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Their Musical Legacy in 11 Songs October 22nd, 2024 |
From the band’s early days in the Toronto music scene to their multiple Grammy wins to the aftermath of drummer Neil Peart’s death, Rush remains one of the most beloved rock bands of all time. Renowned for their stylistic range, integrity, and legendary technical skill, the band’s wry sense of humor and humility have also resonated with fans internationally. After more than four decades and nineteen studio albums, they've produced a rich body of work that continues to enthrall millions of listeners, new and old.
From “Xanadu” to “Time Stand Still” and beyond, Cranking Up Rush provides a whirlwind tour of 11 essential Rush tracks. It covers every era of their output — from their teenage years to their final tour in 2015 — and highlights what truly makes Rush the Spirit of Radio.
Bloomsbury Publishing Group, Inc.
Copyright © 2024
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 “Working Man’ — Three Travelers of Willowdale
2 “Anthem” — Neil Peart, Parts Manager
3 “Xanadu” — The Epic Years
4 “The Spirit of Radio” — Reinvention
5 “Tom Sawyer” — Imperial Phase
6 “Subdivisions” — Perpetual Evolution
7 “Between the Wheels” — A Different Kind of Heavy
8 “Time Stand Still” — Prog Goes Pop
9 “Animate” — Power Trio
10 “One Little Victory’ — Ghost Rider
11 “Headlong Flight” — A Measure of a Life
INTRODUCTION
Teenage friends debate the themes of “2112” as one of them sifts seeds from marijuana buds using the album's gatefold sleeve. A drum student tries to nail down “Tom Sawyer,” dumbstruck by how such a seemingly simple song can be so damned hard to play. A thirteen-year-old outcast hears “Subdivisions” and thinks, finally, someone out there understands them. An office employee sees a coworker with a Rush coffee mug (“You like Rush, too?”), and they become instant friends. An ecstatic crowd in Brazil sings along to “YYZ,” even though it’s an instrumental. Neil Peart starts his drum solo at a concert in 2015, and a proud dad hoists his young daughter on his shoulders so I she can see the master at work. A twelve-year-old buys a cheap used vinyl copy of Moving Pictures at a record fair out of curiosity and a day later is obsessed with those three serious-looking guys on the back cover.
Many bands from the 1970s progressive rock era have maintained long, fruitful careers, but none were able to do so as gracefully as Rush did. And none of Rush’s prog peers had such a devoted — and nerdily obsessive — fan base. For forty years the Canadian trio of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart relentlessly pursued musical growth, embracing new ideas with gusto, always thinking ahead, moving with the times. They endured internal strife, personal tragedy, creative peaks and valleys, all while remaining best friends. They did it with an uncompromising attitude, their integrity fully intact, and best of all, with a sense of humor that endeared them to their audience even more. So loved by fans and peers are Rush that when the news broke in January 2020 that Peart had died of brain cancer, the outpouring of emotion worldwide, from fans to well-known artists, was immediate and overwhelming.
Despite selling more than forty-two million albums world- wide, the band didn’t receive the respect it deserved from the music “establishment” for decades. It wasn’t until Generation X — those of us born between the years 1961 and 1981 — reached middle age and started to supplant baby boomer journalists that the mainstream media would change the way they would portray Rush. Suddenly the accolades started pouring in, from their 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction to their first Rolling Stone cover in 2015. Only in recent years have books about Rush started to surface, like the one you're holding now.
This book will take a different approach than the rest, focusing on eleven of Rush’s greatest songs in an effort to explain why this band is so special. Knowing that Rush’s discography is so varied that it’s impossible to compile a definitive, ranked list of their greatest songs (this is a band that wrote both “What You're Doing” and “Mystic Rhythms”), I’ve decided to take a different approach. Rush’s career trajectory is such a beautiful, bittersweetly perfect arc that the focal point of each chapter will be one song from eleven specific periods in the band’s history, from their first album in 1974 to their final studio opus in 2012, with enough context added along the way, as well as a bonus playlist to help round out the story. Besides, there are so many great Rush songs that there’s no way anyone could mess up a list of the eleven best ones. There are no wrong answers! Well, unless the list includes “Virtuality”; then we'll have to have a chat.
When it comes to Rush, a lot of people’s favorite songs or albums tend to be the first song or album they heard. For me, that’s Grace Under Pressure, which I heard soon after its release in 1984 when I was thirteen. “Distant Early Warning” had me intrigued, and soon “Red Sector A” had me riveted. I grew up a long way from cities where Rush played, so I devoured any concert footage I could find on TV or VHS tape. When their Grace Under Pressure concert aired on Canadian TV in early 1985, it was my first glimpse of the high-tech spectacle that was a Rush show. Soon I was borrowing old '70s Rush albums from my local library and obsessively making tapes, gradually exploring their many mind-bending songs. In my mid-twenties I drifted away from Rush a little, partially preoccupied with present-day indie rock and partially because I couldn't stand Test for Echo (sorry, guys), but when the magic returned in 2002 with Vapor Trails, I was fully back onboard, this time as a freelance music journalist. Those final thirteen years were a glorious late-career renaissance for Rush, and it was a joy to cover that era, seeing them make strong, vital music, not to mention pulling off one imaginative, innovative stage show after another, right to their final tour in 2015.
