If you take the spiral staircase down to Geddy Lee’s basement studio in his Toronto home, you enter a veritable Aladdin’s cave with guitars and basses hanging from every available space on the tartan-covered walls. Classic and obscure models in every conceivable colour make up a lacquered rainbow of instruments in a room where musical history has been made more than once. At the far corner of the room hangs a hand-tooled bass that holds almost as much history as this entire home studio: a pale Fender Jazz model with a Le Studio logo imprinted into its headstock.

Geddy takes it down from the wall and starts plucking abstractedly at its strings. “This was gifted to me from a guy called Mike Bump and the Fender Custom Shop people,” he says. “The wood came from the door to the sound room at Le Studio. Alex [Lifeson] got a Telecaster and Neil [Peart] got a pair of drumsticks. I guess one of the ex-employees had contacted Fender and told them that this wood existed, and he took it upon himself to have it sent to Mike. We knew nothing about it, and so it was a very emotional thing when they arrived because all these memories of recording in that studio came flooding back.”

Le Studio, set on Lake Perry and in the foothills of the spectacular Laurentian Mountains (“It was truly a part of the great Canadian landscape,” says Geddy), not only marked a new decade and studio for Rush, but also an era when they would change the way they worked, how they wrote songs and, not to overstate things, their place in the world.

To understand how Rush were moving forward in 1980, you first have to go back to the tail end of the 1970s. After the relative ease of the recording of A Farewell To Kings, Rush returned to Rockfield Studios in Wales in the summer of 1978 – and hit a wall. Songs came slowly, creative energy was sapped, day became night, their working habits inverted.

“During Hemispheres we were like these monks,” says Lee. “At one point during that album we stopped shaving, we sort of turned into these fucking grotesque prog creatures in this farmhouse making this record, working all night, sleeping all day. Permanent Waves was quite the opposite.

“You have to remember that Hemispheres was the record that wouldn’t end. Everything about making that was exceedingly difficult. We were in Wales for far too long. I don’t remember more than three moments where we actually left the farm in over three months. We were very happy with the record, but it felt like we lost a chunk of ourselves in it.

“The other realisation I had was that I felt that we were becoming formulaic – these long, epic, side-long pieces were becoming inadvertently down pat; overture, theme here, repeat theme here… In and of itself, it was complex, but in actuality we were repeating ourselves, and I didn’t want to do that. So we concertedly tried to shift direction. You know: can we work in a seven-minute time frame? Can we put that limit on what we’re doing and see if we can make that more tuneful, more interesting and still complex? That was our goal.”

Ready to write in earnest for the next album, which would become Permanent Waves, Rush headed to the quiet solitude of northern Ontario (a regular thing for the band when getting ready to record a new album), this time settling into a cottage at a place called Windermere in the Muskokas. They fleshed out some new ideas, tempered by the notion of bringing some brevity to their songwriting. “That’s the thing about Rush music though,” Lee says with a laugh, “five minutes feels like twenty.”

Lifeson, Lee and Peart set up home, with all the equipment they had brought with them filling the basement. Throughout the day, Lee and Lifeson would sit at either end of the sofa, the two of them trading riffs and ideas on acoustic guitars.

“We’d write all day,” recalls Lifeson, “and record our ideas on a cassette player while Neil worked on lyrics in his room. After dinner we would get together in the basement, with Neil’s drums taking up most of the space, and we would work on the arrangements as a band. Although [producer] Terry Brown didn’t move in with us, he did join us from time to time as the arrangements began to blossom.”

“I spent a few days up at Windermere with the boys doing pre-production,” Terry Brown tells Classic Rock. “That was time well spent. The guys might correct me on this, but I don’t think we did any writing in the studio, it had gone that well up the cottage. We would still be fine tuning and making adjustments until we captured a take for the album, but most of that was happening in Le Studio.”

“We were very well-rehearsed and well prepared. The songs were there,” says Lee. “We’d had really good writing sessions tucked away in that cottage. I have very strong memories of writing Spirit Of Radio and songs like that there, the two of us in the living room, hammering away at our acoustic guitars, and Neil appearing intermittently with his sheets of lyrics.”

