the Heart" laments the state of open-heart surgery in those days. The epic "Cygnus X-1: Part I", about an idiot who flew into a black hole, is in fact the first installment of a concept, with the conclusion deferred to the next release — a prog album with a teaser. Lifeson began experimenting with guitar distortion, Lee started wearing fancy robes and playing the Minimoog, and Peart's drumsticks grew several inches in size, the drummer equivalent of dialing the amp up to eleven.
After the success of Kings, the band released their next album, Hemispheres (1978). It contained the conclusion to the Cygnus story, "Cygnus X-2: Cygnus X-1 Part II, Cygnic Blackholgaloo", where the idiot escapes the black hole through spaceships and Greek mythology, another Ayn Rand tribute, "The Trees", about economic and class inequality between maples and oaks, and the instrumental "La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self-Indulgence)", featuring an excerpt from that factory-type song you hear in every cartoon. After other prog bands were feinting toward punk at the time with cheesy renditions, Rush moved away from their prog roots after Hemispheres.
1980's Permanent Waves was originally intended as a King Arthur concept album as Rick Wakeman might do, but Peart scrapped the idea, ditched prog epics, and wrote shorter, more pop-oriented rock. Geddy began to yodel less and sing normal. Peart wrote down-to-earth Ayn Randisms instead of Medieval/sci-fi Ayn Randisms. The band added whiteboy faux reggae. This new style was showcased on the hit singles "The Spirit of Radio" and "Freewill", though Rush tossed their retro fans a bone with the faux-prog epics "Jacob's Ladder" and "Natural Science".
Rush's popularity reached its pinnacle with the release of Moving Pictures in 1981. The lead single and first track, "Tom Sawyer", explored the struggles of today's Tom Sawyer, the warrior who had a mean mean pride, while the followup single, "Limelight", dealt with how strangers are not long-awaited friends and kids should stay away from them. The album also contained the famous instrumental "YYZ", based on the familiar morse code for Toronto's Pearson International Airport, but nobody really cared except during live performances Peart would interrupt with more 20-minute drum solos. Pics was Rush's last album to feature a bloated prog epic, the eleven-minute Manhattan vs. London battle "The Camera Eye". Conversely, in "Vital Signs", Rush desperately tries to morph into The Police with fake reggae. The album reached #2112 on the Billboard Hot 2113 chart and was certified quadruple-duple-rectified platinum by the RIAA. That same year saw the release of the live album Exit...Stage Left, which this Rush era was in the process of doing.
1982–89: Synths and mullets[edit]
“It's tough to be so cool.”
While Geddy's mirror-shattering voice and thick basslines had been featured since the band's first album, 1982's Signals found an even greater affectation: emphasizing keyboards in every song, along with over-use of flange on guitar, in service of more cod reggae. This change in direction divided fans, as well as longtime producer Terry Brown, who left in 1983. However, it made Rush a smash with the the MTV crowd, generating the singles "Subdivisions", about the social shackles of suburbia, and "Countdown", featuring voice samples from the launch of Space Shuttle Columbia (which would suffer from Challenger syndrome in 2003). The band's next album, Grace Under Pressure (1984), continued the direction of Signals, while incorporating more songs about dark and depressing themes including the Cold War, the Holocaust, and eternal nuclear winter.
“God, imagine if we had to play like that now, or I had to yodel like that now? What a pain in the ass.”
After yet another change in style led to yet another producer, Peter Collins, Rush released 1985's Power-Chord Windows and 1987's Hold Your Cold Fire. These two albums put even less emphasis on Lifeson's guitar and more on cavernous electronic drums and meditative synths, further alienated the fanbase but increased the band's "Big Money". A 1989 live album, A Show of Hams (referring to the band members' personalities), featured songs from the Windows and Fire tours, with cover art depicting Rush as though they were in a painting from a hipster coffeeshop. This album was the last to showcase the band's one-finger-driven synth-based sound and their last on Mercury Records.
1989–2001: Return to roots[edit]
After Mercury Records dropped Rush, the band found refuge at Atlantic Records, home of fellow prog bands Genesis and Yes. The band took producer Rupert Hine's advice and ditched the synthesizers. They returned to a stripped-down, guitar-driven sound on Presto (1989), an album with cute little wascally wabbits on the front. It celebrated the new era with overly quiet vocals and thinly produced New Age music.
