Friday Night Rush!
Snakes & Arrows: Part Three
No word yet on Snakes & Arrows Live. My “friend” isn’t returning the text I sent. Go figure.
I did, however, get my airline tickets, which, when added to the cost of my Rush ticket, brings my total expenditures for this show to over $500. Spending that kind of money for three hours of pleasure on a balmy night in your hometown . . . you’d think it was a broad, not a band, I was coming back to see.
But, with moving to California, the cost of inflation, and the price of gas (and a defiant finger raised at the Prius), that is, for now, the price of entertainment.
My faithful readers remember last week’s development of S&A beyond the Neil-centered bildungsroman of Tracks 1-3 that watches the tender child come of age in an unfriendly world (with “Far Cry” a more terrestrial protest and “Armor and Sword” a more spiritual one) and then the rush of memories while traveling on “Workin’ Them Angels,” the song that doesn’t attempt to sort out the past, but simply accepts it as part of the “rear-view mirror” landscape. “The Larger Bowl” kicks off the second part of the album, with its Prince-and-the-Pauper comparison cleverly negotiated in the Malay verse form Neil introduced us to, the pantoum. [I’m still looking for any evidence that there’s a double-reference here to a hashpipe. Other than the Hendrix-inspired lead for Track 7, I’m empty-handed and still curious, so if anybody has any leads, let me know.] “Spindrift” is an eerily cool, if somewhat misplaced, track that, in the lyrical and musical style of Vapor Trails, with its meteorological-relationship metaphor (which, actually, reaches all the way back to Presto’s enchanting “Chain Lightning,” when Neil figured out if you can make a hit out of a vague song based on the obsolete Beaufort weather scale [“Force Ten”], then you could mine the glossary of a handy copy of A Field Guide to Weather Systems for song material).
A cool instrumental later is the album’s centerfold, the Middle East-meets-Middle West “The Way the Wind Blows,” with its careful criticism of politics and global philosophies. Lerxst, aka Guitar Hero Alex Lifeson, follows this song with a short, simple burst of Hope, and, lest we fly too high on this brief happy interlude, we are reminded that Neil is without faith in anything or anybody in the aptly-named “Faithless.” This marks the end of what I see as the second part of the album—the part that looks to the outside world, with its differences and problems, and tries to navigate the issues at stake, with “Faithless” bringing the speaker back into the picture and setting the stage for Part Three.
“Bravest Face” starts off with the simple hook, “Though we might have precious little/ It’s still precious.” Doesn’t have quite the same effect as, “Nah I ain’t sayin’ she’s a golddigger.” What it does do is remind you that this isn’t glam rock or hip-hop (well, you probably would’ve figured out at least the latter by now). Rather, this is a real person who may be the world’s greatest drummer admitting that he doesn’t have much of anythng. Sort of makes you wonder which party he would identify with in “The Larger Bowl.” The verse launches into a cool meta-moment with
I like that song
About this wonderful world
It’s got a sunny point of view
And sometimes I feel it’s true
At least for a few of us
which, of course, is NOT this song! It’s almost like Neil’s saying, “Look guys, I wish I could write those sappy songs you and I would like to listen to but I can’t. Sorry. Life sucks too much.”
In the second verse he does the same thing with TV:
I like that show
Where they solve the murder
That heroic point of view
It’s got justice and vengeance, too
At least so the story goes
In both instances, though, the focus returns to the “darker,” “messy point of view . . . for so many among us.” The song ends with a real downer pep-line:
In the whole wide world there’s no magic place
So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face
Somehow, this part of the album takes me back to Presto, my other Rush favorite. The title track has this cool line: “If I could wave my magic wand/ I’d make everything all right.” Okay, so both songs admit that it doesn’t matter if you’re a rock star, cashier, or Indian Chief, none of us can work our magic. But the 1990 Neil was the optimist-realist:
don’t ask me
I’m just improvising
my illusion of careless flight
Now, a decade and a half later, there’s no more illusion, and no careless flight, only a weary stage walk. Few rockers make it to this age intact, and where others have found their comfort in drugs and playmates, Neil built a family that was utterly destroyed through no fault of his own. With no religion or substances to fall back on, what more could he do than rise and put on a brave face? I hate to psycho-analyze Neil (or any celebrity), or try to understand something that I really can’t, but the lyrics beg for an honest connection, a particle of mercy . . .
“Good News First” is the logical follow-up to “Bravest Face,” and even musically, seems to me almost an extension. The opening line is eager to trump the one from the previous track’s in the anti-hero contest:
The best we can agree on
Is it could’ve been worse
I have to confess, this is one of my all-time favorite songs, but, as was the case with the first few times through “Losing It” (Signals), I can’t hold back the tears on this one. Every chorus finds my eyelids trembling out of time to the beat of the drums as Geddy wails:
You used to feel that way
The saddest words you could ever say
But I know you will remember that day
And the most beautiful words I could ever say
I’m still not 100% sure what this song is about, other than what’s clearly stated, and maybe that’s why the bridge still makes me lose it every time . . . I don’t know. The electric guitars go away for a few measures and this clear, double-tracked Martin D-12 takes front seat, with some subtle synth-orchestral hits in the background, as the words ride the acoustic surf through the ear canal and into the soul:
Some would say they never fear a thing
Well I do
And I’m afraid enough for both of us—
For me and you
Time, if nothing else, will do its worst
So do me that favor
And tell me the good news first
And the guitar solo, a simple, modal affair in the style of Presto but with the achingly simple, solid tonal qualities that are uniquely S&A, finally gives me a break from the heart-wrenching words that, poignant and articulate as they are, can only lead you to the space where words fall short, and only music—in this case some of Rush’s finest—can express the inexpressible.
This is a tragic, beautiful song that will probably be underrated and misunderstood by most. But some of the best art always goes that way.
At this point in the album, it should be clear that it’s not Neil’s past and the lost innocence that is a part of growing up that takes center stage—it’s the future and the uncertainty of living the world that dominates the middle of the album that weigh on Neil, weigh on the guitars and drums, and finally on my own heart.
Thankfully, there is once again an instrumental respite from such a powerful song, and this time, it comes in the form of the dryly funny “Malignant Narcisissm.” Again, I’ll refrain from trying to figure out the etymology of this title, other than to say I think the significance of the song is as a relief from the heavy lyrics, that the title is supposed to make you smile (at least, it’s funnier than “Faithless” or “Good News First”), and the music is short, fun, and—I can’t resist—narcissistic. Especially that last little bend—what a weird, pretentious, and air-headed way to end a song. (I’d like to know who came up with that one.)
“We Hold On” is another classic Rush closer. Since Hold Your Fire they have this precedent of ending albums with these interesting, even more introspective than usual songs that never get played live: “High Water,” “Available Light” (one of the most beautiful, timeless songs of all time), “You Bet Your Life,” “Everyday Glory,” “Carve Away the Stone,” and “Out of the Cradle,” which, interestingly, ends with the repeated (and re-repeated) line, “Here we come out of the cradle/ Endlessly rocking.” An interesting statement for a rock band recording their first studio album after a six-year (their longest) hiatus.
But their latest closer is such a well-crafted finish to a solid, rich album! I honestly don’t know how they do it. Each verse begins with “How many times . . .,” which, when repeated at the head of each stanza, really conveys the repetitive nature of life. I love the verse
How many times
Do we chafe against the repetition
Straining against a fate
Measured out in coffee breaks
which was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which is my favorite poem, in case you were wondering).
Lifeson’s guitar work is interesting, inserting a mode into a riff in the bridge section that, again, is a subtle reminder of the Middle East (and is the first time he’s resurrected that mode since “YYZ”). Otherwise, the song is typical post-Test for Echo—chaotic, heavy, and dissonant, but, in this case, with various atonalities eventually resolving themselves. And the songs last note is this sort of hasty resolution to this simple power chord—almost the admission that there is no good resolution?! Sometimes I’m not sure how far you can take these readings, because obviously the composers do many of these things at a sub- or semi-conscious level. (And here I have to echo the words of my Lit professor Steve Carr: “You should give a writer or character at least as much complexity or believability as you would like others to give to you.” That’s my justification.) But nobody, even the poor bastards who never had Carr to teach them how to read Blake, Swift, and everything else, can’t argue with a well-constructed piece—lyrics and music lead and follow, around again, in a merry dance performed for the listener. And, if you have the benefit of listening live, then the show becomes more of a masque, where the audience becomes part of the dance, feeding the band, becoming the energy they capture to make magic. And who says Neil’s drumsticks aren’t a pair of magic wands?
Those of you who spent the money on the album itself will appreciate something that listeners who illegally downloaded it will have to imagine. Again, finally, I direct you to Hugh Syme’s artwork. Look at the picture that accompanies “We Hold On,” and you’ll see this car driving toward this house framed by a sunset. It’s an interesting moment of suspension between the lines
How many times
Do we weather out the stormy evenings
Long to slam the front door
Drive away into the setting sun
Clearly, we are meant to perceive the car (which is the same Plymouth used in the artwork for “The Larger Bowl” . . . hmm . . . maybe we can identify where Neil situates himself in that one) as driving back home. Yet it’s also driving into the setting sun, which is ties the theme with the driving-your-car-as-therapy “Workin’ Them Angels” and “Spindrift,” which has these ideas of trying to find someone as the wind blows from the east. Maybe it’s just my recent move out west, maybe it’s the knowledge that Neil moved to California after his tragedy, but there’s an interesting undercurrent of, well, currents that laces the songs of this album together. It’s like you could almost feel the current flowing . . .
If I could sum up the direction of this album, it’s this: Neil, and the rest of humanity, is born into a world where snakes and arrows await him. Snakes and Arrows is a game, like Chutes and Ladders (or like Life), but snakes and arrows isn’t a fun game where somebody wins—it’s real life. And there are times in the game to hit the road and run like hell, other times to put on your bravest face, other times for introspection, but at the end of the day, each of these “times” is defined by the currents, tides, fates, what have you, of something we can’t control.
Like the solitary pine
On a bare wind-blasted shore
We can only grow the way the wind blows
And, like that pine, regardless of the season, at the end of the day, we must hold on, while we can . . .
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
When Brian first proposed a series of close readings on Rush’s new album, Snakes and Arrows, he was actually pretty hesitant about it. He just wasn’t sure if it would be “too much”. I told him to shut up and that I would be the judge of that. :)
So I read Brian’s entry….
And Brian, as he is known to do, surprised me. Honestly, what I was expecting was nothing more than a review. What he gave me was a careful, thought provoking, criticial analysis of a band he very clearly “gets”.
So I posted that first entry (last weeks Friday Night Rush’s post), and told him to keep going with it. Make it a series, why donchya?
He, thank heavens, agreed.
Entertaining and lovely, sophisticated and mature, Brian’s latests are meticulous pieces of prose that read as effortless as rainy-day fiction. It is my pleasure to give you Brian’s second entry in his series-within-a-series:
Snakes & Arrows: Part Two
I’m still waiting for the Snakes & Arrows Live album I pre-ordered in February. It was supposed to arrive April 15, but because of a lame mailing address error it was lost. I had a new one shipped out by the first week of May, free of charge, but I left for Cali a few days before it was supposed to arrive.
Rumor has it that one of my friends is hanging on to it “for me.” Great.
Near the point of despair of ever receiving the CD I paid for half a year ago, last night I finally caved and started listening to the live tracks on YouTube. Big mistake—two of them sounded terrible, and I was too disappointed to listen further. I chalk it up to whatever punk had too much time on his hands—surely Rush couldn’t sound like that. This is their fifth live album, and they still sound amazing…but I’ll take my double-pressed vinyls over some YouTube fan video any day.
Last week I explored the deeper meanings behind Tracks 1-3 on S&A. My read is that, taken together, they are the most personal “Neil” songs on the album and tell a story. “Far Cry” is the story of how the world affects the young (who in turn shape the world) with some creepy nods to religion, nuclear warfare, and a weak protest to cosmic fatalism—“I can get back on . . .” “Armor and Sword” is the long, wearying ballad of the long, wearying journey to each one’s personal heaven, with each child born heir to “snakes and arrows.” “Workin’ Them Angels” wraps up this coming-of-age theme (a bildungsroman for Neil, for every “child,” and most especially for Western ideology) with a retrospective of the past offered via travel (with wonderful subterranean connections to Peart’s spectacular Ghost Rider). Almost like “Roll the Bones,” with it’s accept-without-understanding “Why are we here? Because we’re here—Roll the Bones,” “Workin’ Them Angels” chalks up numerous inexplicable “razor edge” skirmishes to working “them angels” overtime. (And, presumably, the price for employing them as such is at least time-and-a-half, although Neil leaves this one up to the listener to decide.)