“Spirit… stands out for me too,” says Lifeson. “But Freewill and Jacob’s Ladder do too, and that’s just side one. I think we were very pleased that our writing was moving in multiple directions yet carried the sonic stamp of us as players.”

“The strength of the songs and Alex starting his fascination with remote control airplanes,” says Lee. “Those are my enduring memories of the cottage. As soon as we got a break from writing, he would go out and try to fly these planes. And of course they’d eventually get lost and we’d have to send out a search party for the plane! He carried his fanatical love of model aeroplanes to Le Studio, and we lost a few there too.”

Neil Peart visited the now near-derelict Le Studio in 2014 (a fire would destroy the site a few years later) and stood among the remains to reflect on the memories of his time there.

“It’s sad that’s it’s gone, and it’s especially sad that no rock band will enjoy that retreat,” he told George Stroumboulopoulos. “What it meant artistically and personally together, to work in the studio all day then go play volleyball at night. Those experiences, artistically and as a collaborative unit.”

Whatever magic was falling through the Canadian sky in the autumn of 1979 was turning into creative pay dirt for Rush. Each day unearthed some new gem. With all six songs already almost fully formed (this was Rush, so there was always going to be some tinkering), the band fine-tuned each one until it shone brilliantly.

“Freewill stands out the most for me,” says Lifeson. “It was such a challenging song to play for all of us, but I remember being so excited on the day we recorded it. I can still remember clearly sitting on the tall stool directly behind [engineer] Paul Northfield, with Terry at the console to my right smoking Gitanes. I’m sure we did Spirit Of Radio in the control room too, because that’s how we worked: on a stool, sitting behind Paul, with Terry there giving Paul a kick in the back of his chair every so often when he drifted away!”

Look back now at the photographs taken during those sessions, they show a band brimming with energy, each member laughing and at ease. Compared with the Herculean, energy-sapping task that was the making of Hemispheres, a band working in the dark and sleeping all day, making Permanent Waves was a relative breeze.

“It was the little things,” Lee recalls fondly. “We were more connected to our families – they were just hours away, not across the ocean – and we were in this beautiful, natural environment. The house we lived in was walking distance to the studio, through the forest every day. We were in this beautiful, natural environment. It was a more invigorating vibe. It was more spontaneous, and the album does reflect that energy.”

“At times, Hemispheres was soul crushing,” says Lifeson. “On the other hand, Permanent Waves was so positive and fun. We had come some way as a touring band, playing to larger and more supportive audiences, and all the touring made us better players. Individually we were all in a good space, and it showed in the way we treated each other and those around us. Life was fun and exciting.”

No doubt in part due to their preparation, the band ended up recording Permanent Waves relatively quickly. “Within six weeks we had the record sort of in the can,” remembers Lee. “Then we went to mix it in Trident, as that had been such a joy to work in even on the Hemispheres album. So we went back to London, and it was a magical mixing room and even the mix went very quickly. You never know what you get when got to make a record – you don’t know if it’s going to be a slog or if it’s going to be a treat. And Permanent Waves was a treat.”

The band started the sessions with what would become the album’s opener and surprise hit record, The Spirit Of Radio. Lee talks fondly of how quickly it came together as a song up at the cottage, and as an opening track it’s so very Rush – a brilliant pealing guitar riff, a complex arrangement, a drum pattern you’d be hard-pushed to follow, and a reggae nod on the outro over a lyric railing against the commercialisation of modern-day radio.

If those sentences were about any other band, you’d be left scratching your head. Frame it as a reference to a Rush song, however, and it makes total sense. Because sometimes Rush really make no sense at all. Somehow they make the unworkable work. And never more so than on Permanent Waves.

“I think if you look through our history internationally,” says Lee, “Tom Sawyer probably has the most resonance and has garnered the most attention, followed by Spirit…, and then Closer To The Heart. Those are probably our three biggest individual songs.”

