2 Guys Talking Rush
By Daniel Bukszpan
2020 has been a terrible year by any standard, but the thing that seemed to really set the tone
for that was the January 10 announcement that Rush drummer Neil Peart had passed away.
For a lot of us, the news that would come later – coronavirus, social distancing, etc. – was just
very bitter gravy. The year was already over. Why bother?
If you’re not a Rush fan, this must look like a very strange way of seeing things. If you’re a
member of the club, it’s not. When the news was released of Peart’s passing, that sound you
heard was millions of fans absorbing what can only be described as a knife to the gut.
We weren’t just fans of the music he made. He was a superhero to us. Every fill, every acrobatic
rhythmic feat, every complex meter executed flawlessly, was the equivalent of watching
Superman catch a falling, disabled helicopter in mid-air, while saving Lois Lane with the other
hand and protecting all the people below.
The problem with our superheroes is that while we believe they’re immortal and unstoppable,
there’s always Kryptonite. Neil Peart understood mortality better than most of us, in part
because of major tragedies that he had endured in his own life. It was just the rest of us who
didn’t get it. It was the rest of us who expected him to go on forever, and his death was the adult
version of finding out there’s no Santa Claus.
We felt so close to Neil – and to his bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson – because it felt
like they knew us. They understood our struggles, especially when we were teenagers. I grew
up in the 1980s with MTV and even though I wasn’t a fan yet, I watched their videos and came
away with the sense that they got it.
They understood. “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth but the suburbs have
no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth” might sound like an awkward mouthful when
you’re speaking the words, but when they sang them, they were a perfect distillation everything
an awkward 14-year-old felt. It was certainly like that for me, and I didn’t even grow up in the
suburbs.
Rush really became an obsession for me when I became a musician. You can’t be any kind of
serious, committed musician and come away from hearing them without conceding that they
could play.
They could really, really play.
I know people to this day who can’t stand their music and will rant angrily that such a band even
exists, yet who will still concede that these three Canadians had mastered their respective
instruments. Even if you hated them, you couldn’t take that away from them.
Why would anyone hate them? Well, there’s the singing voice of bassist Geddy Lee, for
example. I love it personally, but there has been no greater barrier to the acceptance of Rush’s
music than the voice of Geddy Lee.
This has been the case since their first album, right up to today, but instead of it alienating the
rest of us, it gave their music more appeal. It made Rush fandom an exclusive club, that only
people with the best taste in music could qualify for. It kept out the late adopters and the people
who latch onto bands for a single hit song.
Rush had chart success and they sold plenty of records and concert tickets, but they were never
a mainstream band. They stayed “ours” for the whole time they were together, to a degree that
maybe only the Grateful Dead did. Like with the Dead, it wasn’t just a band, it was a lifestyle
choice, and one that instantly disqualified you from being one of the beautiful people.
Rush fandom is fiercely loyal, and will accept to blasphemers. I found this out myself when I got
caught on the wrong end of it in 2013. I had contributed three album reviews to the Martin
Popoff book Rush: The Illustrated History, and one of them was for their 1979 album
Hemispheres.
I said in my review that I wasn’t crazy about “Cygnus X-1: Book II,” the album side-length suite
that takes up the first half of the record, and I heard about it. Boy, did I hear about it. Rush
fandom came at me en masse, to tell me how I had erred and how the review had undercut my
credibility. At the same time, there were no personal attacks and there was nothing nasty about
it – the letters were less of an attack on me and had more in common with someone protecting
something they loved.
Rush made their last original studio album, Clockwork Angels, in 2012, and officially hung it up
in 2015, so they’re absent from the world now. Except for us fans, who have never stopped
listening to their music and don’t have any plans to stop either. Their music is very much out
there and relevant as ever today, but never more so than the people who have loved them
privately and publicly for as long as they can remember.
When John Kane told me that he wanted to do this show, I jumped at the chance. All of us who
are fans want to do our part to make sure this band lives on, even if their drummer and lyricist is
gone and even if his bandmates are trying to end things graciously.
Sorry, guys, we can’t let it end. And while we’ll never ask you to get a new drummer or do a
hologram tour or engage in any other unseemly activity to make us happy, we’ll never stop
listening to your music, we’ll never stop analyzing it, and we’ll never stop talking about it. 2 Guys
Talking Rush is just John and I doing our bit to make sure that keeps up.