Due to copyright restrictions on reprinting actual lyrics from the songs, I advise accessing the lyrics to each song before reading each chapter, so they can give you a frame of reference for the book’s narrative. After all, and if you don’t know already, Rush's lyrics offer a lot more insight and imagination than much of what you'll find on the heavy metal and hard rock landscape, and you'll witness the personal and philosophical growth of that master lyricist, Neil Peart. Thankfully, Rush’s lyrics have been beautifully curated here. So, if you want to truly do a deep dive, be sure to keep a browser tab, as well as your mobile audio streamer of choice, open on your device. Turn on, tune in, and venture far through space, time, and back again.
If you're a longtime fan of Rush's music, hopefully this book will provide some fun new perspectives, or at the very least, compel you to track me down and suggest your own list of eleven songs. Which I embrace! If you’re new to Rush, welcome to the world's biggest, nerdiest family of misfits and weirdos. You're in for a very fun, rewarding adventure. It’s up to you to choose where to start. There’s no wrong answer.
CHAPTER ONE
“WORKING MAN”
Three Travelers of Willowdale
At first glimpse, the name Willowdale sounds like a quaint conjuration from J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination, as though it were a little village in the gently rolling green hills of the Shire, just down the road from Hobbiton, somewhere along the gently winding Brandywine River. At least, that’s the impression one gets upon listening to “The Necromancer,” a track from Rush's third album, 1975’s Caress of Steel, whose intro features a narration that mentions three travelers from that seemingly quaint, idyllic locale.
Far from it. Willowdale, Ontario, is one of many suburbs on the northern periphery of Toronto's gigantic urban sprawl, where during the postwar boom of the early 1950s, middle-class Canadians, many of them immigrants, settled to raise their young families. But it’s here, in this culturally diverse neighborhood (Italian, Greek, Jewish, Chinese, Slavic, among many others), where the foundation for the most influential Canadian rock band of all time would be laid.
Born on July 29, 1953, Gershon “Gary” Eliezer Weinrib was the son of Moshe “Morris” Weinrib and Manya “Mary” Rubinstein, two Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who met as teens in the Starachowice ghetto and survived imprisonments at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. After the war, Morris — a musician who used to serenade his future wife under her window with his mandolin — and Mary wed and immigrated to Canada, where they opened a variety store in suburban Toronto and raised Gary and his two younger siblings. Sadly, Morris would die in October 1964, leaving eleven-year-old Gary as “the man of the house,” a title unfairly foisted upon him by his extended family.
Like his father, Gary showed an acumen for music, first taking piano lessons at the age of nine. Like millions of other kids in 1964, Gary was a huge fan of the Beatles and obsessively listened to rock n’ roll on the radio. Although by the end of 1964 Gary would own his first guitar, music would have to take a back seat as he would be required to complete his Yud Bet Chodesh as per his Jewish faith: twelve months of mourning, during which listening to music is forbidden. To a young rock ’n’ roll obsessed boy in 1964 that’s an eternity, a devastating blow, but Gary, true to his faith and loyal to his mother, honored the tradition as he prepared to enter junior high school.
Aleksandar Zivojinovic was born on August 27, 1953, in the mountain town of Fernie, British Columbia, to parents Nenad and Melanija, two Serbian immigrants from Yugoslavia. Nenad worked in a nearby mine but suffered a back injury when Alex was two years old, and shortly after, in April 1955, the family moved to suburban Toronto. Melanija, who was all too familiar with racial turmoil in Yugoslavia, encouraged Alex and his sister to respect racial diversity, and the effervescent Alex thrived in culturally rich Willowdale, his humorous antics endearing him to his classmates.
Like Gary Weinrib’s parents, Nenad and Melanija encouraged Alex to pursue a musical education, and as a preteen he started taking viola lessons. A kid in the early 1960s, with the youth culture exploding around him, Alex was gifted an eleven-dollar Kent classical guitar for Christmas in 1965. Hungry for an amplifier, Alex saved up for a cheap Kent amp but taped the word “Vox” to it to make it look more professional. Eventually, the now-obsessed young musician bought a fifty-nine-dollar Conora solid-body electric guitar, which he would paint in psychedelic colors, just like his hero, Eric Clapton of Cream.
At Fisherville Junior High, Gary — whose nickname had become “Geddy” after the way his mother would pronounce his name in her Yiddish accent — had a buddy named Steve Shutt, who happened to know a goofy kid named Alex Zivojinovic. Geddy was pretty good at guitar, as was Alex, and Steve suggested the two of them get together and jam sometime. Geddy and Alex quickly hit it off, bonding over their desire to learn their favorite British Invasion songs. Geddy would decide to take up the bass, and the jam sessions began in earnest. As for their mutual friend Steve, he preferred hockey, and would go on to have a Hall of Fame career as a star forward for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s. But that’s another story.
