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Richard Watt

Tag Archives: rush

30. Grace Under Pressure, Rush, 1984

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Richard

I hadn’t specifically planned to land on Rush at the halfway point in this, but here we are.  The main reason that I imposed a rule of ‘one album per artist’ on this list is that there would have easily been half a dozen Rush albums to write about, and probably half a dozen more I’d have tried to sneak in, leaving the list looking a little lopsided.

Despite that, choosing this as mt representative Rush album was straightforward.  It’s not the best Rush album, or the best-known, and it’s probably not – quite – my favourite, but it’s the one which sums up a specific and pivotal time in my life, and which chimed with me and where I was in life so exactly that it was always going to be Grace Under Pressure, or p/g as the cool kids call it.

Well, I’m joking about the ‘cool kids’ part, obviously.  The one thing anyone in the UK could tell you about Rush in 1984 was that they were decidedly not cool.  Earlier on in their career, the NME had dubbed them ‘junior Hitlers’, a tag which rankled for reasons I’ll explain later, and which definitely cast them into a shadow from which they never quite emerged in Britain, at least.

A few months ago, I watched an episode of ‘Word in Your Attic’ featuring David Mitchell (not that one, the other one) talking about his extraordinary book Utopia Avenue, during which he returned more than once to the music of Rush, and saw clearly that not only is the music of Rush a gap in the otherwise comprehensive knowledge of both David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, but perhaps a certain unease at the mere mention of this band who talked about the likes of Ayn Rand in their sleevenotes.

So, being a Rush fan in the early 1980s was to be something of an outsider.  We knew that none of those labels were accurate (well, the one about the distinctive vocal register was true, but Geddy Lee’s voice set Rush apart from everyone else), and there was so much depth and complexity to the music produced by these three Canadians.  In many ways, I was perfectly happy that most of the people I knew didn’t get it; having to justify the one band which meant more to me then (and probably now) than all the others put together got somewhat tiresome after a while.

But I live in Canada now, where Rush are a national icon, and wearing one of my Rush t-shirts will provoke conversations and a shared experience rather than stares and pointing.

Rush appeared in my life – I’m fairly certain of this – when a copy of Permanent Waves appeared in the year area in early 1980. Spirit of Radio had already been something of a minor hit, with the kind of radio play which songs with the word ‘radio’ in the title always seemed to get, and I was already heading down the slope of noisy rock music previously alluded to.  This album spoke to me, but what I did was go out and buy a couple of the earlier, noisier albums, and I disappeared into that world for a few months, slowly working my way forward until Permanent Waves made more sense.

There’s a whole essay to be written about that exploration, and the way I carefully accumulated the albums I’d read about, but I have done a lot of that before.  What I have been thinking about as I prepared this was the course of my first three years in Edinburgh, when the previously alluded to avalanche of noise and tight trousers was filling up my record collection.  There were, of course, layers to my listening habits – the radio would accompany me through the early and late parts of the day, while I would throw on an album by the flavour of the month to get me through essay-writing, or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing, and then when I just wanted to put something on and listen to it, It would almost always be a Rush album.

There was something different and hard to define about the music of Rush.  Superficially, you could listen to an album like 2112 and hear all the same elements which were in those Saxon albums from a few weeks back.  But there was also some of what had attracted me to the Prog albums of the early seventies; telling longer-form stories with interesting musical progressions and things you didn’t hear anywhere else.

And the stories they were telling weren’t like all the others.  Of course, a lot of it – especially the early songs – got written off at the time as ‘pretentious’, but here were songs about the French Revolution, about philosophy and the human condition.  Permanent Waves contains a nine-minute song in three parts about the place of science in the modern world, which is more relevant than ever in 2022, although I’m not sure I still share the optimism these days.

Rush also always challenged the listener by moving on to the next thing before they got bored of the last one; we might have been happy to continue buying albums with twenty minute long pieces about Athenian philosophy of the mind (or whatever it was that Hemispheres was actually about), but Rush weren’t interested in making them – they moved on, and brought us with them.

Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures were influenced as much by The Police and Talking Heads as they were by what had gone before, and by the time we got to Grace Under Pressure, the very sound of the band had changed; there were more and more keyboard sounds, and electronics appearing in unexpected areas.  It is, in many ways, a very 1984 album, but it’s also a very Rush album; full of the signature thoughts, ideas and sounds, and the ridiculously virtuosic playing.  Many of the albums I’d been listening to over those months and years were to a degree interchangeable; Grace Under Pressure could not have been by anyone else.

