All songs published by Core Music Publishing (SOCAN)
At the end of the 1960s much of rock and roll as we now know it was still largely uncharted territory. The dominant styles were
not yet institutionalized; in many cases the original practitioners were still hammering out the final details of what would become
standard rock formats. For Canadian rockers the landscape was even more uncharted. Once past the Guess Who and Gordon
Lightfoot, in fact, you were pretty much on your own. That's exactly where the young guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist
Geddy Lee found themselves as they rehearsed in Toronto basements while the '60s were fast becoming history.
These two players would eventually go on to form Rush and become the most accomplished Canadian rockers in history. But the
history of Rush is a success story won against seemingly insurmountable odds.
The young Lifeson and Lee cut their teeth on British blues from the Yardbirds to Cream and prototype heavy metal from the Who
to Led Zeppelin.
"We came from pretty much the same neighborhood," Lee said. "We met in the eighth grade. Alex used to borrow my amplifier all
the time. We played in coffee shops for chips and gravy . I worked in my mother's hardware store for a while. Alex worked in a
gas station."
"We were playing the English blues--John Mayall, Cream. Alex would pretend he was Eric Clapton, I would pretend I was Jack
Bruce, and we'd play Spoonful for twenty minutes."
Lee and Lifeson formed a power trio and became Canada's first significant heavy metal band. Rush built up a reputation as one of
the best live bands in the Toronto area, and became a bona fide underground sensation.
But the record industry simply didn't take the music scene in Canada seriously back then. Plenty of Canadian musical luminaries
were forced to migrate in order to record--such homegrown talent as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Robbie Robertson went south
of the border in order to be heard.
Rush, built around Lee's unique vocal style and Lifeson's rhythm-lead techniques, released a self-produced album, Rush, on the
independent Moon Records label. The album is a crudely effective representation of the band's live sound at the time. Finding My
Way shows the band kicking away in Zeppelinesque mode. The first track on the first album, this is the recording the band chose
to give first impressions, making it the appropriate opener for Chronicles.
Working Man looks forward to what Rush would become, a fast-fretting power trio carried by Lifeson's lightning-fast guitar
leads. The jam-session format of this seven-minute workout showed just how exciting the band could be live.
Rush was selling out on the basis of word-of-mouth in record stores, and sold so well as an import in the midwest that
Chicago-based Mercury Records took notice and signed Rush to a long-term contract. Drummer John Rutsey left the band at this
time to pursue other interests.
The band's next album on Mercury, Fly By Night, featured an embellishment on the Zeppelin-inspired style, but the band's sound
was much better structured due to the addition of drummer Neil Peart, who brought the precision and ensemble sense of a
percussionist schooled in the art-rock forms of Pink Floyd and King Crimson.
Fly By Night offers a hint of the kind of melodic song structures that the band would eventually evolve, while Anthem polished the
sculpted, hard rock sound of the first album to a glistening sheen.
On the third album, Caress of Steel, songs like Bastille Day and Lakeside Park showed the band developing more varied and
complex song structures and a penchant for unusual songwriting themes.
Peart exerted a strong influence on Rush, and not just musically. His science fiction-inspired imagination provided the impetus for
a series of concept albums that added a new twist to the band's indentity. Their breakthrough album, 2112, developed an intriguing
science fiction tale of a future hero who leads a revolution through music.
The album also marked a musical evolution for the group, away from the slabs of sound that dominated the heavy metal approach
to the nuanced, trance music patterns and dramatic stop-time arrangements that would become a Rush trademark.
Rush had come of age, as the tremendously popular followups, the live All The World's A Stage and two more conceptual albums,
A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres, proved . 2112, Farewell and Hemispheres worked together thematically as a
post-apocalypse trilogy, and the band's stage shows revolved around these stories, backed up by the elaborate visuals on a giant
screen behind the stage. The melodic Closer to the Heart became an emotional high point live, while The Trees and La Villa
Strangiato showcased Lifeson's increasingly virtuosic guitar playing.
