“When the record company heard it, they thought they were screwed,” Dunn says. Yet the elaborate narrative in the suite that comprised side one (loosely based on Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem) and the band’s increasing musical dexterity captured the imagination of Rush’s growing following. For so strong a declaration of artistic autonomy to be greeted with such enthusiasm essentially meant the group never had to deal with anyone telling them what to do again. Says Dunn, “That set them up for the rest of their lives. They realized, ‘We have a fan base that’s loyal and open to our experimentation, and we can do what we want.’ ”
But recent years have tested that loyalty in surprising new ways. For fans, few sights were stranger than seeing Rush in a Hollywood movie. But there they were, performing onscreen in I Love You, Man, the 2009 comedy in which the friendship between characters played by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel intensifies when the duo discovers their mutual love of the band. Neil Peart appeared as himself in 2008’s Adventures of Power, an American indie comedy about an air-drumming Rush fanatic, and in cartoon form in the 2007 big-screen version of the animated series Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Not to be outdone, Alex Lifeson performed roles in both Trailer Park Boys movies, as well as the classic TV episode in which Ricky kidnaps him and mistakenly orders him to play “Diane Sawyer.”
Then there’s their appearance on The Colbert Report in July 2008, when they were touring to promote their most recent album, Snakes and Arrows. The trio looked on as host Stephen Colbert read the lyrics of “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” off his teleprompter and pretended to bed down while the band played an apparently interminable version of “Tom Sawyer.”
Geddy Lee says that some of these very public tributes have polarized the faithful. “Some fans love that we’re suddenly getting mainstream attention,” he says. “Others don’t. They like that we were their private Idaho.”
Apparently, certain fans felt that he and Peart attending the premiere of I Love You, Man “was not a Rush thing to do.” The Colbert Report appearance provoked a similar reaction. “Some fans loved it, and some were upset that Stephen interrupted our performance with comedy,” says Lee. “We were putting on this joke where we’re playing this song that’s so long it really can’t fit on a thirty-minute show. It was us who suggested, ‘Why don’t you just interrupt us and do some shtick?’ A lot of fans got the joke and thought it was great, and some were upset that he dared to besmirch the song with his interruption. It was blasphemous behaviour, let’s face it!”
The band members have developed the habit of blaspheming themselves, the seriousness they exuded in the ’70s having eroded to the point where they now include rotisserie chicken ovens in their onstage gear. (Lee has claimed they give him “a hotter and tastier sound.”) Yet Lee suggests that many fans may have less of a sense of humour about Rush than its members do.
“That’s easier for us,” he says. “Some of these fans, they’ve found something in our music that has given them some sort of positive reinforcement or comfort. And that’s a serious thing in their lives, so to make it into a joke belittles what they’ve gotten out of it, in their view. I understand that; it’s completely in the eye of the beholder.”
Nowhere is that fan base more communal than at Rush Con, an annual gathering held in Toronto since 2001. Conference activities include pilgrimages to Queen’s Park (the location for the cover photo of 1981’s Moving Pictures) and Lakeside Park (which lends its name to a track on Caress of Steel ), as well as Rush trivia contests and concerts by tribute acts such as Limelight, of Brewster, New York.
Rush Con executive director Judy Staley discovered the group as a twelve-year-old, after being confused and captivated by the stop-start intro to “2112” as performed by a neighbour’s garage band. Now every time a new Rush album comes out, she and a friend celebrate by spending a day in the backyard, working through a case of beer and a pack of cigars while dissecting every track. “We sit there and analyze it,” she says. “It becomes a bonding thing.”
According to Staley, most fans value the band’s integrity above all other qualities. “You might think, ‘Oh, Neil’s a great drummer,’ or ‘Geddy’s a fantastic bass player,’ and that’s all important, but the bottom line is they’ve stuck to what they believe in,” she says.
She floats an analogy that equates the band with a well-loved restaurant: “It may not be the trendiest new thing on the block, but it’s been there for thirty-five years, and that place is full every night. And you know what you’re going to get, and you know that they only buy top-quality ingredients and that they spend a lot of time on their menu and make sure it’s exactly right. All of that boils down to the integrity of the people involved.”
Sam Dunn would likely agree with this tasty metaphor. “One thing I found fascinating about Rush,” he says, “is that fans are into them not just because of the music they create; they represent something that has integrity and authenticity.”
Which jibes with McDonald’s argument about how Rush’s work has served as a reflection and validation of a certain middle-class ethos. “My suburban colleagues would listen to stuff like Mötley Crüe, not because that was the lifestyle they led or the values they had, but because it was so opposite to what they were,” he notes. “Rush was being honest about who they were and, ultimately, who I was.”
Needless to say, the highly nuanced portrait of Rush that emerges from the pages of Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class can seem very different from the band’s incarnation as bemused straight men to Stephen Colbert. Yet this latest era in the group’s history may be defined by the proliferation of Rush representations. For Geddy Lee, it feels as if there’s the version of the band that belongs to others, and then the version that is relevant to him and his creative partners.
“We have so many different fans from so many different walks of life, and their music means something slightly different to each of them,” he says. “They have a common ground among them on what they like about our music. That’s amazing to me, and it’s wonderful; it’s enabled us to keep going, their support. But if we were to compare notes between a fan’s vision of what we are and my own vision or Alex’s vision or Neil’s, they’d probably be quite different.”