This week’s focus is what I’ve arbitrarily grouped as Part II of the album, the longest, most diverse, and most musically progressive of the three parts. The first one, “The Larger Bowl,” is most immediately notable for the parenthetical “a pantoum” that follows the title. Since I didn’t know what a pantoum was (I bet you don’t, either), I went to dictionary.com and learned that it is a Malay verse form characterized by lines two and four of one quatrain being repeated as lines one and three of the following quatrain, for as many quatrains as is needed. Neil is a clever guy, and not only is this a chance to bring together Malaysian culture and rock music (how often do you encounter that?), but it syncs nicely with the message—on two levels.
First, there’s the repetition across different melodies. The effect this creates is unlike any song I’ve heard before—the words are the same, but they are sung differently a few lines later. It’s the performative aspect of a text at work—the words
Some are blessed and some are cursed
The golden one or scarred from birth
are sung over multiple melodies with multiple phrasings—just as the principle of the prince and the pauper carries from Elizabethan to Middle Eastern to Ancient Greek to American culture. This probably sounds like another over-reading, but before I even decided to look up pantoum I already got the trans-cultural sense from the form of the poetry.
The other cool way it works is the way the primitive, if I can use that word, Malaysian culture is fused with the progressive rock sound in the body of this song. It’s a weird juxtaposition that took me many listens to get used to it. I admit this was my least favorite song on the album for the first six months and I didn’t really enjoy it until recently. It’s a weird song! But perhaps that’s the point: it’s weird, but eventually we accept it because it’s Rush, and it’s part of our musical world and we’re supposed to accept it, just like we’re supposed to accept the income gap (or insert your other favorite “gap” here) because it’s part of our world. Note the artwork, with the shiny Plymouth rear-end opposite the little tin toy-car (which is cleverly reflected in the Plymouth’s chrome bumper).
Neil Peart and Hugh Syme . . . the best lyrical/artistic collaboration in rock music history.
One more thing about this song: it is, for the most part, the simplest Rush song I’ve ever heard, in musical terms. It has four chords (and they’re pretty typical ones), a simple acoustic guitar pattern, and has a beat so simple your mom could play it on the steering wheel—definitely a contrast to the first three songs, which rock out in various ways. But Lerxst, the guitar hero who’s been hiding out for the last fifteen years or so, uses this drab landscape to bust out his first real guitar solo since I was in the third grade. We’re not talking “Free Will” or “Tom Sawyer” here, but still, the way it builds from this simple pentatonic into the shrill crunch of pull-offs and pinch harmonics is both a reminder of the contrasts that fill this song and the building, the moving on, of Rush, as they take the elements of their musical past—very evident in the first three songs—and move on to really new material.
Well, almost. There’s one exception, and it’s track five. I rarely—very rarely!—criticize Rush, but here I have a minor bone to pick with our Canadian buddies, and that’s the placement of this song. It doesn’t belong after “The Larger Bowl,” and probably doesn’t even belong on this album. The dissonant, heavy guitars sound like Lifeson on “Vapor Trails” and the metaphorical lyrics using a natural phenomenon that nobody’s heard about to describe a relationship between Neil and somebody were the defining feature on VT. Not that it isn’t a cool song—any song that compares ocean “spray that’s torn away” to a feeling between two people, with or without the haunting, bassy guitar riffs, is enough to get my vote. But the whole musical composition, the lyrics, and the feel make me think this was a mid-album project between VT and S&A, and the last place this song belongs is after “The Larger Bowl.” Who knows. Maybe someone higher up made a dumb choice and screwed the bandmates over. Maybe they couldn’t figure out where to put it and felt that sticking it in between a pantoum and an instrumental would make the listener feel as uneasy as Neil claims to feel in the song.
Moving along, the next track is “The Main Monkey Business,” and since it is an instrumental and I’ve never heard any official explanation for the goofy title, I will refrain from trying to make connections that even I will admit are tenuous, at best. Instead, I’ll say a few things about the first instrumental from Rush in ten years.
1. This song rocks. Not in the style of “A Passage to Bangkok,” but more in the vein of those cool tribal songs from the late 80s / early 90s, a la “Mystic Rhythms” and “Scars.” (Perhaps there was some inside joke about monkeys that somehow got this jungley song the MMB title?)
2. It is the longest and most impressive instrumental on the album, and the longest instrumental in almost thirty years! (Last studio-recorded instrumental over six minutes was “La Villa Strangiato,” off Hemispheres (1978).)
3. The highlight of the song is right around the 1:20 mark—that cool little bass drum/bass register fill. It makes my subwoofers buzz every time, and makes the dog at the end of the street start barking when I drive past.
Next, we have “The Way the Wind Blows.” It’s hard not to spend a whole blog just talking about this one, since it is probably the most significant song on the whole album. Notice the following, as I offer you another numbered list:
1. It’s the middle track on the album, placed dead center.
2. It’s bracketed by instrumentals, which directs the listener that much more to the lyrics. (It’s the only time Rush has ever done this.)
3. At the show last year, they played this really powerful video, and the audience was hushed for the whole song. Usually the audience will cheer for the cool drum fill, or the guitar solo, or Geddy’s weird on-stage Jewish dancing while playing the bass, but this song had the audience spellbound.
The song’s message is open and obvious: it attacks the war, it attacks prejudice, and it attacks people on both sides who would readily “attack”—verbally or physically—someone they perceive as different from them.
Now it’s come to this
It’s like we’re back in the Dark Ages
From the Middle East to the Middle West
It’s a world of superstition
Now it’s come to this
Wide-eyed armies of the faithful
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Pray and pass the ammunition
The whole song draws these eerie parallels between the two worlds, the Middle East and the “Middle West.” The fighting is an obvious comparison, but some later lines, like
Hollow speeches of mass deception
. . . Like crusaders in unholy alliance
could just as easily refer to a dictator and his allies as it could to President Bush and his allies in the War on Terror. Unlike a lot of angry musicians, this isn’t a caustic, irreverent rip on Bush; it’s a careful, poignant comparison of two societies that are perceived—and correctly so, on some levels—as being very different.
It seems to leave them partly blind
And they leave no child behind
While evil spirits haunt their sleep
While shepherds bless and count their sheep
The obvious reference to “No Child Left Behind” has disturbing connotations to the education systems in the Middle East we read about that teach children to hate the US. And shepherds may conjure up images of some impoverished Afghani in the foothills, but knowing Neil’s dislike of televangelists (and networking it with some earlier lines in the album), the Western “shepherds” are likely preachers who bless the leaders of the war and “count their sheep”—look at the size of their congregations, those who follow them, the way a military leader might size up his army.
The anti-chorus, the soft, gentle, “We can only grow the way the wind blows,” is a protest to needless fighting. You can’t change the tide, you can’t go against the direction of natural elements. It’s not a song about peace, per se, it’s a plea for sensible, thoughtful action—and a not so gentle criticism on Western hypocrisy.
The bluesy Hendrix-style lead riffs are both ultra-cool and evocative of an earlier time—a time when the US was putting a few men on the moon and thousands more in Vietnam. Is it a coincidence that Lifeson’s first bluesy riffs since “A Farewell to Kings” appear on this song?
I think not!
Lest you get depressed by the war, and the dark nature of Neil’s lyrics, you shouldn’t turn the album off now, o faithful listener (not that you’d even think of that). You get a break in the form of another Rush first—“Hope,” the two-minute instrumental that features Alex playing an acoustic guitar that is folksy and progressive at the same time—sort of a Michael Hedges or Doyle Dykes kind of sound. Don’t just treat this as an interlude, a pee break, because this is a really cool song that enriches the generally depressing album. If the title doesn’t lift you up, then the liner note, which begins with the familiar, “All songs composed by Lee and Lifeson, with lyrics by Peart,” and continues, “except ‘Hope,’ composed and performed by Lerxst Lifeson, all by his own self,” should be enough to bring a smile to the face of the most depressed emo. (Which brings up an interesting question: Do emos listen to Rush?? . . . Stand by,)
“Hope” is very, well, hopeful, with a real pentatonicky sound in the dropped-D (perhaps DADGAD?) tuning. It was performed live and will be done again, and it is the only time I’ve ever seen my guitar hero alone on stage. It was a strange, exciting sight, and is over shortly after it’s begun . . . as hope often is.
Track nine, the last one in my series today, is “Faithless,” and follows “Hope” in it’s title—but in an anti-parallel way. The bridge is this slightly morbid
I don’t have faith in faith
I don’t believe in belief
You can call me faithless
But I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that’s faith enough for me
If anybody fails to see the numerous biblical references in this album, you should really consider giving your Rush tickets to somebody more deserving. I mean, seriously, for an atheist, Neil has more biblical allusions than Billy Graham on a Crusade Reunion Tour. Faith, hope, and love . . .
The cool thing about this song is the Middle Eastern feel to the music—the mode of the lead guitar provides a superb backdrop to the lines
Fools and thieves are well-disguised
In the temple and marketplace
And the chorus? Each line is a nature simile punctuated with a “I will quietly resist.” (Hmm. Reminds me of a song . . .) Fittingly, the artwork showcases a Middle Eastern-looking desert (how a desert can look Middle Eastern is beyond me, but it does) with a single flower blooming in the middle of the night.
Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist
And thus ends the eclectic second part of the album—from “The Larger Bowl” which takes Neil out of his world and throws two different worlds together, and takes Lifeson out of the daiquiri business and has him ripping solos again and bumps over “Spindrift” to some sweet instrumentals bracketing the album’s theme, to a final song that, however briefly, moves you into a soundscape that is semi-Middle Eastern. And, interestingly, subliminally juxtaposes the faithful jihadists that we Westerners have come to associate with the Middle East (however unfairly) with the utterly faithlessness of Neil, who will, once again, take front seat in Part III.
Stay tuned, my good readers, as I prepare for the last S&A blog . . . and as I continue to hunt down the elusive live album in the spindrift of the Postal Service . . .
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush! Part 1
The show is now less than one month away. For those of you who are excited, well, you should be. For those of you who aren’t, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve your readership…
Today I’m going to drop the usual How Did Rush Affect Me This Week theme that seems to creep into my writing and focus on the latest: Snakes and Arrows. Now, why should S&A, or my literary-musical critique, be of interest to you? Well, according to my source (www.2112.net/powerwindows), the current tour is “quite a bit more varied . . . 9 of the 13 tracks from the new album were played live (the most songs [Rush] ever performed in support of a new album . . . ). The paragraph goes on to list some really impressive, er, somebody-has-no-life statistics about what makes this tour so unique. If that stuff interests you, then great.
But I know you’re all just dying to hear what I have to say about S&A! (And you know I’ve got tons to say!) There are, of course, a number of outstanding Rush albums that have been produced over the years. Highlights include Moving Pictures (1981), the “Sum of the Parts Album,” as I think of it—an outstanding collection of Rush classics; Grace Under Pressure (1983), aka P/G, one of the most brilliantly crafted albums as a whole, and in my opinion, the best album-as-a-whole they’ve had; and Presto (1990), my personal favorite, and probably the most under-rated Rush record. But S&A is the latest in the series of Rush’s best, and, song by song, I’m gonna tell you why. (If you haven’t listened to the album a few times, or don’t have a copy handy, then you might want to download (legally, of course) some mp3s and follow along.)
Track 1, “Far Cry,” was the first single released and is still probably the best-known song from the album. It really sets the tone for the album, with the “wandering madmen . . . speaking in tongues” in the first line immediately drawing a connection to religion. The lines
It’s a far cry from the world we thought we’d inherit
It’s a far cry from the way we thought we’d share it
You can almost feel the current flowing
You can almost see the circuits blowing
Really reach back to Signals and P/G, where “The Weapon (Part II of Fear)” and “The Body Electric” talk about a sort of Orwellian, pre- and post-Apocalyptic worlds, respectively. “The Weapon” was way ahead of its time, linking violence, religion, and fear:
With an iron fist in a velvet glove
We are sheltered under the gun
In the glory game on the power train
Thy kingdom’s will be done
And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us . . .
“The Body Electric” is a little lighter (I actually think it’s pretty funny, and I seem to recall reading that Neil said it was supposed to be a dryly amusing song). It opens with this C3-P0 in a Tattooine desert image and resolves into another Lucas reference, the more obscure (but no less brilliant) THX 1138, at the end of the film. Without delving into the history behind the song, or the TV show that was spun out of it, it’s basically the story of a robot that has escaped into the desert and is slowly dying. At the end,
It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays
To the mother of all machines . . .