“I think we kicked off the sessions with The Spirit Of Radio, which excited me,” says Terry Brown. “It was something quite different and was fairly challenging, but as we zeroed in on the final performances it was obvious that it was something very special. I wouldn’t say any of our sessions were easy – the boys had a knack of challenging themselves on every record. Certainly The Spirit of Radio is a very challenging track to play and yet they make it sound so simple.”

“That song felt and sounded so positive,” says Lifeson. “It was one of those songs that seems to capture a moment in time. Not that we had any idea we were doing any capturing! But the response was strong, and we were happily surprised. You think: Spirit… was really a statement of where radio was going, where it had been.

“Growing up in the early 70s, FM radio was such a free forum for music. You’d have DJs who would play stuff for an hour. They’d just talk about the songs, there were no commercials or anything. Free-form, really – a platform for expanding music at the time. And then it was moving more towards a format, and away from that freedom. It was becoming more regulated, more about selling air time. It speaks about that, really.

“We wanted to give it something that gave it a sense of static – radio waves bouncing around, very electric. We had that sequence going underneath, and it was just really to try and get something that was sitting on top of it, that gave it that movement.”

The Spirit Of Radio charted on both sides of the Atlantic, and set the tone, for sales at least, for Permanent Waves and the commercial peak that was to come.

“We’re always surprised when we have a hit anywhere,” Lifeson says with a laugh. “We’ve never really been a radio band. But, ironically, it made sense.”

With Permanent Waves, it wasn’t just the band’s music that was being reshaped and reappraised. Who could forget the Hemispheres album cover: a naked man floating on a human brain, staring down a bowler-hatted figure lifted from a Magritte painting, as they both bobbed gently through time and space?

“When it came to the models for that cover,” says Hugh Syme, Rush’s long-standing art director and Neil Peart’s collaborative foil, “the Magritte man in bowler hat was my old friend Bobby King, also from the Niagara region where Neil and I both hailed from. The other figure was a dancer we found who was studying at the Toronto Ballet School.

“For my entire experience with Rush, never did they ‘pitch’ me, ” Syme continues. “Take Hemispheres, for example. I hadn’t even heard any music by then, as they were in Wales [at Rockfield Studios] for the album. Things got a little easier after that, when they started recording at Le Studio. I could fly or drive up to see the boys working, and that was much more convenient. I’d usually stay for about a week, and sometimes get invited to play on their records, something that had started on 2112 when I’d added some colour to Overture and Ged’s Tears.”

It was at one of those extended stays at Le Studio that Syme was invited to play piano on Different Strings, another new curve ball in Rush’s canon. With lyrics by Lee, it was plaintive yet rich. and examined the way in which the listener, or critic, consumed art and music. So far, so very Rush. Its inclusion on the record hinted even more at the way the band were now willing to play with form and the sort of music people might yet expect from them.

I tell Geddy that I had always assumed Different Strings was a simple love song coming from a very sincere place.

“No it’s not, actually,” he says. “That song was really born out of the idea that: here we were, this band that had been together for quite a long time and we had this ability to polarise people, our music did that. And in writing that song I was addressing that, about what we do and about art. And it really is about that individual way one reacts to it. Whether it’s music or visual or whatever, it’s an emotional response. It’s about our differences. It’s like Entre Nous and Different Strings are sort of two parts of the same concept. They are sister and brother.”

Different Strings aside, Hugh Syme wasn’t at Le Studio just to sample the charismatic sunsets and watch the light at play on the lake.

“Neil and Hugh used to deal with the cover designs,” says Lee. “I think Hugh used to take his cue from what he heard and read, and he would get bits of music and lyric sheets and he would take his image fix from that. And it was clear that we had turned a page. Remember, this was a period where everyone was talking about new wave; there was a new wave of pop and rock. In a way, the title of that album is a comment and a play on the words. There’s all those different wave images on the cover, and it was about the permanence of music.

“Not to sound pompous, but we really wanted to say that this new movement and new wave is exciting and everything, but rock’n’roll is here to stay, and there will be different waves and there will be different styles of it but it can never really be washed away.”

