A modern day warrior, a mean, mean stride
Today’s Tom Sawyer, mean, mean pride
Today I learned the drummer of one of the bands whose music has vibrated my eardrums maybe more than any other throughout my life passed away on Tuesday. If you don’t know who Neil Peart was, or who the band Rush was, then you would not even begin to understand the epic loss I feel.
I still remember being in art class in the ninth grade and Hank Stover singing Tom Sawyer with the passion of a lunatic and playing imaginary drum heads with his paint brushes. I might have heard the song on 96 Rock, but I hadn’t paid it any attention as of yet. After that day, my ears became attuned. But funny enough, they still were not fully registered on my music appreciation radar. Maybe I was too young to understand their complicated time signatures or their philosophical lyrics. Yes, Tom Sawyer was crazy good, and Working Man was the heaviest proletariat song you could ask for, but I didn’t dig any deeper…yet.
Not until I went away to college and away from home for the first time and started searching for tokens of self identity did I finally become a fanatic of Rush, this Canadian rock band with only three of the most talented musicians in the world but who created one of the biggest sounds I’d ever heard. And since it was a “Bible” college (not really, but that’s another story) any rock music, especially from a group who’d had an upside down star on one of their album covers, were looked on by the authorities as pure evil. It was at this time I started lifting weights in the gym. And I had one of the most basic essentials of any music fan at the time, a Sony Walkman which played cassette tapes. I would “lift” and jam to Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures (the one with Tom Sawyer) – to this day my two favorite Rush albums. I remember some figure head confronting me in the hall one day about what I chose to listen to and how it was “ungodly.” Well, I knew better than he did the lyrics Neil Peart had penned. They were positive, poetic, filled with light and hope – and their musicianship was an absolute wonderful example of the theological term “common grace” in my nineteen year-old opinion.
As a self-taught musician myself, Rush was always too good for me to try to learn their songs. I mean I tried every now and then. Guitar World would include a guitar tablature, or tab for short, (a form of writing music using a guitar neck diagram and numbers for frets) of one of their songs such as Roll the Bones. But there was no way I could ever learn their material well enough to play it live in a band setting. I think that’s another reason I’ve never grown tired of their music. They never ceased to wow my ears and I could never decipher down the intricate patterns to play them myself. And some of them are just your basic head banging anthem (e.g. Permanent Waves’ Entre Nous) but it’s always been more fun to just listen to them instead of trying to break them down and recreate them on my own.
The most attractive trait of their music was always this, at least it was to me: they were a nerd’s band. If you were on the math team instead of the ball team, if you loved drawing in your room alone more than riding your bike with the neighborhood kids or if you actually enjoyed reading books, Rush was your band. They were not a band girls would necessarily “get.” Their shows were known to have a small percentage of females in attendance. The ones who did attend were mostly girlfriends and later on wives of their true fans. They weren’t good looking, Geddy Lee’s voice was an acquired taste, they didn’t sing about adolescent tendencies and they definitely did not “party”. I remember an interview with Gene Simmons, the infamous Kiss bassist, talking about how when Rush opened for them back in the mid-70’s they would be sitting in their hotel rooms reading, not boozing it up or chasing local groupies or trashing the furniture.
I actually got to see them live one time back in 1988. Sandie and I had just married in November of ’87 and we were living in Memphis. Rush had just released the Hold Your Fire album (the red one with the three red balls), and in February they made a stop at the Mid-South Coliseum. And yes, she was merely my reason for not going alone – she did not “get” them. She got that I got them and she was happy to see me ecstatic. We were on the risers behind the floor seats, so we could see the stage okay, but Alex, Geddy and Neil were tiny from our vantage point. But it did not matter – it was the boys in the flesh who had inspired Hank Stover to flail his paint brushes and who had inspired me when I was a lonely kid away from home for the first time to lift weights and head bang my way across campus to a 7/4 beat.
I missed one of their final tours a few years back called Time Machine, where they played their biggest songs – in their fan’s eyes of course; they were not your typical hit making pinup band – in reverse order, starting with their most recent tunes and going all the way back to their first album. And they played Moving Pictures from beginning to end. I certainly regret not seeing that one and hearing my friends talk about seeing it. I suppose if I’d been paying attention and knew their existence as a trio was almost concluded, I would have made the effort. But it is heavy knowing for certain…never again. Now it will be only reminiscing, collecting and playing my favorite Rush records, and smiling when I think of how they were a nerd’s band and how they made being a nerd okay.
So long, Mr. Timekeeper. You were one of the best. Thank you for the rhythms, the lyrics, the challenges to my perspective, the talent and the quiet, anti-rock star nature you possessed. The reminiscing will be sweet for this old nerd.
learning2breathe 