“I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man.' Neil Peart reflected on his teenage years and more in our 2015 cover story on Rush. Read it here
— were disturbed by what the drummer would later describe as the “sound of salesmen.” “We would hear them give the same rap to the audience every night,” says Peart. “ ’This is the greatest rock city in the world, man!’ That was creepy. I despise the cynical dishonesty.” They did get along with the guys in Kiss. “We would get high with Ace Frehley in his hotel room and make him laugh,” Lee recalls, “and they were a really good influence on us in terms of learning to put on a show.
As the Eighties approached, Rush discovered concision and synthesizers, recording taut songs that jumped straight into the classic-rock canon: “The Spirit of Radio,” “Freewill,” “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight.” “When punk and New Wave came,” says Peart, “we were young enough to gently incorporate it into our music, rather than getting reactionary about it — like other musicians who I heard saying, ‘What are we supposed to do now, forget how to play?’ We were fans enough to go, ‘Oh, we want that too.
“If any of us were the slightest bit less stable,” says Peart, “the slightest bit less disciplined or less humorous or more mean, or in any way different, it wouldn’t have worked. So there’s a miracle there.”Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, As Peart gets deeper into his sixties, he’s also questioned his continued physical ability to play Rush shows, a task he’s compared to “running a marathon while solving equations.” But so far, he’s surprising himself. “Everything hurts, but that’s fine,” he says. “I’m just gratified that I can still do it – at not only the level I would wish to but still getting better.
It’s an adventurous concept LP, complete with a full-circle return to sci-fi motifs that Peart had long abandoned. Their producer, Nick Raskulinecz, grew up on the band, and pushed them to re-embrace their Rush-iest aspects, urging Lee to use his highest vocal register, encouraging Peart to throw a drum solo right in the middle of a twisty track called “Headlong Flight.”
On the yellowish-orange wall are striking portraits of Jeff Beck, Alice Cooper, Prince and Rush’s old tourmates Kiss, along with a reproduction of John Entwistle’s cover art forAs the meal ends, a roadie drops off both dental floss and little gum-cleaning sticks, which Lee and Lifeson put to immediate and vigorous use — the guys in those photos may have a bit more traditional rock & roll mystique, but when it comes to oral hygiene, Rush wins.
For all his self-deprecation, Lee is an unexpectedly formidable presence — trim, youthful-looking, unflappably self-possessed, with a hint of steel lurking beneath his affability. “He can be intimidating because he’s so smart, and such a man of the world,” says Raskulinecz, producer on Rush’s past two albums. “In my experience, Geddy is the leader of the band.
It was Lee who pushed hardest for Rush’s Eighties transformation, after hitting prog overload with 1978’sAmong other problems, they wrote and recorded the backing music for the entire album without checking whether Lee could sing over it. “We wrote it in such a fucked-up key,” he says, his frustration still fresh 37 years later. “It was just the worst two weeks of my life recording vocals.”
When the Allies liberated the camps, his father set out in search of his mom. He found her at Bergen-Belsen, which had become a displaced-persons camp. They married there, and immigrated to Canada. But years of forced labor had damaged Lee’s father’s heart, and he died at age 45, when Lee was 12. Lee’s mother had to go to work, leaving her three kids in the care of their overwhelmed, elderly grandmother.
The memory of Lee’s father is a driving force in its own right. “My dad missed all the fun,” he says. “All that work and all that grief, and he got ripped off at an early age. I think that’s why I just want to keep playing, and also why I travel so much. While I have my faculties, I want to enjoy everything there is, see as much as I can, just make the most of life.”ack in L.A., Peart stops at a traffic light and spots a sad-eyed, sunburned woman begging by the side of the road.
“For a person of my sensibility, you’re only left with the Democratic party,” says Peart, who also calls George W. Bush “an instrument of evil.” “If you’re a compassionate person at all. The whole health-care thing — denying mercy to suffering people? What? This is Christian?” But he still prefers the “because it happens” explanation to the one where fate’s horrors are all part of some divine plan. “Do yourself a favor,” he says. “Don’t ever say to me, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ ‘Cause you’ll be dead.”
Lifeson was a fan of Ecstasy in the early Nineties, and hadn’t heard that it’s called Molly now. “I’m glad you told me, just in case,” he jokes. “My wife is a totally nondrug person, but for some reason I talked her into it. We cranked the music and we were dancing, and then we talked for hours about deep personal stuff for what seemed like the first time, even though we’d been married for years.
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