Rush

Tonight I went up to near Vancouver, Washington (quite close to Portland) to see the Rush concert. With me were my youngest brother and two eldest nephews, who are now 14 and 12 and have a wide range of rock music knowledge ranging over several different decades. They happen to like Rush independently, so this wasn’t just my brother and I dragging them along in enforced nostalgia participation.

It was a great show. The guys can still play. I was listening to them only in late high school, way back from 1984-86 (I also listened to a lot of blues in those days; strange combination, maybe). I then suddenly and completely lost interest in Rush as my tastes immediately shifted in college towards Wagner and atonal music, plus Bird/Trane/Monk. As a result, I have no familiarity at all with anything Rush has recorded since the Power Windows album a quarter of a century ago. For that reason most of the first set was lost on me. But the second set was more of a gift to their first-generation fans, with a lot of stuff from 1974-1980, including the whole of the Moving Pictures album.

I’d say that the band is aging reasonably well, with a few caveats to be mentioned shortly. It was a generously long concert, and they obviously had plenty of energy despite a gruelling schedule for this tour, which technically began a full year ago (though they took a refuelling break from October through March).

The first song of the night was “The Spirit of Radio,” and at first Geddy Lee’s vocals (despite a still impressive upper range for a male) were bad enough that I was worried it would be a very long night; my brother later confirmed that he’d had the same concern initially. Geddy’s voice was a bit off-key and even cracking now and then. But it only took a couple of songs before he was back to normal and singing very well. The only vocal issue for the rest of the night was that he now often has to drop an octave where he used to sing falsetto, as was especially evident in the “We are the priests…” section of “2112.”

I’d never seen them live before, and so this was the first time I realized that Geddy provides most of the personality for the band. He’s the only one of the three who’s even remotely outgoing; he’s also the only one who dances a bit across the stage while playing, the only one who addresses the audience, and so forth. He also looks reasonably similar to how he looked in the 1980’s, whereas the others definitely do not.

Alex Lifeson looks considerably older than before, but his playing seems comparable to what it always was. His solos stick closely to the recorded versions, which audiences generally appreciate.

Neil Peart, haunted by personal tragedy in the 1990’s, now looks much older when wearing his concert hat (not so much so when you see him normally). He’d have been completely unrecognizable to me if met on the street. He still knows his way around a drum set, but obviously you can’t play the drums as frantically in your late 50’s as in your late 20’s; some of the risk-taking is now gone. His second-set solos used to be “wild man” routines, but tonight it was more of an understated world/ambient solo with spooky mood lighting. In fact, it reminded me (as well as my brother) a bit of Muslimgauze.

Highlights of the concert…

*they nailed “Subdivisions” at the end of the first set, and the video on screen for the song was hilariously literal: footage of high school halls, shopping malls, basement bars, and backs of cars, following the lyrics exactly.

*other than an unfortunate first few bars, when Neil was slightly out of synch with Alex and Geddy, “YYZ” was performed with typical virtuosity

*the second encore was the now ancient “Working Man” (it’s a pre-Neil Peart song), which began amusingly as reggae before shifting into the normal heavy metal vein a couple of minutes into the tune

The musical memory of humans can be really remarkable. I hadn’t heard many of these songs in literally 25 years, but hadn’t forgotten much about them. I still had the solos memorized, and so forth. And that’s not me, that’s just typical of humans in general, I think.

If some random unknown person told you they spent the summer studying H.P. Lovecraft and going to a Rush concert, you’d probably guess they were about 19 years old. It just worked out that way this summer. I’ll make up for it with a year’s worth of 24/7 Aristotle after that.

What I was really stunned by was the level of sophisticated musical knowledge displayed by my nephews, who in several cases made astute critical remarks about certain changes in the songs compared with the recorded renditions.