Again, there is this interesting linkage of religion, fear (“And it’s scared out of its wits”), and, here, technology. If “The Weapon” is pre-apocalyptic, and “The Body Electric” is post-apocalyptic, then “Far Cry” seems to be smack dab on the tip of it all, with the “current flowing” and the “circuits blowing.” Or, more dangerously, at the end of the song,
You can almost see the circle growing
You can almost feel the planets glowing
It took me a few listens to draw the connections: the mushroom cloud is accompanied by an expanding ring, as the blast simultaneously moves up and out, and “glowing” is a sort of radioactive word. And the “crack in the sky” that Neil attempts to fly through—well, that seems to be as readily applicable to a thermonuclear ceiling as it is to the lightning “crack” in the album art for “Far Cry” . . . or the cracked sky on the cover of P/G.
One more thing about this cool, catchy, guitar solo-less song: the hook is this ultra-simple “I can get back on” which is repeated each time. At first, I thought, hey lots of lines get repeated in music, but—and this shows how much time I have on my hands—this is the only line in the whole album lyrics that is repeated. (I’m not counting lines repeated in the vocals, just in the lyrics.) Yes, I checked, to try to disprove my hypothesis. Since it is the only instance, I feel confident in saying this: Neil is really trying to convince himself that he can get back on top of the world, ahead of the wheel. He is The Little Engine That Could (“I Think I Can, I Think I Can”) and the repetition is his own attempt at telling himself he can do it. Look at the artwork, and this dark reading is supported by the fact that the lightning has singled out the baby carriage, and the rainbow, for all you would-be hopeful readers, is off to the corner of the page, disappearing into the sea. And instead of a dove symbolizing peace, we have a predatory hawk patrolling the skies.
This is not a happy song.
“Armor and Sword,” the next one, is even darker, and I’ve heard complaints that its too long. It’s certainly not a radio-friendly, easy-listening tune. The opening line is where the title comes from, and helps explain the baby carriage on the previous page:
The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts.
The child growing up, or the bildungsroman theme, is what connects the first three tracks. (Sort of a David Copperfield set to music.) Remember Vapor Trails? The last song, “Out of the Cradle,” seems to have been picked up with the baby carriage in “Far Cry,” and the poor kid has no idea what he’s in for, as defenses are built, “a place of safety/ And leave the darker places unexplored.”
The religious references really take off here, with the repeated line, “No one gets to their heaven without a fight,” and the riff off of St. Paul’s spirit versus flesh, “Sometimes the spirit is too strong/ Or the flesh is too weak.” Although Neil has made it very clear he’s an atheist, this song leaves me wondering. The cool bridge section has this creepy chord progression and finishes with the words:
The battle flags are flown
At the feet of a god unknown
It seems that there is a chink in the armor of The Professor’s atheism, a bit of doubt and irresolution that is making him uneasy. Otherwise, the song is, as has been suggested, long, although the sort of endless fight that it describes makes this length acceptable to me—I’m partaking in a bloody fight just listening to the slow, plodding, dissonant music. Also, for music theory fans out there, note the 3/4 to 4/4 time signature shifts—this is a trope really common on this album, enough so that I would say it is one of the defining musical elements of S&A.
Moving on to the final song of the day, another 3/4 to 4/4 song, “Workin’ Them Angels” is my favorite, and closes what I perceive as the Neil-as-protagonist portion of the album. This song is the happiest of the three, and the most mature, a collection of reflections “down a desert road.” (An interesting side note: Neil has a lot of references to desert roads, such as “Dreamline”—“We travel on the road to adventure/ On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun” and a chapter in his book Ghost Rider entitled “The Loneliest Road in America.”) Each verse is punctuated with a memory, each one ostensibly a memory of some time in Neil’s past, called to recollection in his motorcycle travels. We have a memory “humming at the heart of a factory town,” which networks nicely with the workin’ angels, overtime, and the cool black-and-white pic of the dude in the factory with the angel wings. Another memory, this one “strumming at the heart of a moving picture,” is a clever reference to Rush’s most successful album (yes, that would be Moving Pictures), but also seems to link up films with music and landscapes, as the medium for memories. The final verse is punctuated with a cool double-image, a superimposition of memories “drumming at the heart of an English winter” and “beating at the heart of an African village.” For the under-informed, Neil spent some time as a teen in London, when he was becoming a good drummer, and much later, traveled on bicycle through parts of Africa, where he became a disgustingly amazing drummer.
These memories provide a nice counterpoint to the chorus, which is a retrospective:
All my life
I’ve been workin’ them angels overtime
Riding and driving and living
So close to the edge
The second chorus, interestingly, changes slightly to become
Riding and driving and flying
Just over the edge
This follows the “moving pictures” memory, and sounds to me like our boy Neil is making a cool double use of the “living on the edge” motif. My reading is this: there were exciting times in his life when he lived on the edge, or even flew over the edge, a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Perhaps when Moving Pictures came out was one of those times, and the exciting, fast-paced life he led was being supported by some unknown group of “angels” that kept him going.
“Living so close to the edge,” though can also mean the exact opposite of flying high: it can mean you’re so low you’re at the edge, ready to jump, or about to fall off. And at these times, the “angels,” whoever/whatever they are, have kept him from going off the deep end.
And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the easy swing time in the verses gives way to this awkward phrasing in the choruses in that slow 4/4 time in what seems to be a contrast between the easy riding/driving on a road and then the more difficult task of sorting through memories—the reliving is itself work, and Geddy’s phrasing, along with the rhythm changes, puts you in shotgun with Neil (or, perhaps, on the back of the bike). We’re along for the ride, and it’s not as easy as “Flying High Again” with Ozzy—this one requires more than a bowl and a nickel bag full of freshly cut grass.
From the “Hemispheres Chord” on “Far Cry” (it’s actually an F#11) to the weird modal shifts in “Armor and Sword” to the beautiful rhythm work on the guitar in “Workin’ Them Angels,” Rush is moving away from the single-minded distortion and dissonance in Vapor Trails (although we get reminded of this in “Spindrift”). Just as S&A has dealt with different times in Neil’s life and his personal growth, the album represents a significant growth for an already mature band.
Next week: Part II of the album, Tracks 4-9.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush
Shortly before Christmas in 2006, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post would propose to famed violinist Joshua Bell what would become a Pulitzer Prize winning concept, or as he wrote it: “an experiment in context, perception and priorities…”
The experiment that launched a million blog entries would have Joshua - Avery Fisher, Grammy, Mercury, Echo Klassik and Gramaphone winner – dressed in jeans and decked out in nothing more decorative than a baseball cap, busking unknown at the L’Enfant Metro station for one hour. The results of the experiment became a thing of legend: a mere total of ONE would recognize him out of 1,097 and only four people actually stopped to listen. He collected around 37 dollars.
For a man who easily commands $1,000 per minute, the sum is rather shocking.
I won’t go into the whole article; that’s not what this post is about. But it did get me thinking: In this day of pre-programmed ipods, we’re downloading what’s already familiar. We know the lyrics, we know the rhythm. Most of the time, we’re daydreaming to those familiar songs, not analyzing them, not deconstructing them, not really letting them sink in, definitely not learning anything new. Not saying there’s anything wrong with zoning out to a good beat, but it begs the question: How much do we actually listen - truly listen - to music?
In a telephone conversation that would last three hours and have me up until 2 in the morning, forcing me to drink 5 Red Bulls before I felt human again, Brian and I discussed his last Friday Night Rush entry, The HOV: Reflections from Without.
As surprised as I was that he was able to draw comparisons between two seemingly incomparable things (the HOV lane and Rush), he was just as suprised I was not able to do the same thing.
Alternately supine and prone on my bed (and yes, I learned there is a difference), I listened to Brian read aloud his latest entry. And while there were a lot of lines that really struck a chord with me, it was this one I remember most clearly:
“Rush’s music,” Brian stated, “makes me think and feel, and by drawing me into the frame of the song, I become an active participant, and I want to share my experiences…”
If the subject matter of what he was saying wasn’t so interesting, the smooth cadence of his voice could have easily lulled me to sleep.
But as it were, it was a fascinating piece. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to it…we’ll get to it!) He answered my question exactly…and a lot more. Music is about participation, and the really great musicians will have you do it effortlessly. Brian was able to make his comparison because Rush enabled him to think outside the frame of everyday-radio-listening. He lets the message of the song sink in; enjoying the music, don’t get me wrong, but realizing it’s much bigger than lyrics and notes.
Brian realizes that the great music, the wonderful music, reminds a person why living is so lovely.
And I realized that a great person, a wonderful person, will point out the music that will remind you in the first place.
Thanks Brian.
Gotta Rub Me the Right Way
It bugs me, just a little bit. For some reason, when Rush comes up in conversation, or in a magazine article, someone always makes the point, usually as if it’s some new, profound revelation: “With Rush, it’s all about the music.”
This statement, or something like it, has been bandied about so frequently that, depending on the intentions of the speaker, it usually falls somewhere between an apology for Geddy’s voice in the early days or a platitude for those poor non-Rush fans who need to be reassured that, Hey, it’s cool that you’re not into Rush—they’re a real live music band, and not for the average radio-friendly wimp, we cool people wouldn’t expect you to understand.
Gag.
So when the feedback to my HOV-lane piece last week focused on the apparent non-relationship between high-occupancy vehicles and the rock band we’re looking forward to seeing this July, I had to step back and ask myself: why does a blog about Rush inevitably wind up being about me and my traveling experiences and not “all about the music?” Sure, I write about Rush too, but it’s always about how they’ve impacted me. I couldn’t possibly be that self-centered…
To prevent further digression (and stave off the inevitable psychoanalytic babble that would follow), I’ll just cut to the chase: I think the reason is that Rush’s music makes me think and feel, and by drawing me into the frame of the song, I become an active participant, and I want to share my experiences. That’s not uncommon in rock music, but Rush makes it particularly mutual. Sometimes, you feel their need to share with you, as in “The Analog Kid” (Signals, 1982):
You move me, you move me
With your buildings and your eyes
Autumn woods and winter skies—
Yeah, okay, so I may not have buildings or landscapes, but by addressing a scene in the second person, I, as the listener, get drawn into the world that our boy Neil wants to share.
Other artists do this too. When the Beatles sang “Barbara Ay-ay-anne, come take my hay-ay-annnd,” they drew in quite a huge female audience who, at some level, was responding to the invitation—even if your name didn’t almost rhyme with garbage can. Or take something a little more recent, a national favorite from a Pittsburgh local:
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Gotta rub me the right way, honey
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Come, come, come and let me out.
I have to confess, I don’t respond as much to the invitation to take Paul McCartney’s hand as I do to Christina’s invitation to “rub [her] the right way”—or the triple invitation to “come.” Hmm. In the words of Kanye West, “Me likey.” (As a side note, I still have doubts about the correctness of punctuating “right way honey”—the comma implies honey is a direct address, a common pet name, but a dash would imply that “honey” is Christina’s preferred substance for, er, “rubbing.”)
The problem is that most of music, whether as classic as the Beatles or as suggestive as X-tina, plays off the whole sexual attraction thing. While I love hearing Fergie lustily belt out “London Bridge” as much as the next guy, we all know the obvious: it’s not meant for us. In all these great love songs, lust songs, sex songs, breakup songs, unless you’re that rare, lucky (or unlucky) subject of the lyrics, you’re really just a vicarious participant in the music. And there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.
But Rush lets you do more than just live out of a vicarious identification with celebrities; they bring the life of the rich and famous to ground level. Take this tour’s opener, “Limelight,” one of Rush’s all-time best-known songs. Neil’s penned some pretty interesting lyrics that display his discomfort with the mega-fame of the rock star. It turns out he’s a regular guy like you or me, and it just so happens that he’s the world’s best drummer. Talk about humility—or honesty: “I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend.” That’s an almost-apologetic line to fans, and really stands in contrast to the never-ending stream of hip-hop singles celebrating Patron, clubs jam-packed with smokin’ hot babes, and Lamborghinis and posh cribs that most of us will never see, much less own. That ain’t real life for your listeners, Akon.
Or, for a return to the romantic theme, look at “Ghost of a Chance,” this year’s most exciting set-piece (for me, anyway). Again, Neil avoids the pitfalls of most love songs:
1. The over-whiny I’m Never Gonna Fall in Love Again/Find Someone/Get Laid motif. Please. Even Class-A losers find others like them…if not better. Stay away from Eric Carmen.
2. The caustic High Rate of Depreciation of the Opposite Sex, a.k.a. the Singlehood Anthem. This one is actually believable for a few people *cough* Natasha Bedingfield, but 99% of listeners can’t embrace this idea for more than 20 minutes.
3. The sappy/sexy I’ve Found True Love/Perfect Sex and I’m So Happy I Have That I Must Share It with You!!!! Yeah, and when we read about your ugly scandal and/or ensuing divorce we’re gonna play this at your court hearing. (Insert your favorite celebrity here.)