“Me and Neil spoke all evening about Rush growing up,” says Syme, “and how we were going to do these ECG [electrocardiogram] readers of each member as they were recording. So Permanent Waves was going to be a technical statement, and we were going to treat that with red and gold foil and do a nice study in design, as opposed to a photographic thing. Then – and I’m still not sure why –I said: ‘Let’s try something with a [model] walking out of a tidal wave situation.’ Neil gave me this blank look and said: ‘Get out of here.’ But the following day he asked me to consider doing just that.”

Syme ran riot. Against a background shot of the Galveston Seawall in Texas during Hurricane Carla in 1961, he superimposed Canadian model Paula Turnbull flashing her knickers and sporting a permanent-wave hairdo that looked like it could weather any storm. Hugh gave himself a walk-on part – waving happily in the distance. The band’s surnames were referenced on a rain-lashed signpost. When the Chicago Daily Tribune railed against their newspaper being blown about in the foreground with the infamous front page from 1948 (when the paper wrongly reported the result of the US presidential election as ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’), the threat of legal action resulted in the headline being obscured on all but the earliest pressings of the album. All things considered, it was a long way from the brains and buttocks that made up the central image of Rush’s previous album.

You only have to look at the structure and form of the six songs that make up Permanent Waves to realise this latest journey the band were on. Much like Syme having some fun with the album’s cover, Rush were determined to break out of some of their own, self-imposed, shackles.

“That’s exactly what we wanted to do,” says Lee. “We wanted to do something different. Even the longer songs – and there are a couple of profoundly important longer songs in our history. But songs like Natural Science and Jacob’s Ladder are on there too, right? So those two are both indicative of what I’m taking about. They’re quite different, and again they’re long concepts, but contained in a ten-minute time frame, as opposed to dragging this concept over a side-long thing. We didn’t feel that Jacob’s Ladder was profound enough to be a one-side thing, you know? And over the years our affection for that song has grown, largely because of how much affection our fans have shown it.”

Are you saying you weren’t originally a fan of Jacob’s Ladder? That’s like hearing that Stephen King doesn’t like books about horror.

“Ha! I guess it was hard for us to tell how different it was at that time,” Lee says. “We played it initially on the first couple of tours and then we stopped playing it for a while. We lost interest in it. But it was constantly one of the top five requested songs from fans for us to bring back into the live show. We resisted that until the last R40 tour when we did bring it back. I was really not thrilled with the idea of playing it. The other guys were up for it, and I wasn’t until we were in rehearsals, where I went: okay, now I remember what I liked about this song. So I got back into that head space for it. And then during the last tour I enjoyed the hell out of playing it. We all did. It was clearly a highlight of the show. It’s got those great, relentless signature moments that Rush fans love so much!”

The album and the single Spirit… propelled Rush up the charts. It was their biggest-selling record to date, and would be surpassed only by the album that followed, Moving Pictures.

“I think the decision to stop the concept album thing was big,” Lee says. “To put a pause on the whole concept, and to look at writing as a series of individual concepts – a series of smaller movies, in a way, which is what led to Moving Pictures. The energy of Permanent Waves bled into Moving Pictures for a number of reasons. And the fact that Permanent Waves was received so well was really a huge boost to us, from a confidence point of view… Every time in life you try something different and it’s well received, that’s about the greatest reward you can have.”

Lifeson agrees with Lee about the domino effect that Permanent Waves had on the band and their subsequent career: “That is true,” he says. “It was very much like that. Moving Pictures is the cute, sweet, happy offspring [of Permanent Waves]. We learned a lot about writing and how we work best to accomplish our goals, so that an ambitious album such as Moving Pictures could be made without wanting to kill ourselves.”

Such was the band’s momentum that they canned the idea of releasing a live album off the back of what had become their most successful tour, and headed into the Canadian countryside and back to Le Studio, a place they’d call home, off and on, for more than a decade.