New best friends Geddy and Alex would jam loudly for hours at a time in the basement of Geddy’s house. At that time, it was all mere fun for the two thirteen-year-olds, and things didn't start to get serious until Alex's friend John Rutsey came along. Although he was only months older than Alex and Geddy, John was a lot more mature, outgoing, and forward-thinking, not to mention a damn good drummer and a more stylish dresser than the other two. Geddy and Alex would eventually grow into a phenomenal collaborative team, but it wouldn't have happened without the influence of the ambitious Rutsey in those early days.
As close as they were, Geddy and Alex would not perform in a proper, working rock band together until 1968, when they had just turned fifteen. Remarkably experienced for a young teenager, Rutsey would play in local bands the Guilde and Summer Wind before forming the Lost Cause with Alex in late 1967. That band would split, and Alex and John would form the Projection the following year. Neither were big fans of that band name, and John’s brother Bill suggested a shorter name, something that would feel immediate, impactful. One name he came up with was Rush, which John took an instant liking to.
With bassist Jeff Jones, Rush played their first gig at the Coff-In, located in the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church, on September 18, 1968. Jones, who viewed Rush as a casual project, was a no-show for Rush’s second show a week later, and Alex called Geddy to fill in on bass and vocals. After a hasty two-hour rehearsal, the first classic incarnation of Rush played its inaugural gig, which went so well that the trio started booking all-ages shows across Toronto. Because they were all underage (the legal drinking age in Ontario was twenty-one at the time) Rutsey, Weinrib, and Zivojinovic cleverly booked high school dances, playing in school gymnasiums on weekends. By connecting face-to-face with teenagers, rock ’n’ roll’s most important demographic, Rush steadily made a name for themselves on the local circuit.
In 1969, aspiring promoter Ray Danniels showed interest in the band and soon became their manager. Personalities initially clashed between Danniels and Weinrib, and Geddy was ousted from the band. Rutsey and Zivojinovic would form Hadrian, while Weinrib would form a couple of heavy blues rock bands called Ogilvie and Judd. At the same time, a band called Led Zeppelin released their epochal debut album, which had a transformative influence on seventeen-year old Weinrib.
Zeppelin’s mastery of heavy blues dynamics — on full display on such songs as “What Is and What Shall Never Be” and “How Many More Times” — permanently changed how far a rock ’n’ roll band could go: John Bonham’s drums sounded massive, Jimmy Page's riffs were towering, John Paul Jones anchored those monstrous grooves with grace and power, and Robert Plant could scream like no rock singer had screamed before. Or at least since Little Richard. As soon as he heard Plant howling away, Weinrib followed suit and began singing in his soon-to-be trademark upper-register scream. By September of 1969 Hadrian had imploded, leaving John and Alex without a band. With Judd petering out as well, the timing was perfect: Danniels contacted Weinrib, fences were mended, and Rush was back intact. Permanently.
By 1971 Rush were starting to gain serious momentum. John, Geddy, and Alex bonded over the heavier guitar bands at the time — Cream, Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, Jimi Hendrix — and their sound started to reflect it. The boys would cover songs by those artists, as well as tracks by the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, John Mayall, Ten Years After, and Traffic. The more experience they acquired, the more confident Geddy and Alex felt when it came to composition, and the high school sets started to feature original music. Still, though, it was left to the gregarious Rutsey to banter with audiences and introduce songs from behind his kit because his bandmates were too shy.
When Ontario dropped the legal drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen on January 1, 1971, it was perfect timing for Rush. On the cusp of turning eighteen themselves, Rutsey, Zivojinovic, and Weinrib had honed their skills over the past year and were fully prepared to play the local bar circuit. Rush would play their first club show that spring and would gradually play more and more shows in Toronto through 1972, even touring northern Ontario, playing to rough crowds in gritty small-town bars. Meanwhile, Geddy and Alex decided to take on stage names: Gary Weinrib chose to combine his long-running nickname and his middle name. Alex Zivojinovic, on the other hand, had a clever idea. Translated semi-literally from Serbian, “Zivojinovic” means “son of life” in English, so Alex decided to have some fun with it. From then on, it would be Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, an inseparable duo that would eventually become known the world over.
In 1973 the three twenty-year-olds were already veterans of the Toronto music scene, on the verge of outgrowing it in fact, and the next logical step was a debut album. Sadly, for Ray Danniels and Rush, there were no takers. The Canadian mainstream music scene circa 1973 could be generously described as idiosyncratic. The homegrown music that was charting at the time was either soft rock, folk, pure schmaltz, or all of the above: Anne Murray, Terry Jacks, Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Thomas, the Stampeders. April Wine was still years away from embracing riff rock, and the Guess Who always held the volume of their otherwise fun music back a degree or two. By comparison, Rush sounded far too aggressive for the Canadian mainstream, and considering Geddy Lee’s piercing wail, too extreme. The only mainstream Canadian band that came closest to Rush’s boisterousness was Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who within a year would be blowing up all over the United States, which in time would help Rush immeasurably. But we'll get to that part.
