Recorded sometime in 1974, the earliest known moving pictures of the rock band Rush are set against a decidedly unglamorous backdrop: the auditorium of Laura Secord Secondary School in St. Catharines, Ontario. Two of the three musicians who take the stage do their best to look the part. Dressed in a black sweater plastered with big silver musical notes, the young Alex Lifeson looks like a timid version of the humble guitar hero he will become. As for Geddy Lee, he’s unmistakable; if the weird high voice isn’t a giveaway, the billowing precursor of the “prophetic robes” the group would adopt as standard stagewear for the rest of the ’70s surely is.
If the drummer seems strange, that’s because he’s not who you’d expect. Seen not long before he departed the band, John Rutsey is the longhair who thunders his way through a greasy, Zeppelinesque rocker typical of Rush’s first album. A few months later, Neil Peart, a Hamilton native who grew up in the St. Catharines area, would become the crucial final member of Can-rock’s holy trinity.
Captured in what turns out to be the only surviving footage of Rush’s paleolithic pre-Peart era, the Laura Secord gig was one of countless high school concerts the band played during its long rise up the rock ‘n’ roll ladder. “I’ve played a lot of Sadie Hawkins dances,” Geddy Lee remarks in a forthcoming documentary about the group. “We’ve probably bummed out a lot of people in their high school memories.”
But given the abundant and diverse tributes the band has received in recent years, it seems the majority of Rush-related memories must be considerably happier. Movie cameos, a hefty academic study, their very own episode of The Colbert Report — it’s all indicative of a mass veneration that has long eluded a group for whom multi-platinum sales and full arenas have done little to erase an underdog reputation. They may still be denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which fans have been demanding for years, but a greater understanding of Rush’s place in musical history — and in the lives of air drummers around the world — may finally be emerging.
The St. Catharines footage was discovered during research for the latest entry in this body of celebratory work, a new documentary by Toronto’s Banger Films. Creators Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, the team behind such hard-rocking docs as Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and Iron Maiden: Flight 666, began the project in 2007 and may release it as early as this spring. Tentatively titled Rush: The Documentary, it is the first in-depth film about the group and its history. Besides never-before-seen footage like the Laura Secord show and photographs culled from the members’ personal collections, the movie will include testimonials about Rush’s greatness from members of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, and others inspired by the band over the past four decades.
During that span, Rush has transformed itself several times over, from the Zep and Cream wannabes of their early days to the fantasy-spinning, Ayn Rand–referencing prog rockers of the 2112 era, to a skinny-tie-wearing, new wave–influenced power trio, to the modern-day kings of classic rock radio. While such stylistic shifts have cost other bands their audiences, most Rush fans grow ever more ardent. And now those devotees have the opportunity to express that loyalty in surprising ways, fostering a trend that may be best described by the tentative title for a chapter in the Banger Films doc: “Revenge of the Nerds.”
As filmmaker Sam Dunn notes, “The kids who grew up on Rush are now in positions where they are writing for magazines, they’re running record labels, they’re producing hit animation shows, they’re producers on The Colbert Report. It’s almost as if the fans who stuck with the band through this whole time are finally getting their moment where they’re kind of like, ‘We told you so!’ ”
Or, as Lee told me, “It just goes to show you that if you hang around long enough, strange things happen.”
Late last year, Indiana University Press published the first book-length academic study of the band and its music. Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class was written by Chris McDonald, an ethnomusicologist who teaches at Cape Breton University. (He also worked as a researcher for Banger Films after finishing his dissertation.)
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Rush Is A BandUsing interviews with fans he met through rushisaband.com, as well as his own analysis of lyrics and articles about the group, McDonald argues that Rush’s success is largely due to its embodiment of the values, aspirations, and anxieties of the middle class.
Rock music, McDonald suggests, has traditionally been about culturally trading up or down, about being anywhere but in the middle. The Stones are a perfect example: “They’re white middle-class kids trying to be like black working-class guys, at least musically,” he says. The typical route for the middle-class artist, he suggests, has been either to look to the underclass for musical direction or to become more avant-garde. “Rush did not do those things. They took hard rock, gentrified it, and left it that way. They didn’t become truly avant-garde in the acceptable sense. It really was a matter of these bookish middle-class kids doing this hard rock thing, being very reflective with it, making it virtuosic, and having this entrepreneurial, upward mobility aspect to their career. It’s a strange niche they chose.”
By espousing what McDonald terms “pro-active self-reliance,” Rush connected with middle-class kids much like themselves. The primary lyricist since he joined the band in 1974, Peart has used various means to articulate themes of individualism and perseverance, ranging from the mock-Tolkien medieval empowerment fantasies of “The Fountain of Lamneth,” to the direct language of “Subdivisions,” a 1982 radio hit that emboldened countless teens who worried that life in the suburbs was sapping their vital life force. As Lee sang, “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth / But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.”