“We were scheduled to do this big live album after Permanent Waves [it would eventually appear as Exit Stage Left, after Moving Pictures was released] and at the last minute we said: ‘You know what? Fuck this, we’re not going to do a live album, we’re going to go back into the studio and do our next album’,” recalls Lee. “And that’s how Moving Pictures came to be. It rode the wave of exuberance that we found through making Permanent Waves. And it turned out to be the most important decision of our careers. Or the second most important decision. The first one being 2112, because without 2112 there would be no Rush.

“If you look at our zig-zag history, we sort of started as a heavy rock band, and then with the addition of Neil and Fly By Night [1975] we realised we finally had a third member that had progressive thinking, that confirmed our progressive tendencies. And that’s why you see what began on Fly By Night reach its apogee on 2112, and we developed that once we had found our style. That style worked itself to the end of Hemispheres, and then it was time to change. In a way it [Permanent Waves] was really the beginning of our third period. The second period was once we had established who we were, and created our own voice.”

Alex Lifeson and I are reminiscing just before our conversation ends. I once got to stand on stage with Rush as they played The Spirit Of Radio, a song I vividly remember buying as a single all those years before as a teenage boy, and both those events still thrill me to this day.

“Isn’t it great, it still moves you now?” he says “That’s the thing, I have such fond memories of that time, so hearing those songs transports me to then. Isn’t that the amazing thing about music and how it marks different stages in one’s life? To be moved and reminded of a time forty years ago and to smile as I am now is a great blessing.”

The 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition of Rush’s Permanent Waves can be ordered at via Amazon.Com.

“I adore Rush, and I'll never stop geeking out on them. For me, and probably a lot of people from my generation, Rush is a band that has been part of the fabric of my life. And it goes beyond their music and extends into everything they've done. They always stuck to their guns and did exactly what they wanted. Their live shows were always presented in a unique and special way. Quite simply, there's no band quite like Rush."

It's a view that has been shared by most members, past and present, of Petrucci's band, Dream Theater. "Keyboard players aren't always as big into Rush as much as guitarists, drummers and bass players," he says. "I know that Jordan Rudess was more influenced by ELP, Genesis and Gentle Giant, But when I met [bassist] John Myung at Berklee, we clicked right away on Rush, and then [drummer] Mike Portnoy was a tying factor - he was way into them, Rush were a major part of our conversations."

In fact, Petrucci reveals that Dream Theater's original name, Majesty, was derived from a Rush song. "I think we were listening to 'Bastille Day' and we were commenting on how majestic it sounded. Suddenly, we were like, 'We should call the band Majesty.' So right from the beginning, Rush were influencing our choices." [Of course, Majesty is also the name of Petrucci's signature model by Ernie Ball Music Man.]

Even today, Petrucci admits that the question "What would Rush do?" gets bandied about during group rehearsals and meetings. "A lot of times, if we have professional conundrums like, 'How should we handle this?' or 'How should we present this?' we'll kind of refer to Rush. They always seemed to do things right. I can't think of a time they made a wrong move. They've always intrigued me, and they've never disappointed me. In terms of how to do things with originality, creativity and wit, they're the ultimate band, one that I continuously fanboy over."

Petrucci points to various aspects of Dream Theater's music that have been lifted from the Rush playbook. "Concept albums and our manner of storytelling - none of that would have happened without Rush," he says. "And the way we've called things Part I or used Roman numerals, or even how we've had three different sections like 'Erotomania,' 'Voices' and 'The Silent Man' - we were absolutely wearing our Rush influences on our sleeves." He laughs, then adds, "I'd be lying if I said otherwise."

In the following interview, Petrucci further details his unabashed love of all things Lifeson, Lee and Peart, and he discusses the impact Permanent Waves (which he calls "the Oreo cream" that helped comprise his three favorite Rush albums - Hemispheres, Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures) had on him.

Could you name any particular Rush song that was the gateway drug to really getting into the band?
Growing upon Long Island, I heard Rush on the rock radio stations. I heard "The Spirit of Radio" and really liked it, but it was when I heard "Tom Sawyer" and "Limelight" that I really started paying attention. Around this time, I had several good friends - they're still good friends, actually - and they were big-time Rush fans, They'd be like, "Oh, you've got to check out the earlier stuff. Go listen to 'The Trees' from Hemispheres." Or they'd say, "You've got to listen to 2112." And that opened the whole thing.