How does Peart avoid these? By appealing to that uncertain, hopeful element within each of us:
I don’t believe in destiny, or the guiding hands of fate;
I don’t believe in forever, or love as a mystical state;
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets, or angels watching from above,
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love—
And make it last.
Maybe it’s the third person “we,” maybe it’s the long buildup of “don’t believes” that lends more credit to the final admission of the “ghost of a chance,” or maybe it’s just Neil’s frankness that makes something in my heart beat with the words. Yes, if Neil Peart thinks there’s a ghost of a chance that it could last, hell, maybe there is for you and me, too. Certainly a better chance than of giving J.Lo babies.
So I have to disagree: Rush isn’t all about the music, at least not for me. It’s about the response the music creates in me, which, I guess, is the goal of all songs—to evoke a feeling in the listener, to rub them the right way. And no artist can do this for me like Rush…at least until Christina hands me the SueBee.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night rush
I suppose one of my favorite things about Brian is that he’s so unpredictable. He’s someone who can definitely give you a run for your money. Intelligent and sharp, brash and confident, engaging in conversation with Brian is like being a matador to a bull. You’ve got to be on your toes! You’ve got to always be paying attention! And for god’s sake, you can’t let him smell your fear!!!!
Opening my email and reading Brian’s latest entry was like that. Matador and Bull. Surprises. Unpredictability. I mean, who would ever be able to write a piece about Rush and somehow find a way to make it coincide with an HOV lane? Seriously, just when I think I know what Brian will say next…..Matador and Bull.
(Wow, that was probably one of my weirder intros….but I’m sure you appreciate what I’m trying to say.)
The HOV Lane: Reflections from Without
Brian Corlett, 22 May 2008
I was creeping along CA-17 in San Jose rush hour this afternoon and saw three Toyota Priuses (would that be Prii??) zip past me in the HOV lane. Three things struck me as I disengaged the clutch and crawled forward again: first, three Priuses in a row were all too fitting for an area where fuel is $4.19 a gallon, but still rare enough to turn my head, anyway. Second, I couldn’t remember being passed by a Prius before. It’s not an event many males my age would be proud of. Third, none of the cars had any passengers, which, by itself, could be coincidence—three smug Prius drivers sneaking along in the HOV. Except that, in the next five minutes, I saw about two dozen hybrids, of various breeds, driving past me, each shotgun empty.
Which suggests that, as usual, California is leading the way in eco-cultural trends, and hybrid drivers are apparently allowed in the HOV—even when flying solo. My mind quickly jumped back to a Rush classic, “Red Barchetta,” from Moving Pictures (1981) (probably to salve the primal sense of loss initiated by being passed by a battery-powered car). The song was inspired by a short story that Neil Peart is said to have read in a car magazine. The inspiration, “A Nice Morning Drive,” by Richard S. Foster, tells the story of an adventurous driver manning an outlawed high-performance car. His illegalities are noted by the local law enforcement, which sends their new government-approved vehicles after him.
He escapes, of course, and although “Red Barchetta” doesn’t carry the same cynicism—the tone is more nostalgic—I couldn’t help but see the Priuses as another form of regulation. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a political piece, and—lest you fail to believe me—I think hybrids are a great idea. My last car was a Geo Metro and it got a very sexy 47 miles to the gallon, thank you.
Really, I’m just waxing nostalgic about cars—and music. Kind of like American Graffiti, only I’m not looking at rock ‘n’ roll, but Rush, who, to this day, is one of the very few bands who have escaped the regulation of rock. By their own admission, they probably wouldn’t have made it if they were emerging into the current music industry. Yet, now that they’ve made their mark, they persist on, sort of like that old cat pee under the sofa. (Okay, bad analogy.) But seriously, there’s this well-documented trend in rock toward multi-tracked, highly-compressed radio-friendly music, which is nearly always written based on what audiences want, not necessarily on what the bands want. It’s good old supply and demand, only with a twist: it’s been found that audiences can be manipulated, and following trends—especially now that the internet has decreased the lifespan of the news, capturing market segments and, eventually, directing them, a la “Superconductor,” off the highly-underrated Presto: “You can put a target on the market.”
Rush has none of that, and it is so refreshing that they’ve maintained their distinctive “Rush” sound for thirty years while still growing with the changes in music and culture. Like the hero of “Red Barchetta,” there’s a certain pleasure to be had in rebelling against the system and just doing what you want to. Not to mention that’s what rock ‘n’ roll was about in the first place. What ever happened to the days when it was sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? Now it’s more like sex, drugs, and the recording companies. Ugh. No wonder they need so much sex and drugs.
Let’s be clear: I respect where music has gone, and I enjoy the latest Nickelback or Fergie hit as much as the next guy—just like I think “Prii” are a good idea. But when someone has the balls to be pimpin’ around in a well-preserved classic, say, a ’69 Camaro (or an ’89 Camaro, for my generation), or a classic three-piece rock outfit recording original music without pandering to major labels, I can’t help but grin and thumb my nose at the trendsetters in the HOV lane—and all the bandwagoneers piling in for the ride.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
After a few more posts, I’m sure he won’t need an introduction any more. He’s a wonderful writer. You’ll know his name and style as if he were always present on this blog, his entries a common thing, not a special feature. But I probably won’t stop doing the small intros because, very simply, I like them too much. :)
So here he is again, one of the best writers in THE WORLD! (Who cares if I’m a bit biased.) With miles and time zones between us, I admit I’m missing the little dork, so it was wonderful to open my email and read his Rush entry. I could hear his voice through this piece as surely as if he were speaking in my ear. And it’s a good voice, steady and strong and so obviously speaking about something that moves him.
Time Stand Still
Brian Corlett
Just two days ago I was, for the first time, driving through Las Vegas. It’s part of a cross-country road trip in which I’ve hit twelve states and made it, finally, to the West Coast. It was 8:30, just past sunset, when we drove through the mountain pass and into the car check that precedes the Hoover Dam. Then down, and around, switchback after switchback, and you’re on the famous structure, Lake Mead on your right, a work-in-progress attempting to span the gulf high away to your left, and more switchbacks ahead up into the mountains of Nevada.
But nothing compares to the view coming down 93, after dusk, when all of Vegas is suddenly visible, all at once, as a mass of lights in the desert.
Of course I didn’t know that two days before Rush was rocking out at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, one of the must-sees I passed in The Strip that night. I would have loved to have been there. (Although it’s not my style to stalk bands around the country. I’m waiting for the Pittsburgh show, thank you.)
Riding shotgun was my dad, who is another Rush fan (although he would prefer the term aficionado). He’s observed on more than a few occasions how Rush creates this “wall of sound,” a seemingly impenetrable mass of chordal complexities, diatonic harmonies, and subtle rhythmic shifts that are often hard to appreciate—for two reasons. The first is, of course, the sheer quantity of sound particles. Let’s face it, Rush is a loud band, and at certain points it sounds like there are two drummers, two guitarists, and a full-time keyboardist. (For those who don’t know, Geddy Lee, the bassist and vocalist, sometimes plays the keys by hand, and frequently plays them by foot.) This wall of sound is kind of like those Vegas lights. There’s just so many, you can’t look at just one, but you have to appreciate the view en masse.
But the other thing about a Rush song that requires a leap in listener response to really appreciate is the natural way in which they are part of their environment. Rush seamlessly integrates words, rhythms, and tones to a degree that can only be appreciated live if, say, you’ve had a few nights alone with Moving Pictures and a good single-malt to reflect. Take “Workin’ Them Angels,” for example, off the new album, Snakes and Arrows. Taken at face value, Geddy’s phrasing seems awkward at times—enough so that I wondered how they ever let some of it on the final cut. But the song is about memories created from traveling—memories from a long, often excruciatingly difficult past. So Geddy’s drawn out words at places actually make the listener feel some of the emotional hyperextension expressed by the lyrics, as does the time signature change from the verses’ easy 3/4 to the choruses’ more plodding 4/4.
Or take another song from this tour’s set, the amazing “Between the Wheels” I mentioned last time. Whoa. As a musician, let me tell you, the chordal uncertainty here is daunting, with guitar and synth playing different chords from each other—and both shifting back and forth between two very unstable, dissonant chord structures. While this is happening, Geddy is singing a melody that is—almost—in a different key. The song talks about being between “the wheels,” or places, in life, but it performs what it says as well: the music is precariously situated between “real”—or, at least, identifiable—musical places.
I wish I could say this all hit me as I was appreciating the Oasis of Light coming off the mountains above Vegas, or driving down The Strip and gazing in wonder at the Bellagio, or Caesar’s Palace, or getting blasted from across the street with the pyrotechnics at Treasure Island…but of course I was too mesmerized to do more than gape at everything going on around me…sort of like at a three-hour Rush show.
By next summer, the Hoover Dam Bypass Project should be completed and people can happily cruise high above the dam and have a great view without the tedious 15 mph switchbacks, an undeniable convenience for locals who have to take 93. But that’s not for me; I’d rather enjoy the views as they come, at both short- and long-range, while they’re still available. Hmmmmm…kinda reminds me of a song, “Time Stand Still” (which is not, sadly, on this year’s set list).
Freeze this motion a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
Experience slips away.
If Rush had asked my opinion (and they didn’t), this would have make the perfect closing piece for the show. But no, they’re ending it with the famous instrumental “YYZ,” a song, which, according to the band, is “about airports.” It’s named—and the rhythm is patterned after—Toronto Pearson International Airport, code YYZ, and the Morse code associated with it, respectively. It is the airport that, for many decades, has welcomed Rush home after being away.
As a closing song, I guess that works too.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
Rush—Immortal for at Least One More Year
Brian Corlett
They’re at it again. One tour for Snakes & Arrows wasn’t enough—so Rush has re-packed the tour bus and is touring for another three-and-a-half months, to the delight of fans ranging from guitar-wielding adolescents to aging rockers who are fast approaching the time when they’ll qualify for the senior citizen discount.
Actually, the same thing goes for the members of Rush, who’ve been making albums and touring since the mid-seventies, and are now in that post-fifty age that sees so many rockstars washed-up, dead, or doing VH1 productions. Yet Rush has managed to avoid the pitfalls of drugs, break-ups, and the many health problems that seem to afflict rockers with disturbing frequency (use your imagination if that last one wasn’t specific enough). Rush has been Alex Lifeson on guitar, Neil Peart on drums, and Geddy Lee on bass, vocals, and keys (always in that order, he’s quick to point out) since 1975—an extremely long run for an unchanging lineup.
But ask anyone who was at last year’s show at Post-Gazette Pavillion and you’ll hear that it was anything but a bunch of old dudes on stage. Sure, they may not have as much hair as they did on some of those late-70s tours, but some would argue that’s a positive change. Their music is still loud, varied, and full of energy—amazingly so, for only a three-piece band. In fact, the music is so much the focus that the crowd is decidedly different from your typical classic rock act—there’s no wild Van Halen fans in the mosh pit, and you’re unlikely to be passed any, uh, good-feel gifts that were generously shared at Aerosmith’s last PPG show. Rush fans are all about the music, and this is no more evident than at the show’s climax, which is generally agreed to be Peart’s drum solo. Coming about three-quarters of the way through the set list, the solo, like many of their songs, is appreciated in near-silence. Everyone stands, craning for an uninterrupted view, and you can actually make out the individual cheers. I wasn’t more than halfway up on stage right last year and when they broke into the verse of “Between the Wheels,” I swear my shouts brought Lifeson’s gaze into my row. (I’m not making this up.) But screaming fans during songs are the exception rather than the rule, and begs the question, is Rush doing a show or a concert? I’m not sure if it isn’t a little bit—or a lot of—both.
Thirty-some years after it all started, they sound as amazing as ever, but, as a die-hard Rush fan can karaoke, “We’re only immortal for a limited time.” (“Dreamline,” Roll the Bones, 1991.) I’m twenty-three, and many of my friends already feel that their immortality is slipping by them. (No comment.) Of course, no one can argue that Rush has already achieved immortality through their twenty-plus recordings and numerous awards.
But with respect to live touring? Like my recently-graduated buddies, immortality and the “live” can only coexist for a time. For Rush on stage, their immortality continues, for now, anyway—and you can expect me to be there as long as it does.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!!!
It’s a brand new series!! Every Friday this month and next, I will be bringing you cd reviews, links, essays and much more on legendary band RUSH!!!
Coming to Pittsbugh this July, it’s the concert of the season and Lux is counting down the days.
Brian Corlett, a truly remarkable writer and Rush aficionado will be joining the blog as a special guest writer. If anyone knows about this band, it’s him. He’s knowledgeable and humorous and I couldn’t think of a more apropos guest.
If you’d like to participate in the Friday Night Rush series, leave a comment below. Feel free to ask questions, make statements and just generally share your Rush love.
And now I turn the mike over to Brian….come back Friday and see what he has to say.