It wasn't until the 1980 album Permanent Waves, though, that Rush made the most dramatic transformation. Having gone through
heavy metal rock and art rock, the band emerged as an arena and FM radio-oriented band, spinning catchy yet thoughtful tunes
like Freewill and The Spirit of the Radio. Lee, always a stupendous bassist, suddenly took center stage with his extraordinary
synthesizer work.
"It was time to stop the concept stories," Lee said. "What you have to say ends up being very nebulous, because you're concerned
with the big story. You try to make the story right, you try to evoke the right moods, and invariably sixteen different people come
up to you and tell you sixteen different things about what you're trying to say. That's fine, but for us it was time to come out of the
fog for a while and put down something concrete."
What they put down was the foundation for one of the most durable arena rock presentations of the '80s. Moving Pictures picked
up where Permanent Waves left off and went on to become the band's most influential album on the strength of such compelling
songs as Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta and Limelight.
During a break in the band's recording schedule, Rush released the live album Exit... Stage Left, a document of the increasingly
popular Rush tours. The title, taken from the "Huckleberry Hound" cartoon, revealed a little-known side of the band, its sense of
humor. Over the years, Rush had used bits from the SCTV comedy troupe and the Three Stooges in their act, and Lee sings on
Take Off, a track from a comedy album made by two SCTV characters, Bob and Doug McKenzie.
Unlike many successful bands, once Rush reached the pinnacle they refused to sit on their laurels but chose to pursue an intensive
touring and recording schedule.
Few bands have managed to mirror the stylistic changes rock has undergone in the '70s and '80s, but Rush has changed its sound
album to album, evolving along with the innovations of the time. Though the band 's complex sound defies any one categorization,
the influence of technological and stylistic developments characteristic of the early '80s are evident on Subdivisions and New
World Man from Signals, and Red Sector A and Distant Early Warning from Grace Under Pressure.
"The most exciting aspect of being in this band is the compositional challenge," Lee explained. "I think the writing stage is the most
rewarding; everything else revolves around that. I don't think that was true ten years ago; it was playing then. But now I look at
myself as more of a musician in the compositional sense than the playing sense. That's what makes it worthwhile."
Rush songs have often centered on political and environmental concerns over the years. Power Windows features two of the
band's most compelling treatments of these themes, The Big Money and Manhattan Project.
The band's compostional evolution continued on Hold Your Fire, which includes the beautiful Time Stand Still and the dynamic
Force Ten. The space-age overtones of the album's themes correspond to its increasingly complex songs structures. The band
that started out as a heavy metal contender evolved into a musical presentation closer to the jazz theories of fusion.
The band sees Hold Your Fire as the end of a phase of its development. "To me Hold Your Fire is an arrival record," said Lee.
"We climbed up a hill and now we've gotten to the top and we have to decide where we go from here." As usual, a live album was
the next step as Rush considered its future. A Show of Hands, the band's third live set, was the perfect summation of where Rush
was as the band prepared for its next phase.
After a creative hiatus, Rush emerged with a new album, Presto, and a fresh attitude. Show Don't Tell charts the new direction,
articulating a healthy skepticism toward authority couched in a direct, anthemic style that makes the song a rallying cry. Twenty
years after the band's inception, Rush is still finding new modes of expression.
Compiled by Bill Levenson
Essay by John Swenson
Mastered by Bob Ludwig, Masterdisk, NYC
Digitally compiled by Denis Drake, PolyGram Studios and Bob Ludwig, Masterdisk, NYC
Art direction by Hugh Syme
Photography by John Scarpati and Andrew MacNaughton
Management by Ray Danniels, SRO Management Inc., Toronto
This Compilation � 1990 PolyGram REcords Inc., � 1990 PolyGram Records Inc., 1990 Anthem Entertainment.
All Rights Reserved.
"Show Don't Tell" � 1989 Atlantic Recording Corporation � 1989 Atlantic Recording Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Back to the main page