I could write a book about Rush, and one day I just might, but I do want to constrain myself to this particular album and this particular time in my life.  At the time this came out, in April 1984, I was coming to the end of my university career.  I’d be graduating in the summer, assuming I ever got my dissertation on Turkish grammar finished, and Id be heading on to – well, I had no idea.  Alongside my first few plays of this album were a mountain of application forms, as I participated in the ‘Milk Round’ of corporate entities looking to scoop up as many graduates as possible. 

I pretty much knew I didn’t want to follow that path, but I had no idea which path I did want to follow.  I went to a few interviews, filled in all the forms, and tried to come to terms with the fact that the relatively cushy academic life I’d known for almost all of my life was actually coming to an end and I was going to have to grow up, face my more mature responsibilities, and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  As I did so, I was obsessively, almost to the exclusion of everything else, listening to this album and its concerns about life in this strange time, and the responsibilities and pressures of being a grown-up in a world seemingly designed to crush the human spirit.

As I wandered around the streets of London in my best, if somewhat ill-fitting, interview shoes, having secured three separate interview which I remember absolutely nothing about, what I do remember is listening to Grace Under Pressure.  Not on any physical device, but simply playing it over and over in my head – I could comfortably get through all forty or so minutes of it entirely in my own brain, and when I reached the final fading notes of Between the Wheels, I could mentally flip it over and start again.

No other album in my life – none of the other fifty-nine on this list, none of the other Rush albums, none of the hundreds I discarded but which I’m ridiculously familiar with – none of them infected my brain like this one did.  I know (because I tried earlier) that I can’t still do the whole ‘playing the whole album in my head’ thing now, but I can conjure up most of it without too much effort.

What on earth is it, then, about this mid-career and often overlooked album which has burrowed so deeply into my brain?  Perhaps it would have been some other album from 1984 – I have a few more to get through yet – but I doubt it; this is a collection of songs which spoke so clearly to me and the mental state I was in as I contemplated what would come next that I still can’t shake it off nearly forty years later.

Distant Early Warning starts by laying out the sonic palette of the album – the guitar sounds are more of a wash than a driving riff, the drumming is illustrating as much as it is powering the rhythm, and there are layers of synthesised sounds.  There’s also a deliberate burst of static, which had me convinced that my brand new copy was in some way damaged.  The song itself is a furrowed-brow of a lyric about things like acid rain and the fragility of the world.  Again, more relevant now than when it was written.  I do remember alluding to it in an essay I wrote for the civil service entrance exam.

I’m not a civil servant; perhaps I have this song to thank for it.

The song, like much of the album, is shot through with cold war imagery.  It does place the album in context, and again, feels perhaps a little more relevant than it might have done twenty years ago.

Afterimage is a properly adult song about the death of a close friend.  It surprised me back then with the way it laid out the raw emotions of a sudden unexpected tragedy, and it still does today.  There’s a middle eight which never seems to get going, echoing the sense of time standing still while we process something largely incomprehensible.  There’s a short guitar solo and the repetition of the lines about remembering and how we try to hold on to the lost one by ‘feel[ing] the way you would’.

Geddy Lee’s parents met in a Nazi concentration camp.  Red Sector A is the only time Rush ever tried to address this; while Neil Peart’s lyrics could often be political and personal, I’m not sure that he often felt comfortable getting this personal.  The song is more abstract than I’m making it sound; it’s a reflection of a victim who is never identified – the song never says ‘this is what it was like for Geddy’s mum’; there’s no indication that it’s a specific place at all; it’s just a chilling reflection on how anyone in this situation could easily feel like the last humans; that humanity itself must have come to an end for this to have happened.

It’s just a rock song, but it’s a really powerful and important one, and I’d like to think that it might have caused the person who wrote the line about ‘junior Hitlers’ to just pause and reflect a little.