Snakes & Arrows: Part Three
No word yet on Snakes & Arrows Live. My “friend” isn’t returning the text I sent. Go figure.
I did, however, get my airline tickets, which, when added to the cost of my Rush ticket, brings my total expenditures for this show to over $500. Spending that kind of money for three hours of pleasure on a balmy night in your hometown . . . you’d think it was a broad, not a band, I was coming back to see.
But, with moving to California, the cost of inflation, and the price of gas (and a defiant finger raised at the Prius), that is, for now, the price of entertainment.
My faithful readers remember last week’s development of S&A beyond the Neil-centered bildungsroman of Tracks 1-3 that watches the tender child come of age in an unfriendly world (with “Far Cry” a more terrestrial protest and “Armor and Sword” a more spiritual one) and then the rush of memories while traveling on “Workin’ Them Angels,” the song that doesn’t attempt to sort out the past, but simply accepts it as part of the “rear-view mirror” landscape. “The Larger Bowl” kicks off the second part of the album, with its Prince-and-the-Pauper comparison cleverly negotiated in the Malay verse form Neil introduced us to, the pantoum. [I’m still looking for any evidence that there’s a double-reference here to a hashpipe. Other than the Hendrix-inspired lead for Track 7, I’m empty-handed and still curious, so if anybody has any leads, let me know.] “Spindrift” is an eerily cool, if somewhat misplaced, track that, in the lyrical and musical style of Vapor Trails, with its meteorological-relationship metaphor (which, actually, reaches all the way back to Presto’s enchanting “Chain Lightning,” when Neil figured out if you can make a hit out of a vague song based on the obsolete Beaufort weather scale [“Force Ten”], then you could mine the glossary of a handy copy of A Field Guide to Weather Systems for song material).
A cool instrumental later is the album’s centerfold, the Middle East-meets-Middle West “The Way the Wind Blows,” with its careful criticism of politics and global philosophies. Lerxst, aka Guitar Hero Alex Lifeson, follows this song with a short, simple burst of Hope, and, lest we fly too high on this brief happy interlude, we are reminded that Neil is without faith in anything or anybody in the aptly-named “Faithless.” This marks the end of what I see as the second part of the album—the part that looks to the outside world, with its differences and problems, and tries to navigate the issues at stake, with “Faithless” bringing the speaker back into the picture and setting the stage for Part Three.
“Bravest Face” starts off with the simple hook, “Though we might have precious little/ It’s still precious.” Doesn’t have quite the same effect as, “Nah I ain’t sayin’ she’s a golddigger.” What it does do is remind you that this isn’t glam rock or hip-hop (well, you probably would’ve figured out at least the latter by now). Rather, this is a real person who may be the world’s greatest drummer admitting that he doesn’t have much of anythng. Sort of makes you wonder which party he would identify with in “The Larger Bowl.” The verse launches into a cool meta-moment with
I like that song
About this wonderful world
It’s got a sunny point of view
And sometimes I feel it’s true
At least for a few of us
which, of course, is NOT this song! It’s almost like Neil’s saying, “Look guys, I wish I could write those sappy songs you and I would like to listen to but I can’t. Sorry. Life sucks too much.”
In the second verse he does the same thing with TV:
I like that show
Where they solve the murder
That heroic point of view
It’s got justice and vengeance, too
At least so the story goes
In both instances, though, the focus returns to the “darker,” “messy point of view . . . for so many among us.” The song ends with a real downer pep-line:
In the whole wide world there’s no magic place
So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face
Somehow, this part of the album takes me back to Presto, my other Rush favorite. The title track has this cool line: “If I could wave my magic wand/ I’d make everything all right.” Okay, so both songs admit that it doesn’t matter if you’re a rock star, cashier, or Indian Chief, none of us can work our magic. But the 1990 Neil was the optimist-realist:
don’t ask me
I’m just improvising
my illusion of careless flight
Now, a decade and a half later, there’s no more illusion, and no careless flight, only a weary stage walk. Few rockers make it to this age intact, and where others have found their comfort in drugs and playmates, Neil built a family that was utterly destroyed through no fault of his own. With no religion or substances to fall back on, what more could he do than rise and put on a brave face? I hate to psycho-analyze Neil (or any celebrity), or try to understand something that I really can’t, but the lyrics beg for an honest connection, a particle of mercy . . .
“Good News First” is the logical follow-up to “Bravest Face,” and even musically, seems to me almost an extension. The opening line is eager to trump the one from the previous track’s in the anti-hero contest:
The best we can agree on
Is it could’ve been worse
I have to confess, this is one of my all-time favorite songs, but, as was the case with the first few times through “Losing It” (Signals), I can’t hold back the tears on this one. Every chorus finds my eyelids trembling out of time to the beat of the drums as Geddy wails:
You used to feel that way
The saddest words you could ever say
But I know you will remember that day
And the most beautiful words I could ever say
I’m still not 100% sure what this song is about, other than what’s clearly stated, and maybe that’s why the bridge still makes me lose it every time . . . I don’t know. The electric guitars go away for a few measures and this clear, double-tracked Martin D-12 takes front seat, with some subtle synth-orchestral hits in the background, as the words ride the acoustic surf through the ear canal and into the soul:
Some would say they never fear a thing
Well I do
And I’m afraid enough for both of us—
For me and you
Time, if nothing else, will do its worst
So do me that favor
And tell me the good news first
And the guitar solo, a simple, modal affair in the style of Presto but with the achingly simple, solid tonal qualities that are uniquely S&A, finally gives me a break from the heart-wrenching words that, poignant and articulate as they are, can only lead you to the space where words fall short, and only music—in this case some of Rush’s finest—can express the inexpressible.
This is a tragic, beautiful song that will probably be underrated and misunderstood by most. But some of the best art always goes that way.
At this point in the album, it should be clear that it’s not Neil’s past and the lost innocence that is a part of growing up that takes center stage—it’s the future and the uncertainty of living the world that dominates the middle of the album that weigh on Neil, weigh on the guitars and drums, and finally on my own heart.
Thankfully, there is once again an instrumental respite from such a powerful song, and this time, it comes in the form of the dryly funny “Malignant Narcisissm.” Again, I’ll refrain from trying to figure out the etymology of this title, other than to say I think the significance of the song is as a relief from the heavy lyrics, that the title is supposed to make you smile (at least, it’s funnier than “Faithless” or “Good News First”), and the music is short, fun, and—I can’t resist—narcissistic. Especially that last little bend—what a weird, pretentious, and air-headed way to end a song. (I’d like to know who came up with that one.)
“We Hold On” is another classic Rush closer. Since Hold Your Fire they have this precedent of ending albums with these interesting, even more introspective than usual songs that never get played live: “High Water,” “Available Light” (one of the most beautiful, timeless songs of all time), “You Bet Your Life,” “Everyday Glory,” “Carve Away the Stone,” and “Out of the Cradle,” which, interestingly, ends with the repeated (and re-repeated) line, “Here we come out of the cradle/ Endlessly rocking.” An interesting statement for a rock band recording their first studio album after a six-year (their longest) hiatus.
But their latest closer is such a well-crafted finish to a solid, rich album! I honestly don’t know how they do it. Each verse begins with “How many times . . .,” which, when repeated at the head of each stanza, really conveys the repetitive nature of life. I love the verse
How many times
Do we chafe against the repetition
Straining against a fate
Measured out in coffee breaks
which was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which is my favorite poem, in case you were wondering).
Lifeson’s guitar work is interesting, inserting a mode into a riff in the bridge section that, again, is a subtle reminder of the Middle East (and is the first time he’s resurrected that mode since “YYZ”). Otherwise, the song is typical post-Test for Echo—chaotic, heavy, and dissonant, but, in this case, with various atonalities eventually resolving themselves. And the songs last note is this sort of hasty resolution to this simple power chord—almost the admission that there is no good resolution?! Sometimes I’m not sure how far you can take these readings, because obviously the composers do many of these things at a sub- or semi-conscious level. (And here I have to echo the words of my Lit professor Steve Carr: “You should give a writer or character at least as much complexity or believability as you would like others to give to you.” That’s my justification.) But nobody, even the poor bastards who never had Carr to teach them how to read Blake, Swift, and everything else, can’t argue with a well-constructed piece—lyrics and music lead and follow, around again, in a merry dance performed for the listener. And, if you have the benefit of listening live, then the show becomes more of a masque, where the audience becomes part of the dance, feeding the band, becoming the energy they capture to make magic. And who says Neil’s drumsticks aren’t a pair of magic wands?
Those of you who spent the money on the album itself will appreciate something that listeners who illegally downloaded it will have to imagine. Again, finally, I direct you to Hugh Syme’s artwork. Look at the picture that accompanies “We Hold On,” and you’ll see this car driving toward this house framed by a sunset. It’s an interesting moment of suspension between the lines
How many times
Do we weather out the stormy evenings
Long to slam the front door
Drive away into the setting sun
Clearly, we are meant to perceive the car (which is the same Plymouth used in the artwork for “The Larger Bowl” . . . hmm . . . maybe we can identify where Neil situates himself in that one) as driving back home. Yet it’s also driving into the setting sun, which is ties the theme with the driving-your-car-as-therapy “Workin’ Them Angels” and “Spindrift,” which has these ideas of trying to find someone as the wind blows from the east. Maybe it’s just my recent move out west, maybe it’s the knowledge that Neil moved to California after his tragedy, but there’s an interesting undercurrent of, well, currents that laces the songs of this album together. It’s like you could almost feel the current flowing . . .
If I could sum up the direction of this album, it’s this: Neil, and the rest of humanity, is born into a world where snakes and arrows await him. Snakes and Arrows is a game, like Chutes and Ladders (or like Life), but snakes and arrows isn’t a fun game where somebody wins—it’s real life. And there are times in the game to hit the road and run like hell, other times to put on your bravest face, other times for introspection, but at the end of the day, each of these “times” is defined by the currents, tides, fates, what have you, of something we can’t control.
Like the solitary pine
On a bare wind-blasted shore
We can only grow the way the wind blows
And, like that pine, regardless of the season, at the end of the day, we must hold on, while we can . . .
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
When Brian first proposed a series of close readings on Rush’s new album, Snakes and Arrows, he was actually pretty hesitant about it. He just wasn’t sure if it would be “too much”. I told him to shut up and that I would be the judge of that. :)
So I read Brian’s entry….
And Brian, as he is known to do, surprised me. Honestly, what I was expecting was nothing more than a review. What he gave me was a careful, thought provoking, criticial analysis of a band he very clearly “gets”.
So I posted that first entry (last weeks Friday Night Rush’s post), and told him to keep going with it. Make it a series, why donchya?
He, thank heavens, agreed.
Entertaining and lovely, sophisticated and mature, Brian’s latests are meticulous pieces of prose that read as effortless as rainy-day fiction. It is my pleasure to give you Brian’s second entry in his series-within-a-series:
Snakes & Arrows: Part Two
I’m still waiting for the Snakes & Arrows Live album I pre-ordered in February. It was supposed to arrive April 15, but because of a lame mailing address error it was lost. I had a new one shipped out by the first week of May, free of charge, but I left for Cali a few days before it was supposed to arrive.
Rumor has it that one of my friends is hanging on to it “for me.” Great.
Near the point of despair of ever receiving the CD I paid for half a year ago, last night I finally caved and started listening to the live tracks on YouTube. Big mistake—two of them sounded terrible, and I was too disappointed to listen further. I chalk it up to whatever punk had too much time on his hands—surely Rush couldn’t sound like that. This is their fifth live album, and they still sound amazing…but I’ll take my double-pressed vinyls over some YouTube fan video any day.
Last week I explored the deeper meanings behind Tracks 1-3 on S&A. My read is that, taken together, they are the most personal “Neil” songs on the album and tell a story. “Far Cry” is the story of how the world affects the young (who in turn shape the world) with some creepy nods to religion, nuclear warfare, and a weak protest to cosmic fatalism—“I can get back on . . .” “Armor and Sword” is the long, wearying ballad of the long, wearying journey to each one’s personal heaven, with each child born heir to “snakes and arrows.” “Workin’ Them Angels” wraps up this coming-of-age theme (a bildungsroman for Neil, for every “child,” and most especially for Western ideology) with a retrospective of the past offered via travel (with wonderful subterranean connections to Peart’s spectacular Ghost Rider). Almost like “Roll the Bones,” with it’s accept-without-understanding “Why are we here? Because we’re here—Roll the Bones,” “Workin’ Them Angels” chalks up numerous inexplicable “razor edge” skirmishes to working “them angels” overtime. (And, presumably, the price for employing them as such is at least time-and-a-half, although Neil leaves this one up to the listener to decide.)