The next album, Roll the Bones (aka I Lost at Yahtzee So My Psychologist Told Me to Make An Album About It; 1991), would be even not-heavier than the previous one, notably featuring the first (and only) rap section on a Rush album: "Superman ain't got nothin' on me, Herdy Gerdy Lee." For the Stone Temple Pilots-esque Counterparts (1993), an album featuring sexual innuendo on the cover in the form of a nut and bolt, Rush hooked back up with Peter Collins and surprisingly told him to produce grunge rather than their prior synth-fests. Test for Echo (1996) went in yet another direction, by featuring a little man made of rocks on the cover. In 1997, Peart shockingly lost his wife and son in a car accident, and the band went on hiatus. A live album, Different Stages, was eked out in 1998, indicating the band's transition to a different stage.
Before the hiatus, Lifeson had collaborated with Les Claypool on an out-of-left field industrial grunge solo project titled Victor (1996). After the hiatus, Lee released the 2000 solo album My Favourite Headache, an imitation of Rush's pomp-rock that would give listeners their own favourite headaches.
2002–14: New Millennium Men[edit]
“I really like this album, yet I can't seem to figure out why.”
After Peart went on a spiritual motorcycling journey and recovered from his grief, the band regrouped and released Vapor Trails in 2002. Like the four previous albums, it was a return to a past style. Unfortunately, it was the present and yielded to the loudness war, with painful digital compression and clipping, but fans still bought it solely because it was Rush. Rush also released the live albums Feedback Frenzy in 2002, consisting of leftover guitar feedback recorded from the Vapor Trails sessions, and Rush's Rio Adventure in 2003.
Snakes and Arrows (2007) was Rush's last with Atlantic Records. Foo Fighters producer Nick Raskulinecz told the band they had gone soft for too long and should return to their hard-rock roots. Peart dropped science fiction, pop-psychology, and Ayn Rand, in favour of reptilian lyrics. Reptiles and Firearms become Rush's most popular album of the decade (mostly due to the instrumental "Malignant Narcissism" using a Team America quote), landing them new gigs at libertarian bars and gun shows.
The band then signed with Roadierunner Records. Clockwork Angels (2012) was a virulent display of angelic craftsmanship with impeccable lyrics about caravans, gardens, wreckers, and headlong flights. Angels turned out to be their swan song, as one band member would soon spread his wings and fly.
2015–20: R40 tour and ambiguous endings[edit]
In 2015, Rush held the R40 Live Tour commemorating the 40th 41st anniversary of the band Neil Peart joining the band. After the tour, Peart stated that Rush had largely retired from the music business and may have quit making albums and touring for good. Ironically, that announcement stoked fan interest like nothing else in decades.
However, after three years of leaving fans hanging, Lifeson said in 2018 that the band is done and has nothing to say anymore. Peart emphatically seconded the motion in January 2020 by dying, kicking off a year of disaster from Coronavirus to Joe Biden. Rush dallied with a merger with the Orkneyan heavy metal band Limbaugh and bringing back Peart as a hologram. One camp of fans claims that Geddy and Alex will renege and reform Rush without Neil, while another believes that Geddy and Alex will occasionally perform together but not as Rush, as Rush has done everything that they could possibly have done; their achievements rival those of Jack Bauer, Lennon/McCartney, and Oscar Wilde.
In 2022, Lifeson and Lee did a one-off reunion concert to promote the 25th anniversary of South Park, avoiding the Rush name so as not to insult Neil's legacy. The two had already guested on the show numerous times and had music videos created for them in the show's paper-cutout style. They performed their old hit "Closer to the Heart", but it didn't go as planned when they Rushed the song for ten minutes.
Members[edit]
Geddy Lee[edit]
Geddy "Heady Geddy" Lee is a walking nose and glasses known for his voice capable of shattering paper and musical virtuosity on the bass. He is noted for being able to play insane licks on his bass by literally licking it, without even using his fingers. He has funny little glasses, a big nose, a goatee, and a headache that he oddly seems to enjoy. His large nose is actually fake (note his present face), and he has a lot of fake noses in his dressing room as seen in the Roll the Bones liner notes.
Alex Lifeson[edit]
Alex "Lifeless" Lifeson is regarded as a master guitarist/instrumentalist and a pioneer of electronic effects and chord structures, who records all his songs in the nude. He was voted guitarist of the year by Rolling Stone, but was stripped of his award when it was discovered he was growing madrigal inside his Gibson Limited Edition '12 Les Paul. His guitar solos often render listeners unable to control their arms.