So at that point, you went from "This is a band I like" to "This is a band I need to follow."
Right. Once that happened, I went back and checked out everything. My friends and I would hang out, and we'd crank Fly by Night, A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres - all of that. This would be junior high and into high school, so I was 12 up to 17. I started playing guitar at 12, so discovering Rush coincided with my formative years. I wasn't influenced by some of the early prog like Genesis, although I was a big Yes fan. And right around the same time as Rush. I was getting into the Dixie Dregs and Steve Morse, so my head space was swimming with progressive, technical guitar music. Rush seemed to have their own thing. I was just immediately drawn to Alex Lifeson and those songs. And so I went back and listened to the first Rush album, which was more stripped down, more jamming and Zeppelin-y. As a young guitar player. I wanted to learn all of it. My friends were all bass players, drummers and guitar players. We would jam on all of that.

Can you pinpoint what it was about Alex's playing that really spoke to you? His tone? Technique? Choice of notes?
Just like the band, he had his own thing. Alex's guitar playing was very different from the normal stuff that was on the radio. Hearing something like "La Villa Strangiato," I was like, "What the hell...?Nobody is doing this." With a lot of guitar players, you can hear the blues rock roots very strongly, but with Alex, even though he had those influences as well, there was other stuff in there. There were chords that I'd never heard before on the guitar. He did a lot of these suspended 2nds and open-string chords. That kind of stuff excited me.

As I listened more. I began to see his evolution. The first record had that raw Zeppelin thing - I could hear the E, D, G and A chords but the first chord of Hemispheres, I was like, "What the hell is that? It's like F#weird... "It was strange, but it hit me as being very cool. And he started orchestrating the guitar in a way that Jimmy Page did. He would use 12-string electrics and acoustics. There would be these mellow sections, and then he'd do volume swells. He just created a landscape on guitar... And as a young player getting more and more into technique, I'd hear his solos on "Freewill"or "La Villa Strangiato," and I just had to learn them: "How is he doing that? How is that even possible?"

Back then, could you play that stuff, or was it still beyond your reach?
No. It was totally beyond my reach. I couldn't even play "Back in Black" in the early days. You know how guitar is - there's this big learning curve until your hands get strong. And you have to remember, there wasn't YouTube or anything like that. You didn't know what the guitar player was doing. I didn't know about vibrato or bending. I would try to play Rush songs in the early bands that I was in. I was in a band called Centurion, and my friend who is a doctor now was our singer, and he could sing really high, so we would play all of that Rush stuff. I did my best. It's funny, because some of Alex's licks that I learned back then, I still use them now. They just come out in my playing.

You were already into Rush by the time you really dove into Permanent Waves How did the album strike you at the time?
See, you have to understand what I was liking so much about them. I got into the storytelling aspect, which was very driven by Neil Peart's lyrics. It was like being lost in a video game, the way these three musicians created this whimsical world. So for me, Permanent Waves was like the Oreo cream of my three favorite Rush albums - Hemispheres, Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures. Those albums were the trifecta. That stuff just tripped me out beyond belief. So Permanent Waves was like the center; it was like this bridge from what they were to what they were becoming, although it had aspects of both. And I ingested all of it. All I wanted to do was be able to play every one of those songs.

Permanent Waves is the album on which Rush got more commercial - "The Spirit of Radio," "Freewill." At first, some of the band's original fans weren't too thrilled about that.
Yeah, but I didn't feel that way, nor did my friends. We just took it as a whole - "This is the band and how they're evolving." And the stuff was perfectly cool musically; it had substance. When I got into Rush, I didn't know their history. I didn't know "The Spirit of Radio" was more commercial than, say. A Farewell to Kings or Caress of Steel.

It was all just Rush music.
I just took the music in and it hit me. I think most of my friends felt the same way, Maybe there were older brothers who were like purists, and they'd be like "What are they doing now...?" But not me.

