While Other Bands From the 70's Play for Beer Money, Rush Sells Out Arenas
By Anthony Mariani/from fwweekly.com
After 30 years, Rush's brand of melodic pop-metal is
stronger than ever. Rush Tonight (Wed) at Smirnoff Music Centre, 1818 1st
Av, Dallas. $39.50-79.50. 214-373-8000.
As in every summer since 1974, these dog days find the Canadian rock trio
Rush touring the globe to minimal fanfare, even disdain. They'll be in
Dallas tonight, but you don't care, sitting there surrounded by your AC/DC
and Incubus c.d.'s. Well, it's your loss, because not only is a Rush concert
-- packed with three and a half hours of non-stop music -- an unparalleled
Big Rock Event, it's a testament to innovation, muscle, and skill, lost
qualities among today's so-called Big Rock acts.
Your cold, hard stare betrays your ignorance. You've never actually listened
to the band, have you? You should, because unlike nearly every other outfit
from the '70s -- save crappy Aerosmith -- the guys in Rush have continued
churning out new product about every three years while forcing themselves
into fresh musical situations. Though still rock's most imitated bassist,
having been validated in print by hipster doofuses Eddie Vedder and Les
Claypool, singer Geddy Lee has (thankfully) tempered his trademark shriek.
Drummer/lyricist Neil Peart, who lost his daughter in a car accident and his
wife to cancer a couple of years ago, has reined in his notoriously abstract
stickwork for the sake of plain ol' pounding, while striving to deliver more
emotionally resonant prosody. Guitarist Alex Lifeson hasn't lost any of his
touch, but he's become just as comfortable adding lambent texture as he is
detonating open chords. The band simply continues incorporating new
recording technologies and styles to stay relevant. Those other acts that
over the decades have shared the airwaves with Rush -- Styx, Heart,
Foreigner -- are all playing state fairs for beer money and barbecue, if
they're playing at all. Rush continues selling out Big Rock arenas. Two
years ago, they played a soccer stadium in S
Your second mistake is writing the band off as either ostentatious or nerdy
or both. It's true, Rush's core constituency is mostly other musicians,
typically white dudes who play air-guitar in public and know their ways
around a Star Trek convention. And, yes, the band's early, allegorical work
often referenced Greek mythology, Ayn Randian platitudes, and space travel.
But that was, like, 20 years ago. Is the squawk of Rush's geeky past enough
to daunt new ears? We guarantee that one unprejudiced listen to the boys'
post-Dungeons & Dragons work will result in a different, better perception.
This doesn't mean that Rush has gone moronic. They're still holistic sci-fi
naturalists at the mercy of metaphysical sturm und drang. The problem with
this approach is that some of their lyrics are better read quietly than sung
aloud. Emotionally fraudulent, these numbers court destruction despite their
intellectual fervor.
Yet for every pretentious lump of coal, Rush has produced about a dozen
gems, the best involving musical and spiritual liberation. Some critics have
said that since Peart's tragedies, his lyrics have grown more personal,
meaning more "mature." Bullshit. Nothing he's penned since is any more or
less substantial than his previous three decades' worth of wordsmithery.
(Could sympathetic critics be reading Peart's personal life into his words?)
Going as far back as the late 1970s, when Rush finally began shedding its
infernal mysticism, a "mature" voice capable of limning affairs of the heart
has rung throughout ("Rivendell," "Different Strings," "Entre Nous").
What's different is that Peart's writing on the human condition is more
prolific, beginning in the early 1980s with Subdivisions. Take the title
track, laced with empathy and angst: "Growing up, it all seems so one-sided
/ Opinions all provided / The future pre-decided / Detached and subdivided /
In the mass production zone."
The three studio albums that followed lacked this type of humanist spirit.
But while the lyrical content strayed, the music grew more airy, warm, and
polished, less crunchy and suave. Eventually these sonic changes helped the
lyrics blossom, reaching their apotheosis on 1989's Presto. Arguably the
band's most thoughtfully executed record of the '80s, the disc is an
achievement of both melody and lyric. It goes pop to evoke moods where
previous Rush efforts reluctantly reverted to flexing musical muscle. "The
Pass" is a good example. In dark hues, it observes a teen suicide. The
intro, a metallic call-and-response, pits Lee's thick four-note chordal bass
line against Lifeson's one-note kerrang. Then both instruments form a steady
stream of modular harmony that spreads out over Peart's methodical stomp.
Ain't nothing maudlin about any of it. "Proud swagger out of the school yard
/ Waiting for the world's applause / Rebel without a conscience / Martyr
without a cause."
With the exception of 1996's Test For Echo, the only instance in which Rush
consistently fails at its trademarked melodicism, everything after Presto is
solid. Roll The Bones (1991) delivered two live-show standbys, the
ballad-ish "Ghost of a Chance" and the invigorating "Dreamline." ("We travel
in the dark of the new moon / A starry highway traced on the map of the sky
/ Like lovers and heroes / Lonely as the eagle's cry / We're only at home
when we're on the fly.") Counterparts (1993), which arrived at the height of
the grunge movement, mixes the band's trademark musicianship with
uncharacteristically simple song structures and -- dare we say? -- sexy
vocals. "Animate" and "Between Sun and Moon" roll like turbo-charged
steamrollers, while "The Speed of Love" ambles slowly, mournfully.
In 2002 Rush cut Vapor Trails, the outfit's most recent studio release and
the record that served as Peart's catharsis. The one tune that speaks
specifically to the lyricist's travails is "Ghost Rider," also the title of
the book Peart authored about his post-tragedy escape across North America
by motorcycle. Anchored by the rapid jazzy rhythm that Lee and Peart conjure
and Lifeson's delicately haunting chord progressions, it's powerful stuff.
"Pack up all those phantoms / Shoulder that invisible load / Keep on riding
north and west / Haunting that wilderness road / Like a ghost rider."
Parts of the Vapor Trails tour were recorded and released on DVD later that
year. A live album from the tour, Rush in Rio, followed in 2003. Stuffed
with 31 tracks, the record is short on decent sound quality (torrential
rain, according to Peart's liner notes, is to blame) but shines as a
historical document. Lee's bass suggests a massive dragon whose flame has
gone nuclear. Peart's polyrhythmic drumming dramatizes speed, bombast, and
agility, even as wind chimes and other assorted non-traditional percussion
doo-dads leaven the gravitas. And Lifeson's fretwork belongs to the music
the way that the sky possesses thunder and lightning. As anyone who's seen
the band in person can attest, it's not unusual to hear a crowd sing along
to nearly every song and then cheer during instrumental flights. Stuck with
your pale approximations of organized sound tonight, you can only imagine
the magic a few miles away.