By Daniel Bukszpan
2020 has been a terrible year by any standard, but the thing that seemed to really set the tone
for that was the January 10 announcement that Rush drummer Neil Peart had passed away.
For a lot of us, the news that would come later – coronavirus, social distancing, etc. – was just
very bitter gravy. The year was already over. Why bother?
If you’re not a Rush fan, this must look like a very strange way of seeing things. If you’re a
member of the club, it’s not. When the news was released of Peart’s passing, that sound you
heard was millions of fans absorbing what can only be described as a knife to the gut.
We weren’t just fans of the music he made. He was a superhero to us. Every fill, every acrobatic
rhythmic feat, every complex meter executed flawlessly, was the equivalent of watching
Superman catch a falling, disabled helicopter in mid-air, while saving Lois Lane with the other
hand and protecting all the people below.
The problem with our superheroes is that while we believe they’re immortal and unstoppable,
there’s always Kryptonite. Neil Peart understood mortality better than most of us, in part
because of major tragedies that he had endured in his own life. It was just the rest of us who
didn’t get it. It was the rest of us who expected him to go on forever, and his death was the adult
version of finding out there’s no Santa Claus.
We felt so close to Neil – and to his bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson – because it felt
like they knew us. They understood our struggles, especially when we were teenagers. I grew
up in the 1980s with MTV and even though I wasn’t a fan yet, I watched their videos and came
away with the sense that they got it.
They understood. “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth but the suburbs have
no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth” might sound like an awkward mouthful when
you’re speaking the words, but when they sang them, they were a perfect distillation everything
an awkward 14-year-old felt. It was certainly like that for me, and I didn’t even grow up in the
suburbs.
Rush really became an obsession for me when I became a musician. You can’t be any kind of
serious, committed musician and come away from hearing them without conceding that they
could play.
They could really, really play.
I know people to this day who can’t stand their music and will rant angrily that such a band even
exists, yet who will still concede that these three Canadians had mastered their respective
instruments. Even if you hated them, you couldn’t take that away from them.
Why would anyone hate them? Well, there’s the singing voice of bassist Geddy Lee, for
example. I love it personally, but there has been no greater barrier to the acceptance of Rush’s
music than the voice of Geddy Lee.
This has been the case since their first album, right up to today, but instead of it alienating the
rest of us, it gave their music more appeal. It made Rush fandom an exclusive club, that only
people with the best taste in music could qualify for. It kept out the late adopters and the people
who latch onto bands for a single hit song.
Rush had chart success and they sold plenty of records and concert tickets, but they were never
a mainstream band. They stayed “ours” for the whole time they were together, to a degree that
maybe only the Grateful Dead did. Like with the Dead, it wasn’t just a band, it was a lifestyle
choice, and one that instantly disqualified you from being one of the beautiful people.
Rush fandom is fiercely loyal, and will accept to blasphemers. I found this out myself when I got
caught on the wrong end of it in 2013. I had contributed three album reviews to the Martin
Popoff book Rush: The Illustrated History, and one of them was for their 1979 album
Hemispheres.
I said in my review that I wasn’t crazy about “Cygnus X-1: Book II,” the album side-length suite
that takes up the first half of the record, and I heard about it. Boy, did I hear about it. Rush
fandom came at me en masse, to tell me how I had erred and how the review had undercut my
credibility. At the same time, there were no personal attacks and there was nothing nasty about
it – the letters were less of an attack on me and had more in common with someone protecting
something they loved.
Rush made their last original studio album, Clockwork Angels, in 2012, and officially hung it up
in 2015, so they’re absent from the world now. Except for us fans, who have never stopped
listening to their music and don’t have any plans to stop either. Their music is very much out
there and relevant as ever today, but never more so than the people who have loved them
privately and publicly for as long as they can remember.
When John Kane told me that he wanted to do this show, I jumped at the chance. All of us who
are fans want to do our part to make sure this band lives on, even if their drummer and lyricist is
gone and even if his bandmates are trying to end things graciously.
Sorry, guys, we can’t let it end. And while we’ll never ask you to get a new drummer or do a
hologram tour or engage in any other unseemly activity to make us happy, we’ll never stop
listening to your music, we’ll never stop analyzing it, and we’ll never stop talking about it. 2 Guys
Talking Rush is just John and I doing our bit to make sure that keeps up.