RUSH: Who Are They?

   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 fist 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 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 record.

   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.

   "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 this 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 identity.  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 follow ups, 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 the heavy metal 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 nooks, 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, it's 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 changed it's sound from album to album, evolving 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 to of the band's most compelling treatments of these themes, "The Big Money" and "Manhattan Project".  The band's compositional 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 it's increasingly complex song 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 it's 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, al live album was the next step as Rush considered it's future.  "A Show of Hands", the band's third live set, was the perfect summation of where Rush was as the band prepared for it's next phase.