A Farewell to Kings

I was introduced to most of my music through peer pressure. I went from spending 6th grade at a tiny Catholic school to 7th grade in the public junior high, and quickly learned that much of your status came from the bands you liked. When I figured out the music the junior high hallways taught me I should be listening to, I worked to catch up. I began listening to classic rock radio. I joined the Columbia House Record and Tape Club more times than I can remember. I drew album covers on the brown paper bag covers wrapped around my textbooks.

Back then in early, early 80s, AC/DC was the apex predator in the hallways and boom boxes, with other now classic rock staples like Foreigner, Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and even Billy Squier earning what seemed to be permanent spots in the Ring of Honor. Another band with an unquestionably deserved spot on the list of our musical titans was Rush. 

I learned about Rush mostly from the radio, since they had a good number of songs deep in rotation from previous albums. They weren’t the kind of band you’d dance around to while playing air guitar in your bedroom, but the kind you’d actively listen to. All of that complicated music was coming from only three guys — Alex Lifeson, playing insane guitar lines, Geddy Lee, playing bass with his hands and using foot pedals to operate keyboards while singing at the same time, and Neil Peart, a drummer who clearly was not human and played like he had nine arms. Being a drummer in the junior high and later the high school band, I was drawn in to Neil Peart’s playing. I knew to ever play like him was beyond my capabilities, but there were still things there to try and learn. 

In our microcosm of the world, Rush was mostly known back then for the song “Tom Sawyer,” and primarily for the drum solo. I recently told a colleague that every music fan from my generation had air-drummed to “Tom Sawyer” at least once, and I feel confident that’s a truth. The song, and the solo, were that important to the time.

Rush has been one of my bands for decades. No matter which musical era of the band an album represents or what influences were on display in the music, I could always find something about it to like. For the longest time they were mostly just present and reliable, resurfacing every year or two with an album of new songs or one of their many live recordings. After a few decades, you come to realize you’ve connected with them more deeply than you have with you most of your other favorite artists.

They are still the only band I’ve seen twice on the same tour, once at the Minnesota State Fair and nearly a year later at The Gorge in Washington state. My friend Erik and I would amuse ourselves during marching band practice, dancing with our drums the same way Geddy Lee danced with his bass guitar in the video for “Distant Early Warning.” When I drove out of the city after presenting the summary paper for my Master’s Degree, hearing the song “Marathon” come up on my car stereo was the moment it sank in that I was actually done. The song that ran through my head in the days surrounding the birth of my first nephew was “Manhattan Project,” mostly for the lyric, “All the powers that be / and the course of history / would be changed forever more.” It seemed appropriate then for the first baby born into my family, and it was. When I had to think up a four-digit passcode on my first smartphone, I used 2112. While talking with my friend Staci at an after school happy hour, I mentioned the only thing I wanted for my birthday was Rush’s newest album, “Vapor Trails,” and I didn’t think anyone in my family was going to buy it for me. She did instead. I played through it for the first time in my classroom. Years later, when Rush released a Blu-Ray concert of the final show of their final tour before retiring from touring, that same first nephew, now an adult, gave it to me for Christmas. It came packaged with a keychain — a small Gumby figure, wearing a Rush t-shirt. I still keep it with my keys today.

It was bittersweet when the band announced their retirement, because you know they meant it. Neil Peart had been drumming at a level of virtuosity that had him widely recognized as the best drummer in popular music for four decades, and his body was wearing out. I couldn’t blame any of them for retiring, and respected them for making it an all-or-nothing decision: If one guy was ready to be done, they were all done. The way I saw it, they deserved it after giving the fans so much music for so many years. The word was that Neil was ready to spend more time writing — he had been the primary lyricist for the band throughout their career, and already had a few books to his name as it was.

The artists who produce your favorite songs become companions for you, communicating with you through the ideas and perspectives they’ve shared through their art, and the opportunities they’ve given you to interpret these ideas, either literally or through any number of degrees of metaphor. Sometimes you’ll find something buried in a song you can apply to your own life and beliefs, and sometimes, and just as importantly, you’ll find a soundtrack for the key events of your life, even elevating events from the mundane to significant by the addition of their music. Their songs become a language of shared experience with other fans; you only need to drop a song title like “Red Barchetta” for another Rush fan to know how that song affected you.

Now that I’m in the back half of middle age (at best), I’ve reached a time when the musical heroes of the generation ahead of me are becoming the ones we lose and miss. When I first heard that Neil Peart had died earlier this month, after a mostly private struggle with brain cancer, a shadow crossed my heart (to quote the man himself). I had not been as strongly affected by the loss of a musician I admire (I won’t say hero, knowing how Neil would have bristled at that term) since Freddie Mercury died in 1991. And I named my dog after that guy. 

The weekend after his passing, I watched “Beyond the Lighted Stage,” a documentary about the band that I’ve seen a double-digit number of times. The movie ends with a scene of Alex, Geddy, and Neil getting together for a “business meeting” at a nice restaurant in a private room, which amounted to little more than the three of them joking and laughing like the friends they were. When I think about losing Neil now, one of the first things I think of is how hard it has to be for those other two guys as they miss their longtime friend. 

The relationship the fans like me had with Neil was nothing like that, but it was just as real. Knowing that he’s gone now, that we’ve lost someone who worked so consistently hard to be as perfect as he could at what he did, leaves the world feeling a little less pure.