Although heavy rock was just starting to percolate in America (Montrose’s landmark debut album came out in 1973, as did Blue Oyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation), the bulk of that style of music was still coming out of the UK: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Budgie, King Crimson, Status Quo, Foghat, Hawkwind, Wishbone Ash, Uriah Heep, Nazareth. The US record labels’ attitude toward new artists was to wait and see what the next trend would be, and even worse, the Canadian attitude was to wait and see which Canadian band attracted attention from the Americans. Ray Danniels had no other choice than to create his own independent label, Moon Records, and in spring 1973 Rush booked some cheap, after-midnight time in Eastern Sound Studios with producer Dave Stock to lay down tracks that would hopefully become that first long player.
For their first single, Rush released a cover of the Buddy Holly standard “Not Fade Away,” an audience favorite at Rush’s bar shows. Backing “Not Fade Away” on the B-side was the Rush original “You Can't Fight It,” written by Lee and Rutsey in 1971. Its lively boogie is decent, but it pales in comparison to what folks would hear from the band a year later. Stock, whose background was English pop, didn’t exactly know how to get the best out of such a riff-driven band as Rush, and the resulting single sounded watered-down to the point of flavorless. While the single sold out — Manya Weinrib’s store in Newmarket bought plenty of copies — the band was frustrated with the results of their first time in the studio.
Enter Terry Brown. Like Stock, Brown was a British expat residing in Toronto, but he had a much deeper rock background than his peer. As a young mixer and recording engineer in London, he worked with Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Traffic, Procol Harum, and, most notably, the Who. Brown knew how to record a heavy, guitar-based band. His experience working with the Who's John Entwistle was especially valuable to Geddy Lee, who cited “The Ox” as a major influence on his style of bass playing. Additionally, Brown was familiar with mainstream tastes in production, having worked on the first three April Wine albums as well as the Stampeders’ skiffle-esque smash 1971 single “Sweet City Woman.” Here was a guy who knew how to make a rock trio sound palatable on record without compromising their sound. This pairing of producer and band would turn into a phenomenal partnership for nearly the next decade, but those first steps were taken in November 1973 as Brown and the boys commenced work at Toronto Sound Studios.
Released in Canada on Moon Records on March 1, 1974, the eponymous Rush was exactly what the band strove to put out: a gritty collection of eight hard-driving songs in the vein of their heroes, featuring production that made the music burst out of speakers. The album unapologetically wears its influences on its sleeve, namely Cream and Led Zeppelin, and those obvious sign-posts would follow the band throughout 1974, as many music critics, while praising the band’s energy, often dismissed the music as lacking originality.
Without question, it’s easy to hear those similarities throughout the record. Opening track “Finding My Way” is the one song on Rush that feels the most Zeppelin-esque: Lifeson’s nimble-fingered opening riff fades in, growing louder and louder, until Rutsey’s cymbals crash loudly and Lee announces his presence with a flamboyant, high-pitched scream a la Robert Plant. He might be shouting about finding his way to a girl, but over five decades later it feels more like a mission statement: they have a lot of living and growing to do, and they're determined to somehow find their way ‘n their art, their career, and their life. With its well-timed tempo changes and attention-grabbing stops and starts, it’s a riveting opening salvo.
The concise “Need Some Love” and the Southern-fried “Take a Friend” keep the mood light, as does Lee’s oddly charming “In the Mood.” The latter song somehow rises above Geddy’s lyrics (“Well-a hey now, bay-beh”) and turns into a snappy little rocker that, while not exactly searing, still has some grit. On the other hand, two deep cuts serve as glimpses of what Rush would be capable of within the year. The wistful “Before and After” contains subtle echoes of Yes in its sunny opening instrumental section, while the wonderfully dynamic seven-and-a-half-minute “Here Again” shows how powerful a tool restraint can be for a heavy rock band, and it’s executed well by Rush.
Rush might be a good debut album, but its great moments are when Lee, Lifeson, and Rutsey lock themselves into a caveman groove and hammer out some glorious, knuckle-dragging jams. “What You're Doing” cockily struts like Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” and the riff is so damned contagious that Lee’s lyrics almost feel like an afterthought. It’s all about that groove, best epitomized on the albums final track, which thanks to some good timing and luck would get Rush their coveted record deal.