Instead of writing giant, sprawling, epics, the 1980s version of Rush split the themed songs over three albums.  Tied to Witch Hunt on Moving Pictures and The Weapon from Signals, The Enemy Within is billed as ‘part one’ of the trilogy, but was evidently the hardest to write.  Addressing the internalised fear which can paralyse, it doesn’t offer solutions, just an acknowledgement that everyone suffers from random, inexplicable fears as well as the justified ones.  This song also features the clearest of indications of the influence of The Police, and is perhaps the most musically dated, for all that I still enjoy bouncing along to it.

The Body Electric invokes Walt Whitman in the service of an intriguing science fiction tale of a decaying android ‘on the run’ from something or other – perhaps the fears in its own mind.  I can’t help feeling that Neil Peart, were he still with us, would have enjoyed the TV show of Westworld, which mines pretty much this seam in a way which is a lot more mainstream than songs like this were in 1984.  I should point out here that Peart’s drumming, often technically brilliant and even – whisper it – flashy, is employed to perfection in the service of the mechanical nature of this song.  There are some extraordinary patterns in the mid section as the machine breaks down, but the metronomic regularity of the beat is never lost and reasserts itself whenever needed.  As with pretty much every Rush song ever recorded, I could happily just listen to the drum track on repeat, trying to figure out how you do that with just the regulation number of arms and legs.

It took me longer to love Kid Gloves than the other songs on here, and for the life of me now, I can’t understand why.  It’s an insightful and clever lyric with a truly spectacular instrumental break, in which drum and guitar duel over an ever-shifting bass pattern which seems to be herding the unruly kids back into line.  I think perhaps I wasn’t as receptive to the idea that all that I’d been learning these past few years might not actually have equipped me for the world beyond; I don’t know.  But I love it now.

The opposite has happened to red lenses. Fully enjoyed at the time as the ‘playful’ song on the album, I perhaps find it a little tricksy now.  It’s definitely coming at the whole cold war paranoia theme from a less serious direction, and it is a welcome lifting of the covers, in which we discover that this most serious of bands are actually having a blast out there, and mucking about with all the technology at their disposal.  Perhaps I just find the  whole thing a little too 1980s in its sound; certainly the references to the Soviets date it almost as much as the layers of digitised sounds do.

But, holy crap, the bassline in the fade is extraordinary.  I’m going back to listen to that again…

I digress.  Between the Wheels is the masterpiece on this grown-up album, featuring a cold-eyed look at what it meant to live in such uncertain and terrifying times.  If anyone was to ask me what it was really like living in fear that one side or the other might just decide to start flinging nuclear weapons around, I point them at this song, which confidently predicted that we were ‘living between the wars, in our time’.

And it gives me the opportunity to single out Alex Lifeson’s guitar playing.  I know that this period of Rush is not exactly his favourite, as his guitar sounds tended to fade in the mix a little under the layers of interesting keyboards, but whenever he cuts loose, as he does here, you’re reminded that he’s as good a guitarists as his bandmates are at their instruments; you do occasionally still read articles about how under-rated he is as a guitarist – I saw one only this week – but not in these quarters.  As the kids say these days, if you know, you know.

And that was always the case with Rush.  I knew, and I was always happy in my knowledge – those who avoided them for whatever reason were missing out, and it was enormously rewarding to me to see them slowly gain acceptance and respect in their later years, as the rest of the world woke up to what some of us had always known – Rush were something very special indeed, and while I miss them every day, the joy of knowing thwt I can go back and listen to any of their albums and be instantly transported to the world as it was back when I first heard it remains undimmed.

If there had been 60 Rush albums, that’s what I’d have written about.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

OK, I’m not going to do the cop-out thing of recommending them all (but I do recommend them all).  If you like this, then the ones either side of it, Signals and Power Windows will likely be up your street too.  Everyone who considers themselves a rock fan will already own 2112 and Moving pictures, so I’m going to instead recommend their last album Clockwork Angels. To produce so much music of such high quality so late in a bands career is  – well, it’s what we should have expected from Rush, I suppose.  And to end it the way they did, with The Garden, still leaves me speechless in a mixture of admiration and profound sadness.

Compilations to consider?

Tricky one, this.  As a Rush completist, you’d think I’d own all the compilations as well, but I don’t.  Honestly, there are several to choose from, and they will all be excellent, so take your pick.

Live albums?

Oh, yes.  Rush built their career on magnificently executed live shows, and released a live album every four albums until the early 2000s, when they started releasing live albums after every tour.  There’s even a live album of the Grace Under Pressure tour, which was released much later.  With the proliferation of 40th anniversary editions of all the key Rush albums, all of which contain some new live recording, it’s pretty much possible to hear what they sounded like live at any point in their career.