This week’s focus is what I’ve arbitrarily grouped as Part II of the album, the longest, most diverse, and most musically progressive of the three parts. The first one, “The Larger Bowl,” is most immediately notable for the parenthetical “a pantoum” that follows the title. Since I didn’t know what a pantoum was (I bet you don’t, either), I went to dictionary.com and learned that it is a Malay verse form characterized by lines two and four of one quatrain being repeated as lines one and three of the following quatrain, for as many quatrains as is needed. Neil is a clever guy, and not only is this a chance to bring together Malaysian culture and rock music (how often do you encounter that?), but it syncs nicely with the message—on two levels.
First, there’s the repetition across different melodies. The effect this creates is unlike any song I’ve heard before—the words are the same, but they are sung differently a few lines later. It’s the performative aspect of a text at work—the words
Some are blessed and some are cursed
The golden one or scarred from birth
are sung over multiple melodies with multiple phrasings—just as the principle of the prince and the pauper carries from Elizabethan to Middle Eastern to Ancient Greek to American culture. This probably sounds like another over-reading, but before I even decided to look up pantoum I already got the trans-cultural sense from the form of the poetry.
The other cool way it works is the way the primitive, if I can use that word, Malaysian culture is fused with the progressive rock sound in the body of this song. It’s a weird juxtaposition that took me many listens to get used to it. I admit this was my least favorite song on the album for the first six months and I didn’t really enjoy it until recently. It’s a weird song! But perhaps that’s the point: it’s weird, but eventually we accept it because it’s Rush, and it’s part of our musical world and we’re supposed to accept it, just like we’re supposed to accept the income gap (or insert your other favorite “gap” here) because it’s part of our world. Note the artwork, with the shiny Plymouth rear-end opposite the little tin toy-car (which is cleverly reflected in the Plymouth’s chrome bumper).
Neil Peart and Hugh Syme . . . the best lyrical/artistic collaboration in rock music history.
One more thing about this song: it is, for the most part, the simplest Rush song I’ve ever heard, in musical terms. It has four chords (and they’re pretty typical ones), a simple acoustic guitar pattern, and has a beat so simple your mom could play it on the steering wheel—definitely a contrast to the first three songs, which rock out in various ways. But Lerxst, the guitar hero who’s been hiding out for the last fifteen years or so, uses this drab landscape to bust out his first real guitar solo since I was in the third grade. We’re not talking “Free Will” or “Tom Sawyer” here, but still, the way it builds from this simple pentatonic into the shrill crunch of pull-offs and pinch harmonics is both a reminder of the contrasts that fill this song and the building, the moving on, of Rush, as they take the elements of their musical past—very evident in the first three songs—and move on to really new material.
Well, almost. There’s one exception, and it’s track five. I rarely—very rarely!—criticize Rush, but here I have a minor bone to pick with our Canadian buddies, and that’s the placement of this song. It doesn’t belong after “The Larger Bowl,” and probably doesn’t even belong on this album. The dissonant, heavy guitars sound like Lifeson on “Vapor Trails” and the metaphorical lyrics using a natural phenomenon that nobody’s heard about to describe a relationship between Neil and somebody were the defining feature on VT. Not that it isn’t a cool song—any song that compares ocean “spray that’s torn away” to a feeling between two people, with or without the haunting, bassy guitar riffs, is enough to get my vote. But the whole musical composition, the lyrics, and the feel make me think this was a mid-album project between VT and S&A, and the last place this song belongs is after “The Larger Bowl.” Who knows. Maybe someone higher up made a dumb choice and screwed the bandmates over. Maybe they couldn’t figure out where to put it and felt that sticking it in between a pantoum and an instrumental would make the listener feel as uneasy as Neil claims to feel in the song.
Moving along, the next track is “The Main Monkey Business,” and since it is an instrumental and I’ve never heard any official explanation for the goofy title, I will refrain from trying to make connections that even I will admit are tenuous, at best. Instead, I’ll say a few things about the first instrumental from Rush in ten years.
1. This song rocks. Not in the style of “A Passage to Bangkok,” but more in the vein of those cool tribal songs from the late 80s / early 90s, a la “Mystic Rhythms” and “Scars.” (Perhaps there was some inside joke about monkeys that somehow got this jungley song the MMB title?)
2. It is the longest and most impressive instrumental on the album, and the longest instrumental in almost thirty years! (Last studio-recorded instrumental over six minutes was “La Villa Strangiato,” off Hemispheres (1978).)
3. The highlight of the song is right around the 1:20 mark—that cool little bass drum/bass register fill. It makes my subwoofers buzz every time, and makes the dog at the end of the street start barking when I drive past.
Next, we have “The Way the Wind Blows.” It’s hard not to spend a whole blog just talking about this one, since it is probably the most significant song on the whole album. Notice the following, as I offer you another numbered list:
1. It’s the middle track on the album, placed dead center.
2. It’s bracketed by instrumentals, which directs the listener that much more to the lyrics. (It’s the only time Rush has ever done this.)
3. At the show last year, they played this really powerful video, and the audience was hushed for the whole song. Usually the audience will cheer for the cool drum fill, or the guitar solo, or Geddy’s weird on-stage Jewish dancing while playing the bass, but this song had the audience spellbound.
The song’s message is open and obvious: it attacks the war, it attacks prejudice, and it attacks people on both sides who would readily “attack”—verbally or physically—someone they perceive as different from them.
Now it’s come to this
It’s like we’re back in the Dark Ages
From the Middle East to the Middle West
It’s a world of superstition
Now it’s come to this
Wide-eyed armies of the faithful
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Pray and pass the ammunition
The whole song draws these eerie parallels between the two worlds, the Middle East and the “Middle West.” The fighting is an obvious comparison, but some later lines, like
Hollow speeches of mass deception
. . . Like crusaders in unholy alliance
could just as easily refer to a dictator and his allies as it could to President Bush and his allies in the War on Terror. Unlike a lot of angry musicians, this isn’t a caustic, irreverent rip on Bush; it’s a careful, poignant comparison of two societies that are perceived—and correctly so, on some levels—as being very different.
It seems to leave them partly blind
And they leave no child behind
While evil spirits haunt their sleep
While shepherds bless and count their sheep
The obvious reference to “No Child Left Behind” has disturbing connotations to the education systems in the Middle East we read about that teach children to hate the US. And shepherds may conjure up images of some impoverished Afghani in the foothills, but knowing Neil’s dislike of televangelists (and networking it with some earlier lines in the album), the Western “shepherds” are likely preachers who bless the leaders of the war and “count their sheep”—look at the size of their congregations, those who follow them, the way a military leader might size up his army.
The anti-chorus, the soft, gentle, “We can only grow the way the wind blows,” is a protest to needless fighting. You can’t change the tide, you can’t go against the direction of natural elements. It’s not a song about peace, per se, it’s a plea for sensible, thoughtful action—and a not so gentle criticism on Western hypocrisy.
The bluesy Hendrix-style lead riffs are both ultra-cool and evocative of an earlier time—a time when the US was putting a few men on the moon and thousands more in Vietnam. Is it a coincidence that Lifeson’s first bluesy riffs since “A Farewell to Kings” appear on this song?
I think not!
Lest you get depressed by the war, and the dark nature of Neil’s lyrics, you shouldn’t turn the album off now, o faithful listener (not that you’d even think of that). You get a break in the form of another Rush first—“Hope,” the two-minute instrumental that features Alex playing an acoustic guitar that is folksy and progressive at the same time—sort of a Michael Hedges or Doyle Dykes kind of sound. Don’t just treat this as an interlude, a pee break, because this is a really cool song that enriches the generally depressing album. If the title doesn’t lift you up, then the liner note, which begins with the familiar, “All songs composed by Lee and Lifeson, with lyrics by Peart,” and continues, “except ‘Hope,’ composed and performed by Lerxst Lifeson, all by his own self,” should be enough to bring a smile to the face of the most depressed emo. (Which brings up an interesting question: Do emos listen to Rush?? . . . Stand by,)
“Hope” is very, well, hopeful, with a real pentatonicky sound in the dropped-D (perhaps DADGAD?) tuning. It was performed live and will be done again, and it is the only time I’ve ever seen my guitar hero alone on stage. It was a strange, exciting sight, and is over shortly after it’s begun . . . as hope often is.
Track nine, the last one in my series today, is “Faithless,” and follows “Hope” in it’s title—but in an anti-parallel way. The bridge is this slightly morbid
I don’t have faith in faith
I don’t believe in belief
You can call me faithless
But I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that’s faith enough for me
If anybody fails to see the numerous biblical references in this album, you should really consider giving your Rush tickets to somebody more deserving. I mean, seriously, for an atheist, Neil has more biblical allusions than Billy Graham on a Crusade Reunion Tour. Faith, hope, and love . . .
The cool thing about this song is the Middle Eastern feel to the music—the mode of the lead guitar provides a superb backdrop to the lines
Fools and thieves are well-disguised
In the temple and marketplace
And the chorus? Each line is a nature simile punctuated with a “I will quietly resist.” (Hmm. Reminds me of a song . . .) Fittingly, the artwork showcases a Middle Eastern-looking desert (how a desert can look Middle Eastern is beyond me, but it does) with a single flower blooming in the middle of the night.
Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist
And thus ends the eclectic second part of the album—from “The Larger Bowl” which takes Neil out of his world and throws two different worlds together, and takes Lifeson out of the daiquiri business and has him ripping solos again and bumps over “Spindrift” to some sweet instrumentals bracketing the album’s theme, to a final song that, however briefly, moves you into a soundscape that is semi-Middle Eastern. And, interestingly, subliminally juxtaposes the faithful jihadists that we Westerners have come to associate with the Middle East (however unfairly) with the utterly faithlessness of Neil, who will, once again, take front seat in Part III.
Stay tuned, my good readers, as I prepare for the last S&A blog . . . and as I continue to hunt down the elusive live album in the spindrift of the Postal Service . . .
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush! Part 1
The show is now less than one month away. For those of you who are excited, well, you should be. For those of you who aren’t, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve your readership…
Today I’m going to drop the usual How Did Rush Affect Me This Week theme that seems to creep into my writing and focus on the latest: Snakes and Arrows. Now, why should S&A, or my literary-musical critique, be of interest to you? Well, according to my source (www.2112.net/powerwindows), the current tour is “quite a bit more varied . . . 9 of the 13 tracks from the new album were played live (the most songs [Rush] ever performed in support of a new album . . . ). The paragraph goes on to list some really impressive, er, somebody-has-no-life statistics about what makes this tour so unique. If that stuff interests you, then great.
But I know you’re all just dying to hear what I have to say about S&A! (And you know I’ve got tons to say!) There are, of course, a number of outstanding Rush albums that have been produced over the years. Highlights include Moving Pictures (1981), the “Sum of the Parts Album,” as I think of it—an outstanding collection of Rush classics; Grace Under Pressure (1983), aka P/G, one of the most brilliantly crafted albums as a whole, and in my opinion, the best album-as-a-whole they’ve had; and Presto (1990), my personal favorite, and probably the most under-rated Rush record. But S&A is the latest in the series of Rush’s best, and, song by song, I’m gonna tell you why. (If you haven’t listened to the album a few times, or don’t have a copy handy, then you might want to download (legally, of course) some mp3s and follow along.)
Track 1, “Far Cry,” was the first single released and is still probably the best-known song from the album. It really sets the tone for the album, with the “wandering madmen . . . speaking in tongues” in the first line immediately drawing a connection to religion. The lines
It’s a far cry from the world we thought we’d inherit
It’s a far cry from the way we thought we’d share it
You can almost feel the current flowing
You can almost see the circuits blowing
Really reach back to Signals and P/G, where “The Weapon (Part II of Fear)” and “The Body Electric” talk about a sort of Orwellian, pre- and post-Apocalyptic worlds, respectively. “The Weapon” was way ahead of its time, linking violence, religion, and fear:
With an iron fist in a velvet glove
We are sheltered under the gun
In the glory game on the power train
Thy kingdom’s will be done
And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us . . .
“The Body Electric” is a little lighter (I actually think it’s pretty funny, and I seem to recall reading that Neil said it was supposed to be a dryly amusing song). It opens with this C3-P0 in a Tattooine desert image and resolves into another Lucas reference, the more obscure (but no less brilliant) THX 1138, at the end of the film. Without delving into the history behind the song, or the TV show that was spun out of it, it’s basically the story of a robot that has escaped into the desert and is slowly dying. At the end,
It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays
To the mother of all machines . . .