If you're going to write a song called “Working Man,” it had better be simple, straight to the point, devoid of subtlety. To this day, music for the blue-collar crowd still leans heavily toward guitar-based artists, and if an artist is going to sing from the perspective of a lowly shift worker, they had better get it right. You don’t even have to have blue-collar experience — Bruce Springsteen will be the first to tell you that he was never a real “working man’ — but the key thing is that you have to sell it. You have to sound absolutely convincing, because fans of that music can spot a phony the moment they hear it.
Perhaps it’s because Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson came from families that valued hard work and discipline, or perhaps it’s because since dropping out of twelfth grade they worked like dogs to even get a chance at playing music for people. Either way, they were driven and deeply passionate, and whether the callouses on your fingers are from construction or from playing electric guitar, what matters most is that the music feels genuine. And “Working Man” is as simple and as genuine as it gets.
Rush announce their presence with authority on the opening notes of “Working Man.” Again, it’s an extremely simple progression, just like “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man,” four notes on the fifth and sixth strings that even the rawest newbie could learn in minutes: E, D, A...E,C, D. It sounds quaint when you're practicing it, but amplified thousands of watts it becomes a towering, gargantuan riff that stands alongside the gods Page, Iommi, and Blackmore. It's interesting how a record so indebted to the swagger of Cream and Led Zeppelin would be upstaged by a dark, ominous riff that sounds more like Black Sabbath, and it’s smart that the band saved that moment for last. It brings the album to a thrilling climax, starting with Alex’ solo riff, and then Geddy’s impassioned first verse dwelling on the drudgery of day-to-day life at a dead-end job.
Rutsey enters with his heavy-hitting beats, punctuating Geddy’s lines with thuds and cymbal crashes as the verse continues, the narrator realizing that there might be more to life than being a faceless cog in the machine.
A songwriter choosing to depict the working class could easily be tempted to take a snarkier tone, poking fun at those who find themselves stuck in a lousy job, selling the fantasy of being a traveling rock star who has all the time in the world to do whatever they want. As it so happens, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s single “Takin Care of Business,” a song that does just that, was starting to make big waves in America in early summer 1974. People dug the humor of the song’s satirical notion that you could just quit your job, get in with the right kind of fellows, and sit back and work at nothin’ all day. It was simple, it was fun, it was stupidly catchy.
“Working Man,” however, goes for gravitas instead of humor, which is a big reason why the lyrics, straightforward as they are, hit so hard. The narrator knows he’s stuck in a rut, working to live rather than living to work. He gets up early, comes home at five, takes a moment to enjoy a cold beer, and it’s back to the grind again. He senses he can find a way out, but he just needs another paycheck first. Just one more, and he'll start saving toward whatever his dream is. Maybe a few paychecks. Or six months. Well, if he’s being realistic, a year. That sadness permeates the song; it understands its subject deeply. Life is hard, work can be hard, and you try like mad to find just a little transcendence amid the drudgery.
Similarly, “Working Man” smartly shifts toward something resembling transcendence. After a soulful, melancholy solo by Lifeson, the band stops suddenly at the two-minute mark and immediately shifts gears into a four-on-the-floor groove, Rutsey locked in a tempo that bears an uncanny resemblance to the motorik beat of early-’70s krautrock: head down, locked in 4/4 time with little variation save for a couple fills. This section becomes a fantastic showcase for Lifeson’s skills as a stadium rock shredder, and he guides his mates through a fiery little journey, his solo ebbing and flowing, building tension and releasing it. It’s a fantastic three-minute song-within-a-song, as though the track’s protagonist has found a few moments to briefly escape reality. It’s upbeat, optimistic, but reality comes crashing down as it always does, and the song returns to that monumental opening riff. That reverie is now a distant memory, and the sadness of it all is hammered home by Rutsey, whose cymbal crashes and drum fills are his most powerful on the entire album, stabbing like daggers to the heart as the narrator's resignation evokes devastating hopelessness.
In May 1974 Donna Halper, music director at WMMS FM in Cleveland, Ohio, received a promo LP from her friend and colleague Bob Roper at Warner Music Canada. On May 24, she played “Working Man” for the first time. Comically, the phone lines lit up with dozens of listeners asking to know more about this amazing new track by Led Zeppelin, and when the new Zep album was coming out. Requests for “Working Man” soon came pouring in, more Midwest radio stations picked up on the track, and record stores imported as many copies of the Moon Records release as they could.
At the same time, Rush was a week into their first run of shows in the United States, inching their way through the Midwest, and by the time they got to Cleveland, manager Danniels had booked them to open for ZZ Top, which would be their biggest concert to date. The groundswell from word-of-mouth publicity was starting to feel palpable, and American record labels came sniffing. The band almost signed with Casablanca Records, which had recently signed New York City upstarts Kiss, but right before they signed on the dotted line the band got a call from Cliff Burnstein, an A&R rep for Mercury Records in Chicago, who also backed BTO, whose breakthrough single was blowing up across the country. Burnstein had heard the album on a Monday morning and was so blown away by it that after several frantic phone calls — including one to Rush begging them not to sign with Casablanca before he could get an offer to them — a five-year, $200,000 deal, including a $75,000 advance, was set up by the end of the day, and Danniels and Rush signed shortly thereafter.