But I’m going to recommend Different Stages from 1999, as it sums up everything about the band in the live experience.  There are later, more spectacular shows (you should look up Rush in Rio, for example), but for sheer joyful musicianship, this is the set which I go back to more than any of the others.

Anything else?

Yes.  Two films covering the later stages of their career sum up what Rush were about, and why they meant so much to so many of us.  The first, Beyond the Lighted Stage, is a stroll through the complete history of the band, with all the usual biographical tropes, but is genuinely engrossing and entertaining, even to non-obsessives.  The second, Time Stand Still, is an account of the final tour, and is both an exploration of what it means to work at these high standards as you age, but also looks in some depth at what the end of a band like this means to is fans.  It’s perhaps a little less accessible that the first, but has some real insights into the power of music, and is warmly recommended.

Oh, and there are endless books.  I could do a whole post on those, too.  If you don’t read anything else, though, read Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, his account of his ‘lost years’ as he tried to come to terms with the death of his daughter and wife and re-emerge into the world.  Then listen to Vapur Trails.  It’ll all make sense after that.

Posted in 60at60, Music, Rediscovering Rush, Writing | Tags: 60at60, GraceUnderPressure, p/g, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – All the World’s a Stage IV

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Richard

Thoughts from the future:

As you might expect, following my musings on setlists, there was a helpful post on the original forum, leading me to some typical lists from this tour, which seemed to prove that the album represents one complete show, in the order it was played that night.

Not sure what that does to my argument, if indeed I actually had one.  Still, it’s a remarkably clear and well-produced live album which I rarely listen to.  I still haven’t replaced my vinyl copy, which I loved back in the early eighties.  Maybe I’ll get round to it after I’m done reposting all of this.

One thing seems clear from the original posts – I do struggle to find ways to talk about songs for a second time, especially as Rush do tend to recreate the album versions pretty faithfully.  It gets easier as we go on, I seem to recall.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: alexlifeson, alltheworldsastage, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush, thoughtsfromthefuture |

Rediscovering Rush – All the World’s a Stage III

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Richard

By-Tor and the Snow Dog

OK, so from a technical point of view, how do they do all those effects?  At times it sounds like there are about 8 people up on that stage, and this all sounds pretty sophisticated for 1976.  I guess it’s actually normal for that time – this is the era of Prog, after all, but it still sounds pretty accomplished from here.  The live version of this is just as riveting as the original, and appears to have even more drums on it, if such a thing were possible.

In The End

I had actually forgotten this was on here. By now Geddy’s voice is sounding a little mellower – feeling the effects of an evening at full stretch, perhaps?  The introduction is positively laid-back, and then – “One, two, buckle my shoe”  – it’s on with the main event.  Now, this is definitely slower than the recorded version.  It sounds pretty menacing in places – and long, too.  A bit of a tour de force, this – I think I prefer it to the original.

Working Man / Finding My Way

We must be nearing the end, now – round things off with a couple of old favourites which they can play in their sleep by now.  Amazing to listen to the drums on this now – Neil’s playing takes this into another league – much more of a showcase for the whole band than just a guitar workout.  The instrumental passage is bubbling along nicely, then falls over the edge of a cliff into ‘Finding My Way’ – neatly done, and so is the climb back up into ‘Working Man’.  It all fits together really well, and just when you thought it was all over…

…”Ladies and Gentlemen, The Professor on the drumkit”.  I remember the first time I heard this; I was (and remain) blown away – every band has to allow the drummer a solo, none – I mean none – of them come even close to this for musicality and sheer joy of playing.  I keep expecting to hear blasts of horn, but this early version of the classic Peart solo has everything else, including the seeming ability to play four different rhythms at once.  Short, sharp and to the point, this leaves us wanting more (but then, all Neil’s solos leave me wanting more…)

Thank you.  Goodnight (then of course there’s an encore):

What You’re Doing

Yes, we’d like a little more, thanks – a quick blast through what now sounds like an old blues standard, and it’s all over, bar the offstage noises, which make me laugh out loud, because I’d completely forgotten about them.

