The queue outside the Cineworld just south of Piccadilly Circus in central London is about 300m long and made up largely of white men aged between 30 and 50, but if you look closely you’ll spot a few rogue elements. Such as women: There are, perhaps, five or six dotted among the men. Most appear to have been dragged along, but a couple look like they actually might be here of their own volition. Near the front of the queue there is a group of three young, turbaned Sikhs, and there are a few Japanese fans who may, or may not, be tourists. But in the main this is a river of middle-aged white blokes, and so I, a middle-aged white bloke, join it. Happily.
We are all here for a special screening of a film called Beyond the Lighted Stage, a documentary about Rush, a Canadian rock group who last had a single in the UK top 40 in 1983, yet are now selling out bigger venues — often stadiums — in more parts of the world than they ever have done before. What makes tonight special for Rush fans is that Geddy Lee, the group’s lead singer and bassist, will be taking part in a question-and-answer session after the film. To get us in the mood and break the ice, tonight’s compere asks how many of us have seen the film before. Every single person — every last one — in the room puts their hand up, and a Mexican wave of laughter spreads across the room. The crowd relaxes into their seats and waits for the lights to go down. Five hundred outsiders have suddenly become a lot less outsiderly.
Rush, and Rush fans, are long used to being the butt of the joke — kimono-wearing, book-learning, heavily mustachioed Canadian prog-rock overlords never seemed likely to be at the cutting edge of cool. But what’s really interesting is how their fan archetype — that nerdy, computer-club, Dungeons and Dragons-playing, comic-reading, sci-fi geek — has moved from the margins right into the very heart of the mainstream. Rush has been uncool for so long that they are, finally, perhaps the coolest band in the world.
photo: AFP
“We’ve been vindicated!” laughs guitarist Alex Lifeson down the phone from his home in Toronto a few days later. “A lot of fans feel vindicated, too. There is a segment of our audience that are outsiders and some have grown into power and influence, but that bond they feel to us is still there. It’s very, very deep and I don’t think it’s like that for a lot of other bands.”
Lifeson and Lee were the long-haired, music-obsessed children of Serbian and Jewish immigrants when they met at Fisherville Junior High in Toronto in 1967. They had both persuaded their parents to buy them guitars: Lee had a thing for Steve Marriott, but they both loved Led Zeppelin. They both wanted to play in a loud rock ’n’ roll band.
“We also both wanted to play really fast,” laughs Lee, sitting in the sunlit conservatory of a London hotel the morning after the screening. “That was really important. We wanted to play stuff that was hard to play. We’re not so different now.”
The band’s first album was released independently in 1974, and it ran all the way from ballsy, Zep-like rockers to more ballsy, Zep-like rockers. It was only when John Rutsey, their original drummer, left a few months later because of illness that Rush began to morph into this most remarkable of groups. His replacement was Neil Peart, whose family ran a farm equipment business — the gangly teen was more interested in Buddy Rich, Keith Moon and Duke Elllington’s drummer, Louie Bellson, than in tractors. The band signed to Mercury Records and, after just two weeks getting to know each other, they played their first gig together in front of 11,000 Uriah Heep fans, and began to tour in earnest. Peart, unused to the tedium of touring, would read obsessively and soon the science fiction and autobiography and “junior philosophy” he was consuming turned into lyrics for his new band.
TOUGH TIMES
On the band’s debut LP Lee had sung: “Running here, I’m running there/I’m looking for the girls.” By early 1975 — on their second album, Fly By Night — he was tackling the words Peart had started writing for him: “His nemesis is waiting at the gate/The snow dog, ermine glowing, in the damp night, coal-black eyes shimmering with hate.” Oddly, brilliantly, it’s the latter he sounds most comfortable singing. The trouble was that Rush’s record company preferred the former. Just eight months later the band released their third LP, Caress of Steel — a fantastically lyrical and at times maddeningly overwrought album. It tanked, and the series of shows the band played to promote it became known as the Down the Tubes tour.
“That was a depressing time,” Lee says. “You’d pull up at a venue and they didn’t even expect you there; it was humiliation after humiliation. Your shoulders start to slump, and you wonder why you’re playing a rock club in Oklahoma City on a wet Tuesday night. The label and the management wanted us to follow a straight path, but we went hard left. We were convinced we would be dropped and end up back home playing bars.”