Little did Mercury know that Rush was in the middle of some internal issues when they signed the band. Rutsey, a type 1 diabetic, was struggling. Suddenly more and more shows were lined up, and John couldn't balance the band, the partying, and his health. A fan of the simpler side of heavy rock, he also wasn't thrilled with the sound of Alex and Geddy’s new material, which was starting to become more complex, more influenced by Yes and King Crimson. After signing with Mercury, Lee and Lifeson were ecstatic at the thought of affording new gear, but John was miserable, often disconnecting from his two bandmates, and within the tight-knit confines of a traveling rock band, that’s cancerous. Rush were now contractually obligated to continue with a heavy tour itinerary, and if that meant going on without John Rutsey behind the kit, so be it. They'd have to find another drummer.
Chapter One Playlist:“I Can't Explain,” The Who
“Crossroads,” Cream
“Stroll On,” The Yardbirds
“Beck’s Bolero,” Jeff Beck
“Summertime Blues,” Blue Cheer
“How Many More Times,” Led Zeppelin
“Last Song,” Edward Bear
“Sweet City Woman,” The Stampeders
“Rock the Nation,” Montrose
“Caroline,” Status Quo
“Takin’ Care of Business,” Bachman-Turner Overdrive
CHAPTER TWO
“ANTHEM”
Neil Peart, Parts Manager
On a hot July day in 1974, a brown Ford Pinto pulled up to Rush’s rehearsal space on Liverpool Road in Ajax, Ontario. Out stepped a gangly, six-foot-three kid with short hair who proceeded to pull out a couple garbage cans from the little car's hatchback. Compared to Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, who were long-haired, flush with cash and new gear, wearing velvet pants and platform shoes, and driving Sports cars, this dude from the sticks looked ridiculous.
Vic Wilson at Anthem Entertainment had learned of a talented drummer from St. Catherine, Ontario, via a fellow named Johnny Trojan, himself a drummer for Curtis Lee, another band Anthem managed at the time. Neil Peart had just returned from London, England where he attempted — unsuccessfully — to make inroads in the UK heavy rock scene, and he was currently working at his father's farm implements dealership to make ends meet. Apparently he was big into Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, he was looking for work, and after being coerced by Rush’s management to audition, he decided to give it a shot. Inside those garbage cans stuffed into his mom’s Pinto was a drum kit featuring two comically small eighteen-inch kick drums, and when he sat behind the set-up kit, he loomed over it like a giant. Surely this guy can't be serious. As soon as he started playing, though, he hit his drums with astonishing power and precision, his maniacal triplets echoing Cream and the Who at the same time. This guy was very serious indeed.
Neil Ellwood Peart was born on September 12, 1952, in Hamilton, Ontario, the first of four children to Glen and Betty Peart. When Neil was two years old, the young family moved from their farm near Hagersville, Ontario, sixty miles east to St. Catherines. A precociously smart kid, Neil was moved up a grade in elementary school twice, which only perpetuated his disinterest in schooling. Besides, it’s no fun for a twelve-year-old to enter ninth grade. The fact was that Neil was an autodidact, perfectly happy to lose himself in books and learn on his own, save for one passion.
Like his future Rush bandmates, Neil grew up in a household that appreciated music. His uncle, who was only a year older than him, played in a local R&B band, and thanks to the little transistor radio his mom gifted him, Neil quickly started obsessing over the Hit Parade’s pre-Beatles R&B hits that stations in Toronto and Buffalo, New York, would spin. He would hear such artists as James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding, and would become particularly transfixed by two songs as a teenager: Carole King’s shuffling “Chains,” recorded by the Cookies in 1962, and Sam & Dave’s raw, insistent 1966 classic “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” The real clincher, though, would be seeing Sal Mineo in the 1959 film The Gene Krupa Story, and after pestering his parents for a couple years, he would receive a pair of sticks and a practice pad. “If you stick with this pad for a year,’ they told him, “then we'll talk about drums.”
With only two weeks to rehearse for a tour opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann, Peart was quickly hired, and the new trio played their first show together on August 14, 1974, to a crowd of eleven thousand at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Over the next four months, Rush would undertake an intense schedule, opening for the likes of Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, Hawkwind, T. Rex, Nazareth, Foghat, and Rory Gallagher. On the road constantly, with few days off, the tour was a perfect opportunity for Peart, Lee, and Lifeson to get to know one another, and as the camaraderie grew, the threesome began to develop exciting new music, written and arranged between shows.