Summary:

That was a blast – haven’t heard it in ages, but it’s a real snapshot of the time; halfway between gigging out of the back of a van, and full-length stadium tours, the guys have all the stagecraft, and seem to be really enjoying their day jobs.  Incidentally, I know it’s traditional to see this as the punctuation between phase one and phase two of the Rush career, but I tend to see Rush studio albums in groups of three, so this comes a third of the way through phase 2 for me – I can hear a difference between the ‘2112’ tracks and the others – but either way you look at it, this is a great live album – one of the best.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: alexlifeson, alltheworldsastage, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – All the World’s a Stage II

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Richard

Bastille Day

“Would you please welcome home…”  That always sounded cool to me – imagine coming back to your hometown, triumphant, selling out huge venues where you used to play to a handful of friends and family.  First impressions – it’s tight, well-practiced – good opener, you need something to grab people from the off, and this will do nicely.  The balance of instruments is good live – just as I suspected it would be when I reviewed the studio version – I’m sure there are effects and so on to come, but this is just three guys doing their thing.  One thing – why do all crowds everywhere always feel the need to yell out into any silence?  Just asking.

Anthem

Woah; Geddy speaks!  I remember this being the first time I’d hear his speaking voice.  Now, I’m not sure whether I prefer my live performances to be full of chat to the audience or not; I think that in Rush’s case, the music kind of speaks for itself, but it’s good to hear some information about a song sometimes.  Must be hard, though, to play shows for months on end and still find something interesting to say about anything.  The song is fluid and pretty faithful to the original – I imagine this is a point of pride for these guys at this stage.

Fly By Night / In The Mood

Barely a pause for breath here – straight on with the show.  What I’m hearing here is the bass sound – I wonder how difficult it is to concentrate on those bass lines while singing.  Even by this point, I suppose Geddy’s had enough practice!

Abrupt change for In The Mood – somehow, it works, but the juxtaposition is a little awkward – these two songs are not exactly natural bedfellows, are they?  Of course, the drumming stands out as different from the original, but not hugely so – it just couldn’t be anyone else.

Something For Nothing

And the contrast with this is quite dramatic – I’m trying to hear if this feels a little less well-rehearsed than the others, but it doesn’t.  I remember seeing bands in the past who were playing tracks from their new album which they seemed to be barely familiar with, but this just feels like an old friend.  It’s been pretty full-on up to now; the question is, how do they handle the change of pace which must be coming?

Lakeside Park

My previously documented ambivalence to this aside, this is pretty much the perfect song for this point in the proceedings – taking the pace down a little, using the introduction to let the audience as well as the band catch their breath, and it works better than I’d have thought – I think that the solo sounds more spontaneous than on the studio version, and the audience seem to be well into it.  I didn’t skip it this time, must be a good sign.

And at the end, I want it to go into Xanadu…

2112

… but obviously, it doesn’t.

How I remember the disappointment of realizing that this was not the full version – no Discovery?  At least, that’s how I remember it.  The overture is damned impressive; boy, these guys can really cut it live!  Syrinx is a lot less strident than the recorded version – you couldn’t really do that to your voice night after night, I suppose – and for me it’s all the better for it.  The segue into Presentation works pretty well, although the narrative loses quite a bit – it would all sound a bit odd if you hadn’t heard it before.  The vocal contrasts are handled well – is Geddy leaning away from the mic as the priest, lending a sense of distance to the proceedings?  Whatever, it works.

“The sleep is still in my eyes..” – listen to that rich baritone! Another section has been skipped, but with less damage to the story this time.  the final lyric is pure Robert Plant – never noticed that before.  And then the Finale, which seems slightly faster than I remember it – always a danger when playing live, I suppose – but it’s as creative and complex as ever, and really works in the live context.  Did they take a break in the show at this point?  I suppose they were young and fit back then; maybe there was no need…

I’m going to take a break, though – back in a moment.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: alexlifeson, alltheworldsastage, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – All the World’s a Stage I

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Richard

All The World’s A Stage

A quick note from the future:  I’m not going to post individual song links for the live albums, I think.  Quite apart from it being somewhat of a pain to do, it will make the posts somewhat unwieldy, and probably not offer much in the way of illumination.

History

I love live albums.  I think I tended to buy live albums rather than compilations, since they were at least different versions of songs, and – to my mind, anyway – a better indication of what a band could actually do.  Also, there tended to be interesting stuff on them which you couldn’t get elsewhere – I’m a completist, remember?