Instead the band locked everyone out and wrote 2112, an album whose entire first side was taken up by a concept piece about a brutally dystopian future in which a group of elite priests exert total control over the meek and mediocre: Excellence and individualism have been traded in for a numb, cowardly security. One man finds an old guitar, is fascinated by the sounds it makes and begs the priests to let the people make their own music. They respond by crushing the guitar beneath their feet. A voice at the track’s end intones: “Attention all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control.”
The sleevenotes offered thanks to the right-wing novelist Ayn Rand, while critics also detected nods to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Peart’s ultra-libertarian stance was construed by the NME, never one to shy away from a ludicrous argument, as being dangerously close to Nazism, despite Rand — and Lee — being Jewish. “I believe in the sanctity of the individual,” Peart said later. “In freedom of action without harming anyone else.”
While this debate raged on, in England at least, Rush displayed their desire for individual freedom on 2112’s sleeve where they were pictured wearing silk kimonos, in what they admit in Beyond the Lighted Stage was an attempt to have an image, any image. As a young fan I found that picture a far more powerful message and, to this day, I’ve never met a Rush fan who ever gave two hoots for Rand or objectivism, but I know plenty for whom Rush’s brilliantly openhearted, unafraid ludicrousness was just as much of a draw as their staggering technical aptitude.
“We were pretty goofy,” Lee says. “We came up through a generation where you admired bands who had a stage look. But we didn’t have a stylist, and our management was no use.”
But it worked out well, Rush was never less than striking.
“You’re very kind,” he laughs, “but sometimes it was more freaky. There were visual crimes. My huge glasses. When I had my hair tied back all the time. That was so bad. But my wife let me out of the house like that and she’s actually really fashionable — she makes her living in the fashion business.”
Has she ever banned an outfit outright?
“Oh god, yeah,” he laughs. “Plenty. But we were always connected to our times, that’s for sure.”
The release of 2112 turned Rush into stars, and they kept up their epic scope for two more albums — during which time Peart rewrote Coleridge’s Kubla Khan for the song Xanadu, another of the band’s signature numbers — then as the 1970s became the 1980s Rush changed again, just as dramatically as they had when Peart joined. Hair was cut, and so were song lengths. Synths appeared. Lee was listening to Ultravox and Simple Minds, while the influence of the Police and Talking Heads was all over 1980’s Permanent Waves and its massive hit single, Spirit of Radio. The follow-up, 1981’s Moving Pictures, is still the band’s most successful record and had its own huge hit in Tom Sawyer, a song iconic enough to have been cut up and refigured as intro music at Beastie Boys gigs, and remembered so affectionately it became a recurring theme in the 2009 bromance I Love You, Man.
“There was something special about that record,” Lifeson says. “Moving Pictures still makes me get into a groove, I love the way it feels. But I’m not nostalgic for old times. I’d love to have that hair again and be 40 pounds (18kg) lighter, but it’s a trade-off. If we were at the end of our careers, I might feel differently.”
But, of course, they’re not. During the 1980s the band took a peculiarly synth-heavy direction (too synth-heavy, some would say — including, it turned out, Lifeson). They were turned down flat when they offered a young band called Nirvana a tour in the very early 1990s. Roll the Bones, from 1991, included a rap, and 1993’s (hugely successful) Counterparts touched on grunge and included a song calling for more personal understanding of AIDS.
TRAGEDY
It looked as if it would all fall apart when, in 1997, Peart’s only daughter was killed in a car accident. Ten months later, his wife died of cancer. While caring for her, Peart started learning to cook, a process documented in strangely moving fashion on his own Web site, in which he offers thanks to the UK high street retailer Marks & Spencer for putting instructions on pre-prepared meals. The band didn’t play live for five years, during which time Peart — who now has a new wife and a 16-month old daughter — covered nearly 100,000km riding across the US on his BMW motorcycle. “These days we’re judicious with our tour planning,” Lifeson says. “Neil doesn’t want to be away too much.”
After 37 years, Rush is still recording new material and still finding new places to play (“In South America they cry when they meet you,” Lee says). More importantly, they’re still friends.
“That’s totally it,” Lee says. “That’s what Rush means, and that’s the satisfying thing for all of us.”
Back in his home office high above Toronto, Lifeson laughs out loud. “There are very, very few bands that get along anything like as well as we do. In fact, thinking about all the bands I’ve ever met, I really don’t think there are any.”
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