Starting with Permanent Waves, Rush started to incorporate new sounds. They were influenced by the Police; you hear that particularly in the reggae section on "The Spirit of Radio."
Definitely.

Did that make you think, "Where are they getting that? Who are the Police?
Well, the Police were played on the radio a lot, so I probably didn't notice at first. Maybe I wasn't savvy enough musically with the full rock scene to make the connection that it was Police influenced. I didn't really figure that they were doing a reggae thing until Signals, which was a couple of years later. That's when I was like, "Oh, wow, I can kind of hear they're doing this." Alex's sort of reggae pattern guitar parts were on that record.

When was your first Rush concert?
It was at the Nassau Coliseum in 1982, the Signals tour. Being a Long Islander, that's the place we went to see bands. We had these horrible seats way in the back. I remember the smell of pot - everybody was getting baked in the arena. And I remember being freaked out when the band walked on stage. "They're here! They're in the same building as me!" They were mystical heroes, so I couldn't believe they were occupying the same space as me. And they even opened with "The Spirit of Radio" - I remember that. They also played "La Villa Strangiato," and that guitar solo, as Paul Gilbert would say, melted my face. I was so blown away by how the solo starts off so dynamically and builds to this ridiculous flurry of notes. It was so inspiring to me.

Plus, they put on a great show, as they always did. Their production had a big influence on me, and it's how I always envisioned Dream Theater should be presented. They had lasers and blow-up props, and eventually they added video. And they tied in Hugh Syme's artwork. You felt like you were entertaining the world of their records. Even Neil's drum heads featured album artwork. The whole show was so brilliantly thought out and put together.

Dream Theater have covered quite a few Rush songs over the years. A while back you guys played "Jacob's Ladder" from Permanent Waves. What made you go for that track?
For us to cover a song, we try to play things that aren't normally on the radio, like "La Villa Strangiato" or "Xanadu". Being geeky, nerdy Rush fans, we felt is though "Jacob's Ladder" fit into that category. I mean, it's one of their best songs. You can hear the influence that song had on Dream Theater - the odd times, the themes and just the whole structure. It doesn't follow the typical pop song structure at all.

As an accomplished player, were you able to nail Alex's parts better than when you were a kid?
I was much better at it, for sure. [Laughs]

Did you guys ever toss around doing "Natural Science"?
I don't remember, although there have been numerous occasions when we've busted into the "Natural Science" riff. We just never did an official cover of it. But we also did a cover of "Different Strings." I don't know why we picked that song- maybe we were playing a more mellow event. It's a great song, and it's definitely one of the more obscure ones on Permanent Waves. It's more of a ballad. for sure.

I assume you've had opportunities to meet the band over the years....
My exposure to them, or chances to meet them, have been very limited. I never met Neil, unfortunately. I did meet Alex and talked to him, and I met Geddy while filming an episode of That Metal Show. He was one of the guests, and I was the guitar player who would play out to the commercial. So I got a nice chance to chat with Geddy. I started talking about Rush live albums, and because there were other people there and the topic was live albums, it was a bit of a cushion for me; otherwise, I might have been nervous.

Do you find there are similarities between Rush fans and Dream Theater fans?
I think you get similar types of fans who aren't afraid of being challenged by non-traditional rock music - songs that are longer than three or four minutes - and they're into songs with multiple parts, concept albums and artwork of a certain nature.

You're probably too humble to admit it, but both bands have fan bases that are extremely loyal. Neither band has fair-weather fans. If you're in, you're all in.
You're absolutely right. That's 100 percent right. Our fan bases are extremely invested and loyal. They're the types of people that not only will wear the T-shirts, but they'll also get tattoos of your logo or symbol. And I think they see how we are loyal Rush fans, to the point where we've crossed over in personnel. Hugh Syme has done a lot of Rush's album covers, and he's done a lot of Dream Theater covers as well. In the studio, we worked with guys like Paul Northfield, Terry Brown and Rich Chycki – all from the Rush camp. So yeah, we’re all in, too! [Laughs]“