This was the first live Rush album I owned (by the time Exit Stage Left came out, I already owned everything else), and for a time, it was my favourite Rush album.  After a while, though, I noticed that I didn’t play it much at all  – probably because I preferred the newer stuff, but also possibly because I think this is an uneven selection.  Looking at it now, it seems to me to be a record company-driven exercise in getting people to buy the back catalogue. (at the same time, I’m not sure that’s true, because I imagine this is a pretty faithful representation of the live show at the time.)  I’d love to know (yeah, I know – it’s on the web somewhere!) how much of the recorded show never made it on to vinyl; interesting to know what the full show was like.  Or maybe this is the full show – sets would have been shorter in those days, I guess.

Anyway, I’ve been debating with myself how to approach this – I’ve only just finished talking about most of these songs, so I think this will be slightly more cursory than usual.  I’ve got plenty to say about A Farewell To Kings, though, so that should make up for it.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: alexlifeson, alltheworldsastage, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 IV

Posted on October 4, 2005 by Richard

Thoughts from the future

Two things stand out – I absolutely love those videos, and the last line of my summary is a load of nonsense – the answer to that question is an awful lot of them, but I’m trying not to be too hard on myself; what I wrote then is what I thought then, I’m just older now…

Anyway, since then, I’ve listened to 2112 a whole bunch of times – my children gave me the 40th anniversary box set for Christmas a couple of years back, and while there’s not much new to be said about it (famously, Rush just don’t have unheard versions or leftover songs on the cutting room floor), it’s a magnificent thing in its own right, and well worth your hard-earned cash if you’re like me.

Which, given that you’re reading this, you probably are, at least a bit.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: 2112, alexlifeson, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush, thoughtsfromthefuture |

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 III

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Richard

A Passage to Bangkok

Yeah, I remember this.  Can I say straight off that the little ‘shorthand for being in Asia’ fill is about the cheesiest thing Rush ever recorded, but it still makes me smile.  Apart from that, I remember this well – one evening in Edinburgh, I was pub-crawling my way home and found myself in the Southern – not a pub I visited often, but it was known for having a decent rock jukebox.  I think I was looking for some Warren Zevon or something (I had a bit of a reputation in those days for putting odd things on jukeboxes), but I saw the word Rush.  Abandoning my beer goggles for a moment, I managed to focus enough to put it on.  It was this, a live version, and presumably the b-side to something; I don’t know what.  Whenever I heard it after that, I smiled to myself at the thought of the unsuspecting punters in the Southern being subjected to the Rush stoner’s anthem.

And that’s another thing – how long did it take me to work out what it was about?  I’m not saying, but I lived a sheltered life.

So, once you get chopsticks out of the way, what is there to say about this?  Not a huge amount, really – it’s the ideal light relief after the storms of side 1, and it’s just a simple riff and a pleasant melody.  Kind of sticks in the brain, though.  Just to reiterate that the production values are superb now – even something as light as this feels solid and crafted.

The Twilight Zone

A little descending figure, and we’re straight into it.  If (unlikely, I know, but work with me here) you were listening to this without knowing about the TV show, you’d be a little lost, I think.  I love the way we transition to the chorus – that fluid bass still gets me.  What’s interesting about it now is its gentleness – this is almost an acoustic number – at least until we get to the solos, and then there’s something I had never before noticed – the whispering!

I wish I’d been able to listen to all this stuff through crystal clear headphones when I was 20 – I’d have been in transports…

Lessons

I don’t remember this at all, and I’m not sure if it’s going to stick with me after this, either.  I detect the hand of a guitarist here – it’s a real guitarist’s song.  In a way, this feels like the last gasp of the old Rush – there’s a more basic, blues-based feel to this.  I have to say that it all fits together perfectly well, with the possible exception of the screeching of the  end of the chorus – not sure that’s entirely necessary, but it is what it is, I guess.  It has its moments, but not too many of them.

Tears

And so does this.  A little oasis of calm in the midst of all this, it has one of the great guitar intros – I can’t tell you how astonished I was one day to discover that it’s just a transposed C chord, and it’s another of those little figures that I play whenever I pick up a guitar – once you know it, you don’t forget it.