To put it politely, the lyrics Lee and Lifeson wrote, while serviceable, lacked the imagination the new, increasingly more aggressive and complex material demanded. Peart, whose nose was constantly in a book — much to the bafflement of Kiss — was more articulate than your average heavy rock drummer, so at the behest of his new bandmates, he assumed the role of lyricist. To have a drummer that was equal parts Keith Moon and Bill Bruford was an incredible ingredient for the rapidly developing Rush; for that same drummer to display an acumen for the written word, for fantasy storytelling, was akin to striking gold. Better yet for Peart, being given such a big responsibility so soon after joining the band quickly made him feel included, making it easier to fit in as “the new guy.”
Two new songs, “Best I Can” and “In the End,” were written before Peart joined the band, but he would write the lyrics for the other six songs that would make up the album Fly By Night. Swiftly recorded and mixed with Terry Brown during a five-day December break between performances and released on February 15, 1975, Fly By Night was a startling change in direction from the comparatively straightforward debut, with songs that ranged from fiery metal anthems (“Beneath, Between & Behind”) to wistful tales of travel (“Fly By Night”) to contemplative Tolkien-derived ballads (“Rivendell”) to Rush’s first foray into the structurally complex songwriting that would define their 1970s work (“By-Tor and the Snow Dog”).
By 1974, British progressive rock was dominant. Yes, whom Geddy Lee was a particular fan of, were at their creative and commercial peak thanks to landmark albums Fragile, Close to the Edge, and Tales of Topographic Oceans. Genesis was making serious waves with Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery was so popular that the band headlined the massive California Jam in April 1974 in front of a quarter million people, complete with spinning grand piano. King Crimson reinvented themselves as a formidable power trio of their own on the stunning Red album. Even the heavier bands were dabbling in prog: Yes’s Rick Wakeman played on Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Led. Zeppelin had expanded their sound on Houses of the Holy, as did Budgie on the classics Never Turn Your Back on a Friend and In for the Kill! Meanwhile a little band called Queen had come along with the raucous Sheer Heart Attack and were about to put out the immortal A Night at the Opera.
However, no one, at least in the mainstream sphere, had yet to combine prog and nascent heavy metal. Fly By Night married those two styles, meshing the intricate musicianship of Yes and Genesis with the raw visceral power of Jeff Beck and Led Zeppelin. Gone were the overt homages to Cream and groovy jams: the band now sounded much tighter thanks to Neil’s highly disciplined drumming; Lifeson’s riffs sounded razor sharp and nimble; and Geddy’s vocal melodies became more challenging and far less predictable. Like any other second record by a talented band, it was a transitional work, as Rush started to move far beyond the groundwork that the debut had laid. It’s not a perfect record, but its giddy sense of discovery is irresistible.
Fittingly, Fly By Night opens with the cannonading “Anthem,” a four-and-a-half-minute barrage of riffs, drum fills, and stops and starts that wastes no time declaring to one and all that this was a different band, one with a lot more ambition and a lot more to say than it had six months earlier. A crucial transitional moment in the band’s development, “Anthem” would pave the way for a much bigger, visionary, career-altering composition a couple years later. And although it would come to epitomize the band’s uncompromising attitude, the controversial source material from which it is derived would eventually land Peart in some hot water in the UK and Europe.
As soon as “Anthem” kicks in, listeners immediately hear how much different Rush sounds with the new drummer behind the kit, how the song has two intro sections, and how those two intros create a dramatic effect that acts as a perfect way to kick off this new chapter in the band’s history. Initially those opening bars of “Anthem” feel overwhelming: Lifeson and Lee launch into a crazy riff sequence that defies logic: four insistent, ascending chords followed by a nimble series of staccato hammer-ons and pull-offs, repeated three times before returning to the beginning, and then wash, rinse, repeat. As Lifeson displays far more flash than he did on the entire first album, Peart punctuates every note Alex hits, his snare beats going into overdrive. In full Keith Moon mode, Peart throttles the hell out of his chrome-plated Slingerland kit, but what immediately sets his playing apart from the rest of rock drumming royalty is how taut his playing is. Every single beat is precisely on point. For a passage this intricately arranged, precision ‘5 a must, and Peart wastes no time showing not only his chops but his importance, his worth, in this power trio.
After five furiously paced repetitions of that overture progression, “Anthem” begins in earnest, Lifeson launching into a looser, gnarlier, downward sliding riff that feels like more of a gallop, and when he’s joined by Geddy and Neil, the headbanging groove kicks in. A drummer like Rutsey would have drummed a little more behind the beat to let that riff breathe, but Peart's tighter playing allows him to propel the music forward. Seemingly overnight, the - focal point in Rush quickly became the drums: the power and precision commands the listener's attention.
After those two memorable intros, Geddy dives into Peart’s first verse, backed up by an understated, swinging arrangement that makes plenty of room for Neil’s lyrics to grab listeners attention. On the surface it feels as though “Anthem” is a run-of-the-mill self-empowerment treatise — a trope that would only get more popular among heavy metal bands for the next couple decades — but dig a little deeper into who and what inspired the song and things get more interesting.
