For Christmas,
my wife bought me this book:
It’s My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee, the bassist and vocalist for the Canadian progressive rock band Rush. The band was a trio of three virtuosi musicians (including Alex Lifeson on guitar and Neal Peart on drums) active since 1974, though it first formed in the late ’60s when Geddy and Alex were high school classmates. They’ve released 19 studio albums and a whole bunch of live albums and have sold 42 million of them worldwide. In 2013 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They played their last concert on August 1, 2015, after Peart announced his retirement. In January of 2020 the legendary drummer died of glioblastoma at age 67.
As I’ve
written about numerous times in these here electronic pages, I’ve been a
lifelong fan of Rush. I still remember the first time I heard them: Spring of
1982, the song “Tom Sawyer” piped into my ear drums through my brother’s Walkman.
To say I was instantaneously transfixed would be an understatement. Somehow I
got the cassette tape of Moving Pictures, which contained “Tom Sawyer,”
and I listened to that all summer. I bought a songbook of the album a little
bit later, but that defeated my inexperienced fingers at the time. Soon more
Rush purchases followed, classic Rush, their earlier 70s masterpieces. “Subdivisions”
dominated the FM radio play at this time.
43 years
later I am still a fan, though to be honest it’s been a while since I’ve
listened to them. Once every few months I’d ask Alexa to shuffle Rush songs as
I did the dishes. I think I mentioned Lee’s autobiography to my wife when it
came out around a year ago, then it slipped my mind. So I was pleasantly surprised
when I unwrapped it at Christmas. I set aside my current reading and delved
into it. I am almost 200 pages deep (the autobiography clocks in at 507 pages)
and to supplement my reading I am doing something like I did when I read the
Mozart biography back in May: I am (re)immersing myself in Rush’s music.
I am
listening to their albums in chronological order. On deck for today is 1978’s Hemispheres,
one of the first “albums” I bought on CD around 1989 and listened to about a
thousand times before 1990. I’ve re-listened to seven so far: Rush, Fly
By Night, Caress of Steel, 2112, All The World’s a Stage (live),
A Farewell to Kings, and Exit … Stage Left (live). Some I’ve
listened to while walking around the ponds near my house, some while nestled in
my reading nook, some at work with the headphones on cranking out spreadsheets.
I have seventeen more studio albums and one more live album to get thought, so
this will take me to the end of the month.
Combining My
Effin’ Life with these re-listens has been a hugely pleasant experience. A
lot of nostalgia’s been flowing through my mind: voracious listening as a kid,
trying to figure out songs on guitar, me and my band mates playing tons of their
stuff at rehearsals (particularly Cygnus X-1), even the one time I saw
them live in April of 1990. I am now trying to convert my wife and children into
Rush fans. Not gonna happen for the little ones (though Patch likes “Xanadu”),
but the Mrs. seems open, at least for their music. Rush fans are something like
90 percent male, and it has something to do with the science fiction and philosophic
lyrics combined with the progressive rock (unusual time signatures and weird
chord progressions) and mostly with Geddy’s, er, unique singing voice. I have
but one Rush t-shirt, but this may have to be corrected, and I think the Mrs.
will help out more with this end of the Rush experience.
Anyway, that’s
one of the many things I’ve been up to lately. Perhaps when I finish I’ll write
up a post of Rush trivia for any fan who may blunder upon this blog. I dunno. After
1982’s Signals album Rush’s overall sound changed to one more heavily dominated
by synthesizers, and as this was when I started playing in bands, I was more
interested in guitar-driven music and am not familiar with their mid- and
late-80s work. So I am looking forward to listening to that with a new ear, and
hopefully finding something to enjoy that I didn’t thirty years ago. I did have
a t-shirt I purchased at the concert for 1989’s Presto tour, but I
decidedly did not like the album. 1991’s Roll the Bones I bought on CD, and
though that was a more return-to-earlier-form kinda thing, only gave it a few
listens. Not up to those 70s masterpieces. Same with their final five albums,
all borrowed from the library here and there. With a newfound and nostalgic
re-appreciation of the band, I am hoping to uncover a lot of hidden gems, and
hoping that one turns out to be 2025’s Song of the Year here at the Hopper.
An ancient
2011 post by me on Rush, here.