So, I can’t work out if this is all orchestrated, or if it’s just synth work – I suspect the latter, but it’s good enough to make me wonder.  In the end this is not what we think of when we think about Rush, is it?  It’s a  song which would have been perfectly acceptable if done by someone else, but just doesn’t quite seem to fit with the rest of what’s here.  Odd.

Something For Nothing

But this is much more like it!  Just listen to that bass – there’s so much going on in the introduction that I’m lost in the music when I’m suddenly assaulted by those so-familiar ‘Rush’ chords and swept up into the sheer enthusiasm of the thing, irresistibly so by the time the solo comes along.  So hard not to air guitar along…

I also still love the lyrics – how often do you hear this kind of philosophical sentiment expressed in a four-minute rock song? There’s even a full-blooded scream in the middle of all this pondering on the responsibilities of the individual in the modern society.

Ah, I love this band sometimes.

Summary

Well, it’s legendary.  That in itself is enough to make it difficult to talk about, and familiarity just adds to the difficulty.  But I’m hooked all over again.  I think I had forgotten that side 2 does have its weaker moments, but overall, this is a fine package.  It’s easy to see why things just took off from heere – here’s a mature band of excellent musicians, doing what they do so well.  It rewards careful listening, and how many 29-year old albums can you say that about?

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: 2112, alexlifeson, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 II

Posted on October 2, 2005 by Richard

2112

Overture

Right, let’s get this out of the way first.  It’s absolutely not (in my view, of course) pretentious to use words or concepts like ‘Overture’ in rock music. I know I’m preaching to the converted here – at least, I hope I am – but this kind of thing can spoil perfectly good friendships, you know.

So we have an overture.  A proper one, just the way Mozart or Wagner would have done it – weaving in the themes from the whole work, and prefiguring the whole thing, while at the same time playing the oldest trick in the book – the one that modern-day pop song writers imagine they invented: letting us hear the melody of the chorus up front, so that when it comes around, it’s already familiar, and you are even more predisposed to liking it.  Just as Mozart previewed the big arias, so Rush here give us snippets of the big riffs and themes, softening us up for the main event.

When it starts, I’m immediately whisked back to my little room in Edinburgh.  It doesn’t matter how long it is since I heard this, I’m never going to mistake that synthesized swirl for anything else.  Immediately, I can see that all the lessons learnt over the last 3 albums have been put to work here; the arrangement is tight, the production awesome.  At times the bass leads the way, at others the guitar dances a jig; at all times it sounds like the mature Rush sound.  This is where it all falls into place.  I’ll even forgive the explosions.

Temples of Syrinx

A seamless segue from the cataclysmic end to the overture, and we’re straight into an anthem which is meant to sound like – well, an anthem.  Here’s the strident voice used to its proper effect – there’s no mistaking what’s going on here, and for all the joyful bounce of the melody, we’re under no illusions that this is a facade, and the manufactured happiness is just that – manufactured.  The lyrics deserve a mention here – sinister without there being anything you could put your finger on; I always loved “Oh, what a nice, contented world” – chilling in it’s naive simplicity.

As we move along, I’m struck by a Rush trademark, which I must have overlooked earlier – suddenly guitar and drums are the rhythm section, while the bass does its thing, and the sound created is unmistakable.  I’m strangely pleased at having put my finger on something I’d always taken for granted.

Discovery

Possibly the boldest thing they’ve tried so far; I have always loved this.  The spare, picked opening is utterly convincing (although it is a rare talent indeed who can pick up a guitar for the first time, and never hit a bum note) and if the development to harmonics and then structured melody is rather rapid, let’s not forget that this is a narrative device, not a literal guitar lesson.

The melody is still highly effective, and the sound is possibly unique in all of Rush music – is this the only track which features only guitar and voice?

Presentation

The crux of the whole thing; the pivotal moment, and it doesn’t disappoint.  The melody flows logically from the previous section, and the narrative voice blossoms from the earlier uncertainty to the strong, true sound – we can hear he has right on his side –

Which is why the contrasting voice (Father Brown; an odd resonance for me – I somehow doubt that G K Chesterton was high on Neil’s reading list, but you never know) is so devastating.  “Yes, we know; it’s nothing new” is possibly the single most crushingly dismissive line in all of recorded music.  So much so that the remainder of the song is a kind of anti-climax; just going through the required motions (which is what the characters in the story are doing) until we can reach the devastation of the breakdown, and the pained howl of the guitar solo.