Call Ayn Rand what you will: objectivist philosopher, mediocre writer, champion of selfishness, fascist, laissez-faire capitalist, libertarian, conservative, hero to everyone on the far right from CEOs to MAGA cultists to spoiled white males. Regardless of your opinion of Rand, it’s easy to see how her work would have had an impact on a struggling young musician fighting tooth and nail to make a living in the brutal, often corrupt microverse that is the music industry.
Rand’s 1938 novella Anthem and her 1943 novel The Fountainhead had a huge impact on the young Peart, who would have been around the same age as Anthem’s protagonist when he read it. Anthem’s plot is rigidly written, paranoid, libertarian propaganda: a twenty-one-year-old man named Equality 7-2521 lives in a dystopian communal society where everything a person does is done for the good of the collective, to the point where individuals are given numerical names and are referred to in the plural, while personal expression and free will are strictly stifled by the elders. Young Mr. Equality 7-2521 convinces himself he’s been given the “curse” of being able to learn quickly and question things, discovers a tunnel leading to relics from the distant capitalist past, conducts illegal science experiments, falls for a teenaged girl named Liberty 5-3000, sees his “discovery” of electricity vehemently denounced by the elders, and runs away with his woman to live all alone and start populating the world with “individuals.”
“To a 20-year-old struggling musician, The Fountainhead was a revelation, an affirmation, an inspiration,” Peart wrote in his 2004 book Traveling Music. “Although I would eventually grow into and, largely, out of Ayn Rand’s orbit, her writing was still a significant stepping-stone, or way-station, for me, a black-and-white starting point along the journey to a more nuanced philosophy and politics. Most of all, it was the notion of individualism that I needed — the idea that what I felt, believed, liked, and wanted was important and valid.’
There’s no denying Rand’s individualistic stance could help motivate someone like Peart, and starting with Rush’s song “Anthem,” the band started to dig in their heels when it came to dealing with demands from the suits at Mercury Records in America. For the next few years, that idea of the individual’s needs surpassing the good of the collective would play a massive role in Rush's own march toward artistic autonomy. They would do things their way, and if they failed and had to go back to their day jobs, then at least they tried.
The forcefulness of “Anthem’s” lyrics is echoed brilliantly by a great little touch in the last line of the chorus when Geddy hollers the line as Peart punctuates the vocal cadence with monstrous yet fluid drum fills. It’s the kind of stuff that instantly draws in any social misfit, catnip for introverted teenage boys in the mid-’70s, not to mention their older, weed-smoking siblings.
Structurally, “Anthem” is conventional, but thanks to Peart's presence and the trio’s ferocity, the song brims with urgency, the sound of a hungry young band finding its voice. Just listen to how they close the song in its final thirty seconds, stopping and starting, hammering out E-chord couplets and drum thuds with all their might. It’s all testosterone, ambition, and desperation, and while Rush would go on to write more complex and sophisticated music, “Anthem” is arguably the fiercest and heaviest moment in the entire discography.
Rand’s influence on Peart and Rush would eventually fade, but not before the band’s 1976 breakthrough side-long track “2112,” whose storyline closely mirrors that of Anthem and which Peart dedicated “to the genius of Ayn Rand.” By then Rush’s name would be ascendant, and a genuinely concerned British music press would inevitably confront Peart with questions about why he chose to side with a fascist writer, especially considering the world warred against fascism for five harrowing years three decades prior. Writing for the New Musical Express in 1978, Barry Miles was scathing in his indictment of Rush: “They are actually very nice guys. They don't sit there in jackboots pulling the wings off flies. They are polite, charming even, naive — roaming the concert circuits preaching what to me seems like proto-fascism like a leper without a bell.”
Geddy Lee eloquently told Paste magazine in 2015, “[Rand’s] point of individualism was more appropriate and influential in terms of compromise as an artist... . When you're a young band that’s in a greedy business like the music business, and there’s so much pressure on you to compromise your music and write three-minute love songs, when you read a book like that it has a profound effect on you in terms of reinforcing your belief that it should be about making the music you want to make, and not the music someone else wants you to make in order to line their pockets.”
Peart, meanwhile, would gradually drift away from Rand's teachings and embrace the idea of the greater good while at the same time humbly enjoying the luxury of being able to live strictly on his own terms. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2012, he said, “[Rand] was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile. . . . As you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many, many times. . . . Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we're all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into...a bleeding-heart libertarian. That'll do.”
Chapter Two Playlist:“Sing, Sing, Sing,” Gene Krupa
“Chains,” The Cookies
“Hold On, I’m Comin’,” Sam & Dave
“Close to the Edge,” Yes
“Firth of Fifth,” Genesis
“Karn Evil 9 Ist Impression, Part 2,” Emerson, Lake & Palmer
“The Song Remains the Same,” Led Zeppelin
“Red,” King Crimson
“On the Run,” Pink Floyd
“Who Are You?,” Black Sabbath
“Brighton Rock,” Queen
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Cranking Up Rush: Their Musical Legacy in 11 Songs