Neil Peart[edit]
Neil "Real Pearty" Peart was a balding Drum Lord and occasional hat expert who played lots of drum solos, in which he hit numerous things in an angry fashion to achieve a very John Bonham-esque sound. Peart was not happy with just a basic drumkit so he found seven other kits and tied them together with the sap of 2,112 trees, forming a kind of shell of the drums; Neil felt very safe in his shell. His solos were also known to melt people's faces on a regular basis. Peart had a strange liking for triangles, and even named his first band "The Eternal Triangle" in secondary school. Neil Peart's Hat, a beanie, was considered a separate entity. It is said it host all of his powers, has stopped famine in Africa, prevented World War III, and invented sliced bread.
Musical style[edit]
“I once saw Rush live. They opened for Genesis. Also, I once ate a raw flower. Also, I once juggled 40 Slippermen at once.”
Rush is known for the insane instrumental virtuosity of its members, who often pull off their skillz one-handed and without wearing underwear, as well as their complex compost and electric lyrical bodies drawing heavily on Ayn Rand novels and high school bathroom scribblings. Rush has changed its musical underwear dramatically over the years, beginning in the vein of blues-blooded hard rock/heavy metal on their unanimous debut, then making the jump to styles encompassing progressive rock on the next five albums. From Permanent Waves on, they shifted to a more stripped-down pop rock style, then on Signals, moved into an '80s New Wave/synthpop style with guitar shoved into the background, to stay afloat in a period dominated by The Police and Phil Collins. On Presto, they ditched the synths and actually played guitar again, but had thin and brittle production until they regained that tougher alternative rock/grunge sound on Counterparts.
Acclaim and recognition[edit]
“Rush are quite good. You might say, they give me the Rushes...”
“Don't get me wrong, but Rush? They're no April Wine...you know...I want to rock! R!”
Rush's three-member lineup of Heady, Lifeless, and Pearty has dominated old folks' home grampcore talent competitions all over Canada and the Middle-earth music industry, and has earned the band many, many ice-cold beers and minor congratulations in the form of asexual favours from their fans. Indeed, Rush could be considered the greatest band ever, but they're Canadian so they automatically rock/suck depending on who you ask. Rush has influenced notable modern rock, metal, and prog artists such as Mentallica, The Smashing Mailboxes, Primutive, Cacophony X, and Nightmare Cinema.
Though not as popular as Dream Theater, Rush still maintains a minor cult following in the United States of America and the band's native Canada. Rush still holds the current RIAA record of "Most Dream Theater Fans in a Single Parking Lot Venue After Dream Theater Released a New Album"; the record set was 2.5. The previous record was only beaten after one fan lost the lower half of his body whilst attempting to squeeze between two large picture frames being moved from one end of the stage set to another in an attempt to beat the crowds to the local record store. The injured fan remained alive for two full hours and was thus counted as a part of the crowd for the record. In addition to Dream Theater, The Rolling Stones are also known to be a big enemy (within) of Rush, and despise the so-called "Rushians". While Rushians believe in being able to get whatever one desires, Stoners believe that you can't always get what you want, but you can usually get what you need — this is directly opposed to the oath that all Rushians must agree to when joining.
Rush has been awarded several pieces of bread lemony cake from the Juno Awards, and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1994. Over their careers, the individual members of Rush have surpassed their fellow talented studio musicians with each member being voted the most proficient players on their respective instruments in magazine readers' polls; this has often led to dangerous bar fights between rock fans over which poll candidate is better, culminating in several arrests and suicides by jumping off skyscrapers. As a whole, Rush boasts 21 gold and 12 platinum records, making them one of the best-selling rock bands in history; these statistics place them a long fucking way ahead of The Non-Denomonative Insects, The Moving Rocks, PASH, and Aeronautica for the most consecutive well-deserved media headjobs.
And when you listen to Rush in a chain, all your other problems vanish. You don't think about work, taxes, or the fact that there's a stranger eating Salisbury steak in your bathroom. Besides, what else are you going to listen to? The Decemberists? Not likely. Come on, you're better than that.
See also[edit]
- Genesis
- Yes
- King Crimson
- Led Zeppelin
- Metallica
- Trailer Park Boys
- Crash Test Dummies
- Primus
- Klaatu (band)
- Uriah Heep
- Kim Mitchell
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