Oracle: The Dream

(How many song titles have a colon in them?  Never mind.)

Putting aside for a moment my initial reaction (a male Oracle?); what strikes me about this is the way the vocal line leads the rhythmic pattern.  This is unusual for Rush, and it stands out for me; more usually, the voice serves the rhythm and is emphasized by it in return; this is odd, prompting me to wonder if it was composed differently to normal.  Or maybe I’m just hearing things.

Soliloquy

Sparsely orchestrated, here the music tells the tale just as well as the words.  This is ultimate despair, and the breakdown is complete – as the music boils over, so the voice is lost, becoming in its final agonies almost a caricature of the Priests’ voices – the irony, I am sure, is entirely intentional.  The abruptness of the end still seems a little shocking, but there are time constraints here, and we do understand that this was the only course which seemed open to him.  It’s just a little – sudden.

Grand Finale

If you’re going to have an Overture, you’d better have a Finale, and this is a beauty – satisfying the classical geek in me with its two competing themes, cleverly intertwined with the darting guitar solo.  If I have a quibble, it is that the ending is obscure, but then I realize that it may well be deliberately so; who wins this battle?  Just who has taken control, and of what?  You can read it both ways and the music doesn’t help, either.

I think that, as a younger man, I assumed that the good guys had won, that the Elder Race had come back to sort everything out.  Now, I’m older and more cynical, and I’m not so sure – my feeling is that the music tips us the other way, that the nascent revolution caused by this suicide has been brutally stamped on.

But I could be wrong.  What’s not to like here?  A song cycle, properly constructed, with themes and counterpoints, narrative tension and an unresolved ambiguous ending.  No wonder I like Mahler…

In the end, am I amazed?  No, not quite, but it’s still pretty damned good, and I am happy to have found new things in something which I knew so well.

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: 2112, alexlifeson, geddylee, neilpeart, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 I

Posted on September 26, 2005 by Richard

2112

History:

I’ve been scratching my head over this, I really have.  I feel like I’ve owned this forever, so it must have been my first Rush album, yet I know it wasn’t.  I know I owned it before ‘All The World’s A Stage’, because I remember getting that home and being disappointed by ‘2112’ being edited highlights.  It wasn’t first, then, but it was close to it.  A thousand years have passed me by since then, and although I have heard most of this relatively recently (I own a copy of ‘Different Stages’, remember, and I had two tracks from side 2 on my mp3 player months ago), I wonder if the original version still has the power to amaze?  Because that’s what I really remember about this – being amazed by it; I was a big ELP fan as a teenager, and I wasn’t new to sprawling epics, and concept pieces (although I can’t honestly say that the lyrics of Pete Sinfield prepared me in any way for the Solar Federation) but I was blown away by this.  Wonder if I still am?

Posted in Rediscovering Rush | Tags: 2112, alexlifeson, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush |

Rediscovering Rush – Caress of Steel IV

Posted on September 19, 2005 by Richard

Some thoughts from the future:

There was a noticeable gap between the last two posts, as the family went to Canada on vacation for a couple of weeks – I remarked on it at the time, but perhaps hadn’t quite grasped the significance of what that trip was about to mean to us all.

Still, I remember vividly listening to ‘Caress’ on the flight over, and again in the hotel in Vancouver as we tried to rediscover our equilibrium and banish the jetlag.  Maybe it was because of that that this review feels odd to me – I’m happy rediscovering ‘Fountain’ for sure, but at no point do I try to review it as a whole – and I think that’s why my optimism was misplaced; I genuinely did enjoy finding it again, but I’ve scarcely listened to it since, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much other good stuff out there, and partly because, for all my enthusiasm, it really doesn’t quite hang together as a coherent whole.

I put it away when I’d finished writing that post, and I doubt I’ve listened to the whole thing more than a couple of times since.

I did, however, buy a vinyl copy of ‘Archive’ some months back – replacing my original with another UK pressing was a joyful moment, and I definitely did listen to all of it then, so I know for sure I’ve heard it all the way through at least once since 2005…

 

Posted in Writing | Tags: alexlifeson, caressofsteel, fountainoflamneth, geddylee, neilpeart, RediscoveringRush, rush, thoughtsfromthefuture |
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