Again, there is this interesting linkage of religion, fear (“And it’s scared out of its wits”), and, here, technology. If “The Weapon” is pre-apocalyptic, and “The Body Electric” is post-apocalyptic, then “Far Cry” seems to be smack dab on the tip of it all, with the “current flowing” and the “circuits blowing.” Or, more dangerously, at the end of the song,
You can almost see the circle growing
You can almost feel the planets glowing
It took me a few listens to draw the connections: the mushroom cloud is accompanied by an expanding ring, as the blast simultaneously moves up and out, and “glowing” is a sort of radioactive word. And the “crack in the sky” that Neil attempts to fly through—well, that seems to be as readily applicable to a thermonuclear ceiling as it is to the lightning “crack” in the album art for “Far Cry” . . . or the cracked sky on the cover of P/G.
One more thing about this cool, catchy, guitar solo-less song: the hook is this ultra-simple “I can get back on” which is repeated each time. At first, I thought, hey lots of lines get repeated in music, but—and this shows how much time I have on my hands—this is the only line in the whole album lyrics that is repeated. (I’m not counting lines repeated in the vocals, just in the lyrics.) Yes, I checked, to try to disprove my hypothesis. Since it is the only instance, I feel confident in saying this: Neil is really trying to convince himself that he can get back on top of the world, ahead of the wheel. He is The Little Engine That Could (“I Think I Can, I Think I Can”) and the repetition is his own attempt at telling himself he can do it. Look at the artwork, and this dark reading is supported by the fact that the lightning has singled out the baby carriage, and the rainbow, for all you would-be hopeful readers, is off to the corner of the page, disappearing into the sea. And instead of a dove symbolizing peace, we have a predatory hawk patrolling the skies.
This is not a happy song.
“Armor and Sword,” the next one, is even darker, and I’ve heard complaints that its too long. It’s certainly not a radio-friendly, easy-listening tune. The opening line is where the title comes from, and helps explain the baby carriage on the previous page:
The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts.
The child growing up, or the bildungsroman theme, is what connects the first three tracks. (Sort of a David Copperfield set to music.) Remember Vapor Trails? The last song, “Out of the Cradle,” seems to have been picked up with the baby carriage in “Far Cry,” and the poor kid has no idea what he’s in for, as defenses are built, “a place of safety/ And leave the darker places unexplored.”
The religious references really take off here, with the repeated line, “No one gets to their heaven without a fight,” and the riff off of St. Paul’s spirit versus flesh, “Sometimes the spirit is too strong/ Or the flesh is too weak.” Although Neil has made it very clear he’s an atheist, this song leaves me wondering. The cool bridge section has this creepy chord progression and finishes with the words:
The battle flags are flown
At the feet of a god unknown
It seems that there is a chink in the armor of The Professor’s atheism, a bit of doubt and irresolution that is making him uneasy. Otherwise, the song is, as has been suggested, long, although the sort of endless fight that it describes makes this length acceptable to me—I’m partaking in a bloody fight just listening to the slow, plodding, dissonant music. Also, for music theory fans out there, note the 3/4 to 4/4 time signature shifts—this is a trope really common on this album, enough so that I would say it is one of the defining musical elements of S&A.
Moving on to the final song of the day, another 3/4 to 4/4 song, “Workin’ Them Angels” is my favorite, and closes what I perceive as the Neil-as-protagonist portion of the album. This song is the happiest of the three, and the most mature, a collection of reflections “down a desert road.” (An interesting side note: Neil has a lot of references to desert roads, such as “Dreamline”—“We travel on the road to adventure/ On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun” and a chapter in his book Ghost Rider entitled “The Loneliest Road in America.”) Each verse is punctuated with a memory, each one ostensibly a memory of some time in Neil’s past, called to recollection in his motorcycle travels. We have a memory “humming at the heart of a factory town,” which networks nicely with the workin’ angels, overtime, and the cool black-and-white pic of the dude in the factory with the angel wings. Another memory, this one “strumming at the heart of a moving picture,” is a clever reference to Rush’s most successful album (yes, that would be Moving Pictures), but also seems to link up films with music and landscapes, as the medium for memories. The final verse is punctuated with a cool double-image, a superimposition of memories “drumming at the heart of an English winter” and “beating at the heart of an African village.” For the under-informed, Neil spent some time as a teen in London, when he was becoming a good drummer, and much later, traveled on bicycle through parts of Africa, where he became a disgustingly amazing drummer.
These memories provide a nice counterpoint to the chorus, which is a retrospective:
All my life
I’ve been workin’ them angels overtime
Riding and driving and living
So close to the edge
The second chorus, interestingly, changes slightly to become
Riding and driving and flying
Just over the edge
This follows the “moving pictures” memory, and sounds to me like our boy Neil is making a cool double use of the “living on the edge” motif. My reading is this: there were exciting times in his life when he lived on the edge, or even flew over the edge, a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Perhaps when Moving Pictures came out was one of those times, and the exciting, fast-paced life he led was being supported by some unknown group of “angels” that kept him going.
“Living so close to the edge,” though can also mean the exact opposite of flying high: it can mean you’re so low you’re at the edge, ready to jump, or about to fall off. And at these times, the “angels,” whoever/whatever they are, have kept him from going off the deep end.
And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the easy swing time in the verses gives way to this awkward phrasing in the choruses in that slow 4/4 time in what seems to be a contrast between the easy riding/driving on a road and then the more difficult task of sorting through memories—the reliving is itself work, and Geddy’s phrasing, along with the rhythm changes, puts you in shotgun with Neil (or, perhaps, on the back of the bike). We’re along for the ride, and it’s not as easy as “Flying High Again” with Ozzy—this one requires more than a bowl and a nickel bag full of freshly cut grass.
From the “Hemispheres Chord” on “Far Cry” (it’s actually an F#11) to the weird modal shifts in “Armor and Sword” to the beautiful rhythm work on the guitar in “Workin’ Them Angels,” Rush is moving away from the single-minded distortion and dissonance in Vapor Trails (although we get reminded of this in “Spindrift”). Just as S&A has dealt with different times in Neil’s life and his personal growth, the album represents a significant growth for an already mature band.
Next week: Part II of the album, Tracks 4-9.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush
Shortly before Christmas in 2006, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post would propose to famed violinist Joshua Bell what would become a Pulitzer Prize winning concept, or as he wrote it: “an experiment in context, perception and priorities…”
The experiment that launched a million blog entries would have Joshua - Avery Fisher, Grammy, Mercury, Echo Klassik and Gramaphone winner – dressed in jeans and decked out in nothing more decorative than a baseball cap, busking unknown at the L’Enfant Metro station for one hour. The results of the experiment became a thing of legend: a mere total of ONE would recognize him out of 1,097 and only four people actually stopped to listen. He collected around 37 dollars.
For a man who easily commands $1,000 per minute, the sum is rather shocking.
I won’t go into the whole article; that’s not what this post is about. But it did get me thinking: In this day of pre-programmed ipods, we’re downloading what’s already familiar. We know the lyrics, we know the rhythm. Most of the time, we’re daydreaming to those familiar songs, not analyzing them, not deconstructing them, not really letting them sink in, definitely not learning anything new. Not saying there’s anything wrong with zoning out to a good beat, but it begs the question: How much do we actually listen - truly listen - to music?
In a telephone conversation that would last three hours and have me up until 2 in the morning, forcing me to drink 5 Red Bulls before I felt human again, Brian and I discussed his last Friday Night Rush entry, The HOV: Reflections from Without.
As surprised as I was that he was able to draw comparisons between two seemingly incomparable things (the HOV lane and Rush), he was just as suprised I was not able to do the same thing.
Alternately supine and prone on my bed (and yes, I learned there is a difference), I listened to Brian read aloud his latest entry. And while there were a lot of lines that really struck a chord with me, it was this one I remember most clearly:
“Rush’s music,” Brian stated, “makes me think and feel, and by drawing me into the frame of the song, I become an active participant, and I want to share my experiences…”
If the subject matter of what he was saying wasn’t so interesting, the smooth cadence of his voice could have easily lulled me to sleep.
But as it were, it was a fascinating piece. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to it…we’ll get to it!) He answered my question exactly…and a lot more. Music is about participation, and the really great musicians will have you do it effortlessly. Brian was able to make his comparison because Rush enabled him to think outside the frame of everyday-radio-listening. He lets the message of the song sink in; enjoying the music, don’t get me wrong, but realizing it’s much bigger than lyrics and notes.
Brian realizes that the great music, the wonderful music, reminds a person why living is so lovely.
And I realized that a great person, a wonderful person, will point out the music that will remind you in the first place.
Thanks Brian.
Gotta Rub Me the Right Way
It bugs me, just a little bit. For some reason, when Rush comes up in conversation, or in a magazine article, someone always makes the point, usually as if it’s some new, profound revelation: “With Rush, it’s all about the music.”
This statement, or something like it, has been bandied about so frequently that, depending on the intentions of the speaker, it usually falls somewhere between an apology for Geddy’s voice in the early days or a platitude for those poor non-Rush fans who need to be reassured that, Hey, it’s cool that you’re not into Rush—they’re a real live music band, and not for the average radio-friendly wimp, we cool people wouldn’t expect you to understand.
Gag.
So when the feedback to my HOV-lane piece last week focused on the apparent non-relationship between high-occupancy vehicles and the rock band we’re looking forward to seeing this July, I had to step back and ask myself: why does a blog about Rush inevitably wind up being about me and my traveling experiences and not “all about the music?” Sure, I write about Rush too, but it’s always about how they’ve impacted me. I couldn’t possibly be that self-centered…
To prevent further digression (and stave off the inevitable psychoanalytic babble that would follow), I’ll just cut to the chase: I think the reason is that Rush’s music makes me think and feel, and by drawing me into the frame of the song, I become an active participant, and I want to share my experiences. That’s not uncommon in rock music, but Rush makes it particularly mutual. Sometimes, you feel their need to share with you, as in “The Analog Kid” (Signals, 1982):
You move me, you move me
With your buildings and your eyes
Autumn woods and winter skies—
Yeah, okay, so I may not have buildings or landscapes, but by addressing a scene in the second person, I, as the listener, get drawn into the world that our boy Neil wants to share.
Other artists do this too. When the Beatles sang “Barbara Ay-ay-anne, come take my hay-ay-annnd,” they drew in quite a huge female audience who, at some level, was responding to the invitation—even if your name didn’t almost rhyme with garbage can. Or take something a little more recent, a national favorite from a Pittsburgh local:
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Gotta rub me the right way, honey
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Come, come, come and let me out.
I have to confess, I don’t respond as much to the invitation to take Paul McCartney’s hand as I do to Christina’s invitation to “rub [her] the right way”—or the triple invitation to “come.” Hmm. In the words of Kanye West, “Me likey.” (As a side note, I still have doubts about the correctness of punctuating “right way honey”—the comma implies honey is a direct address, a common pet name, but a dash would imply that “honey” is Christina’s preferred substance for, er, “rubbing.”)
The problem is that most of music, whether as classic as the Beatles or as suggestive as X-tina, plays off the whole sexual attraction thing. While I love hearing Fergie lustily belt out “London Bridge” as much as the next guy, we all know the obvious: it’s not meant for us. In all these great love songs, lust songs, sex songs, breakup songs, unless you’re that rare, lucky (or unlucky) subject of the lyrics, you’re really just a vicarious participant in the music. And there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.
But Rush lets you do more than just live out of a vicarious identification with celebrities; they bring the life of the rich and famous to ground level. Take this tour’s opener, “Limelight,” one of Rush’s all-time best-known songs. Neil’s penned some pretty interesting lyrics that display his discomfort with the mega-fame of the rock star. It turns out he’s a regular guy like you or me, and it just so happens that he’s the world’s best drummer. Talk about humility—or honesty: “I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend.” That’s an almost-apologetic line to fans, and really stands in contrast to the never-ending stream of hip-hop singles celebrating Patron, clubs jam-packed with smokin’ hot babes, and Lamborghinis and posh cribs that most of us will never see, much less own. That ain’t real life for your listeners, Akon.
Or, for a return to the romantic theme, look at “Ghost of a Chance,” this year’s most exciting set-piece (for me, anyway). Again, Neil avoids the pitfalls of most love songs:
1. The over-whiny I’m Never Gonna Fall in Love Again/Find Someone/Get Laid motif. Please. Even Class-A losers find others like them…if not better. Stay away from Eric Carmen.
2. The caustic High Rate of Depreciation of the Opposite Sex, a.k.a. the Singlehood Anthem. This one is actually believable for a few people *cough* Natasha Bedingfield, but 99% of listeners can’t embrace this idea for more than 20 minutes.
3. The sappy/sexy I’ve Found True Love/Perfect Sex and I’m So Happy I Have That I Must Share It with You!!!! Yeah, and when we read about your ugly scandal and/or ensuing divorce we’re gonna play this at your court hearing. (Insert your favorite celebrity here.)
How does Peart avoid these? By appealing to that uncertain, hopeful element within each of us:
I don’t believe in destiny, or the guiding hands of fate;
I don’t believe in forever, or love as a mystical state;
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets, or angels watching from above,
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love—
And make it last.
