Difficult Music

Don’t Annoy Us Further!
The Rush Concert, Book II

Early in the concert, Gary “Geddy” Lee joked that they had 6,000 songs to play that night. Well, it wasn’t quite that many, but they must have knocked out a couple dozen. Even though this tour was billed as “an evening with Rush” and the band had about three hours to kill, picking the set list still must have been a chore.

The Rush back catalogue has piled up like sediment over the decades, and they managed to stick a trowel into nearly every layer during the show. They didn’t prise any nuggets from the Caress of Steel LP (despised by the band, but a favourite of Rush curmudgeons like Sox and myself), but gems from nearly every other release were unearthed. I guess the problem is that some layers of the catalogue are richer than others. So while 1980’s Permanent Waves yielded “The Spirit of Radio,” “Freewill,” and “Natural Science”—all strident, “progressive” numbers that the audience received warmly—1990’s Presto yielded only “The Pass,” an earnest-but-lethargic tune that provided the first pee break for dozens of concertgoers.

As a musician I can sympathize with Rush’s plight. It’s always more fun to play newer stuff. But as a fan I’ll admit that I want some nostalgia tweaked, especially in the case of Rush, who saw me through four crucial and formative years of my life. I’ll never disown any of that music because, as my mantra goes, I’m loyal to the things and people I love. And although I’ve got no right to ask for such a thing from an artist, I do want my loyalty reciprocated—I’d like them to go back and play the stuff that gave me a thrill back in the days when my ears were hungry for cosmic bombast (now that I think of it, when haven’t they been?) and my head was reeling with new possibilities. I treasure those songs, so it’d be nice to know they’re still fond of them too.

My problem with present-day Rush music stems from the fact that I’ve grown and they’ve grown, but I don’t think we’ve grown together. I’ve wanted them to abstract their music, to use their instrumental prowess to venture into realms beyond the rock song. Instead they’ve veered off into a comparatively conservative approach to music and songcraft. During their epic heydays, besides the proliferation of hairpin-turn virtuosity and scary narrator voices on nearly every album, there was a sense that they were forcing lyrics and music together into songs, and that’s what gave them character. So what if the words didn’t always rhyme or the occasional line didn’t scan? So what if Geddy just sang along with the riff instead of creating a counter-melody to sing over top? The material wasn’t any less memorable for it.

For the last decade and a half they’ve streamlined their songs, trimming away those endearing rough edges. There’s always 10 to a dozen songs on each new album, all four or five minutes long, always a single for the radio. Verse-chorus-verse. You might say they’re less “progressive” than they were in the late seventies, but I’m not going to touch that issue for now—I’m in deep enough as it is. Maybe Rush aren’t the mad scientist/pot-smoking geniuses I took them for when I was 14. Maybe their music in 1977 sounded as conservative to seasoned 36-year-old music nerds then as their current stuff sounds to me now. All I can say is when I compare tepid offerings like Test for Echo and Roll the Bones, to records like King Crimson’s bracing and raucous The Construkction of Light, I find myself wondering why Lee, Lifeson and Peart haven’t made a similar leap into the great beyond.

But there I go, being an ungrateful sod. My aforementioned loyalty was reciprocated on Sunday night. Absolutely. Bearing in mind Rush’s long career arc, I couldn’t have realistically asked for a better bunch of songs. Like I said, they played “Natural Science,” which surprised me because it’s one of their more outlandish, ungainly songs, and one of their last great epics. It’s probably still in the set because it’s just a fun song to play. It also affords Geddy the opportunity to sing the lines “Each microcosmic planet/A complete society,” which may not be rock ’n’ roll, but I like it.

The set also featured several instrumentals, a much-loved variety of song that Rush can never write enough of, as far as I’m concerned. They trotted out “La Villa Strangiato” (featuring an odd Lifeson rap during the “Monsters!” section that had his partners exchanging bemused glances), “Leave That Thing Alone,” and “YYZ,” which is perhaps their most successful instrumental—exciting yet restrained, concise but very satisfying. People lapped it up, getting as “into it” as one can get at a Rush show.

There was no moshing, of course. You’re fairly safe from most concert-related injuries at a prog show. You might get a cuff in the head from an air drummer flicking out a hand to hit an imaginary splash cymbal, but that’s pretty rare. Or, if you were my friend Malty, you could get bounced by GM Place goons for too much headbanging during “Cygnus X-1.” One second, he was up front, hair flailing around in 11/8 time, the next, he had disappeared. Too bad, because if he’d caught “Working Man,” he would have really gone off.

I guess the staff were concerned for the safety of the child. Somebody in the second or third row saw fit to bring their six-year-old daughter to a Rush concert. Watching this kid perched on an adult guardian’s shoulders during “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” (“Square for battle/Let the fray begin!”) was cause for concern, and no doubt a lifetime of therapy awaits the traumatized tot.

Everyone I’ve spoken to about the concert has been quite moved by it. Whether their judgment is coloured by knowledge of recent Rush history, I don’t know. I’d prefer to think they were just awed by a spectacular rock concert. It’s sure nice to go to one of those now and again, and it was great to hear all those songs. Thanks, Sox.