Maybe it’s the third person “we,” maybe it’s the long buildup of “don’t believes” that lends more credit to the final admission of the “ghost of a chance,” or maybe it’s just Neil’s frankness that makes something in my heart beat with the words. Yes, if Neil Peart thinks there’s a ghost of a chance that it could last, hell, maybe there is for you and me, too. Certainly a better chance than of giving J.Lo babies.
So I have to disagree: Rush isn’t all about the music, at least not for me. It’s about the response the music creates in me, which, I guess, is the goal of all songs—to evoke a feeling in the listener, to rub them the right way. And no artist can do this for me like Rush…at least until Christina hands me the SueBee.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night rush
I suppose one of my favorite things about Brian is that he’s so unpredictable. He’s someone who can definitely give you a run for your money. Intelligent and sharp, brash and confident, engaging in conversation with Brian is like being a matador to a bull. You’ve got to be on your toes! You’ve got to always be paying attention! And for god’s sake, you can’t let him smell your fear!!!!
Opening my email and reading Brian’s latest entry was like that. Matador and Bull. Surprises. Unpredictability. I mean, who would ever be able to write a piece about Rush and somehow find a way to make it coincide with an HOV lane? Seriously, just when I think I know what Brian will say next…..Matador and Bull.
(Wow, that was probably one of my weirder intros….but I’m sure you appreciate what I’m trying to say.)
The HOV Lane: Reflections from Without
Brian Corlett, 22 May 2008
I was creeping along CA-17 in San Jose rush hour this afternoon and saw three Toyota Priuses (would that be Prii??) zip past me in the HOV lane. Three things struck me as I disengaged the clutch and crawled forward again: first, three Priuses in a row were all too fitting for an area where fuel is $4.19 a gallon, but still rare enough to turn my head, anyway. Second, I couldn’t remember being passed by a Prius before. It’s not an event many males my age would be proud of. Third, none of the cars had any passengers, which, by itself, could be coincidence—three smug Prius drivers sneaking along in the HOV. Except that, in the next five minutes, I saw about two dozen hybrids, of various breeds, driving past me, each shotgun empty.
Which suggests that, as usual, California is leading the way in eco-cultural trends, and hybrid drivers are apparently allowed in the HOV—even when flying solo. My mind quickly jumped back to a Rush classic, “Red Barchetta,” from Moving Pictures (1981) (probably to salve the primal sense of loss initiated by being passed by a battery-powered car). The song was inspired by a short story that Neil Peart is said to have read in a car magazine. The inspiration, “A Nice Morning Drive,” by Richard S. Foster, tells the story of an adventurous driver manning an outlawed high-performance car. His illegalities are noted by the local law enforcement, which sends their new government-approved vehicles after him.
He escapes, of course, and although “Red Barchetta” doesn’t carry the same cynicism—the tone is more nostalgic—I couldn’t help but see the Priuses as another form of regulation. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a political piece, and—lest you fail to believe me—I think hybrids are a great idea. My last car was a Geo Metro and it got a very sexy 47 miles to the gallon, thank you.
Really, I’m just waxing nostalgic about cars—and music. Kind of like American Graffiti, only I’m not looking at rock ‘n’ roll, but Rush, who, to this day, is one of the very few bands who have escaped the regulation of rock. By their own admission, they probably wouldn’t have made it if they were emerging into the current music industry. Yet, now that they’ve made their mark, they persist on, sort of like that old cat pee under the sofa. (Okay, bad analogy.) But seriously, there’s this well-documented trend in rock toward multi-tracked, highly-compressed radio-friendly music, which is nearly always written based on what audiences want, not necessarily on what the bands want. It’s good old supply and demand, only with a twist: it’s been found that audiences can be manipulated, and following trends—especially now that the internet has decreased the lifespan of the news, capturing market segments and, eventually, directing them, a la “Superconductor,” off the highly-underrated Presto: “You can put a target on the market.”
Rush has none of that, and it is so refreshing that they’ve maintained their distinctive “Rush” sound for thirty years while still growing with the changes in music and culture. Like the hero of “Red Barchetta,” there’s a certain pleasure to be had in rebelling against the system and just doing what you want to. Not to mention that’s what rock ‘n’ roll was about in the first place. What ever happened to the days when it was sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? Now it’s more like sex, drugs, and the recording companies. Ugh. No wonder they need so much sex and drugs.
Let’s be clear: I respect where music has gone, and I enjoy the latest Nickelback or Fergie hit as much as the next guy—just like I think “Prii” are a good idea. But when someone has the balls to be pimpin’ around in a well-preserved classic, say, a ’69 Camaro (or an ’89 Camaro, for my generation), or a classic three-piece rock outfit recording original music without pandering to major labels, I can’t help but grin and thumb my nose at the trendsetters in the HOV lane—and all the bandwagoneers piling in for the ride.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
After a few more posts, I’m sure he won’t need an introduction any more. He’s a wonderful writer. You’ll know his name and style as if he were always present on this blog, his entries a common thing, not a special feature. But I probably won’t stop doing the small intros because, very simply, I like them too much. :)
So here he is again, one of the best writers in THE WORLD! (Who cares if I’m a bit biased.) With miles and time zones between us, I admit I’m missing the little dork, so it was wonderful to open my email and read his Rush entry. I could hear his voice through this piece as surely as if he were speaking in my ear. And it’s a good voice, steady and strong and so obviously speaking about something that moves him.
Time Stand Still
Brian Corlett
Just two days ago I was, for the first time, driving through Las Vegas. It’s part of a cross-country road trip in which I’ve hit twelve states and made it, finally, to the West Coast. It was 8:30, just past sunset, when we drove through the mountain pass and into the car check that precedes the Hoover Dam. Then down, and around, switchback after switchback, and you’re on the famous structure, Lake Mead on your right, a work-in-progress attempting to span the gulf high away to your left, and more switchbacks ahead up into the mountains of Nevada.
But nothing compares to the view coming down 93, after dusk, when all of Vegas is suddenly visible, all at once, as a mass of lights in the desert.
Of course I didn’t know that two days before Rush was rocking out at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, one of the must-sees I passed in The Strip that night. I would have loved to have been there. (Although it’s not my style to stalk bands around the country. I’m waiting for the Pittsburgh show, thank you.)
Riding shotgun was my dad, who is another Rush fan (although he would prefer the term aficionado). He’s observed on more than a few occasions how Rush creates this “wall of sound,” a seemingly impenetrable mass of chordal complexities, diatonic harmonies, and subtle rhythmic shifts that are often hard to appreciate—for two reasons. The first is, of course, the sheer quantity of sound particles. Let’s face it, Rush is a loud band, and at certain points it sounds like there are two drummers, two guitarists, and a full-time keyboardist. (For those who don’t know, Geddy Lee, the bassist and vocalist, sometimes plays the keys by hand, and frequently plays them by foot.) This wall of sound is kind of like those Vegas lights. There’s just so many, you can’t look at just one, but you have to appreciate the view en masse.
But the other thing about a Rush song that requires a leap in listener response to really appreciate is the natural way in which they are part of their environment. Rush seamlessly integrates words, rhythms, and tones to a degree that can only be appreciated live if, say, you’ve had a few nights alone with Moving Pictures and a good single-malt to reflect. Take “Workin’ Them Angels,” for example, off the new album, Snakes and Arrows. Taken at face value, Geddy’s phrasing seems awkward at times—enough so that I wondered how they ever let some of it on the final cut. But the song is about memories created from traveling—memories from a long, often excruciatingly difficult past. So Geddy’s drawn out words at places actually make the listener feel some of the emotional hyperextension expressed by the lyrics, as does the time signature change from the verses’ easy 3/4 to the choruses’ more plodding 4/4.
Or take another song from this tour’s set, the amazing “Between the Wheels” I mentioned last time. Whoa. As a musician, let me tell you, the chordal uncertainty here is daunting, with guitar and synth playing different chords from each other—and both shifting back and forth between two very unstable, dissonant chord structures. While this is happening, Geddy is singing a melody that is—almost—in a different key. The song talks about being between “the wheels,” or places, in life, but it performs what it says as well: the music is precariously situated between “real”—or, at least, identifiable—musical places.
I wish I could say this all hit me as I was appreciating the Oasis of Light coming off the mountains above Vegas, or driving down The Strip and gazing in wonder at the Bellagio, or Caesar’s Palace, or getting blasted from across the street with the pyrotechnics at Treasure Island…but of course I was too mesmerized to do more than gape at everything going on around me…sort of like at a three-hour Rush show.
By next summer, the Hoover Dam Bypass Project should be completed and people can happily cruise high above the dam and have a great view without the tedious 15 mph switchbacks, an undeniable convenience for locals who have to take 93. But that’s not for me; I’d rather enjoy the views as they come, at both short- and long-range, while they’re still available. Hmmmmm…kinda reminds me of a song, “Time Stand Still” (which is not, sadly, on this year’s set list).
Freeze this motion a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
Experience slips away.
If Rush had asked my opinion (and they didn’t), this would have make the perfect closing piece for the show. But no, they’re ending it with the famous instrumental “YYZ,” a song, which, according to the band, is “about airports.” It’s named—and the rhythm is patterned after—Toronto Pearson International Airport, code YYZ, and the Morse code associated with it, respectively. It is the airport that, for many decades, has welcomed Rush home after being away.
As a closing song, I guess that works too.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!
Rush—Immortal for at Least One More Year
Brian Corlett
They’re at it again. One tour for Snakes & Arrows wasn’t enough—so Rush has re-packed the tour bus and is touring for another three-and-a-half months, to the delight of fans ranging from guitar-wielding adolescents to aging rockers who are fast approaching the time when they’ll qualify for the senior citizen discount.
Actually, the same thing goes for the members of Rush, who’ve been making albums and touring since the mid-seventies, and are now in that post-fifty age that sees so many rockstars washed-up, dead, or doing VH1 productions. Yet Rush has managed to avoid the pitfalls of drugs, break-ups, and the many health problems that seem to afflict rockers with disturbing frequency (use your imagination if that last one wasn’t specific enough). Rush has been Alex Lifeson on guitar, Neil Peart on drums, and Geddy Lee on bass, vocals, and keys (always in that order, he’s quick to point out) since 1975—an extremely long run for an unchanging lineup.
But ask anyone who was at last year’s show at Post-Gazette Pavillion and you’ll hear that it was anything but a bunch of old dudes on stage. Sure, they may not have as much hair as they did on some of those late-70s tours, but some would argue that’s a positive change. Their music is still loud, varied, and full of energy—amazingly so, for only a three-piece band. In fact, the music is so much the focus that the crowd is decidedly different from your typical classic rock act—there’s no wild Van Halen fans in the mosh pit, and you’re unlikely to be passed any, uh, good-feel gifts that were generously shared at Aerosmith’s last PPG show. Rush fans are all about the music, and this is no more evident than at the show’s climax, which is generally agreed to be Peart’s drum solo. Coming about three-quarters of the way through the set list, the solo, like many of their songs, is appreciated in near-silence. Everyone stands, craning for an uninterrupted view, and you can actually make out the individual cheers. I wasn’t more than halfway up on stage right last year and when they broke into the verse of “Between the Wheels,” I swear my shouts brought Lifeson’s gaze into my row. (I’m not making this up.) But screaming fans during songs are the exception rather than the rule, and begs the question, is Rush doing a show or a concert? I’m not sure if it isn’t a little bit—or a lot of—both.
Thirty-some years after it all started, they sound as amazing as ever, but, as a die-hard Rush fan can karaoke, “We’re only immortal for a limited time.” (“Dreamline,” Roll the Bones, 1991.) I’m twenty-three, and many of my friends already feel that their immortality is slipping by them. (No comment.) Of course, no one can argue that Rush has already achieved immortality through their twenty-plus recordings and numerous awards.
But with respect to live touring? Like my recently-graduated buddies, immortality and the “live” can only coexist for a time. For Rush on stage, their immortality continues, for now, anyway—and you can expect me to be there as long as it does.
Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush by Bethany
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Friday Night Rush!!!
It’s a brand new series!! Every Friday this month and next, I will be bringing you cd reviews, links, essays and much more on legendary band RUSH!!!
Coming to Pittsbugh this July, it’s the concert of the season and Lux is counting down the days.
Brian Corlett, a truly remarkable writer and Rush aficionado will be joining the blog as a special guest writer. If anyone knows about this band, it’s him. He’s knowledgeable and humorous and I couldn’t think of a more apropos guest.
If you’d like to participate in the Friday Night Rush series, leave a comment below. Feel free to ask questions, make statements and just generally share your Rush love.
And now I turn the mike over to Brian….come back Friday and see what he has to say.
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