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On a warm April evening, the New Orleans Arena pulses with bong-infused cuts from the Seventies: Zeppelin's "Kashmir," Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick," Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" — the last a particularly apt choice for tonight's crowd. Under bright houselights, the 17,000-capacity venue is quickly filling with fans of the Canadian rock trio Rush — many resembling the two young men I find sitting 10 rows from the stage: brow-fringing hair, utilitarian glasses, sprouts of chin whisker. They look straight out of an '82 yearbook photo of the after-school D&D club — a suggestion neither finds insulting.
"We fully embrace that," says Sam, 21, an electrical-engineering student with a Ziggy Stardust tee and Harry Potter tattoo. "That's definitely our lifestyle, the whole nerd thing. We play video games and listen to Rush, we play video games about Rush. That's what we did all last night in preparation for this."
Do they read science-fiction and fantasy novels?
"Oh, yeah," says Brad, a darker presence in black hair and an Alice in Chains tee. "Lord of the Rings, Sword of Truth," says Sam.
Do they have girlfriends?
"Aw, that's fucked up!" says Brad.
"That's one stigma I'd like to change," says Sam. "But nothing could bother us right now."
The American-Nerd Age is nigh. Today, everyone from the bed-headed club promoter to the siliconed spokesmodel calls themselves a "nerd" because they play Sudoku or can operate an iPhone. But 34 years ago, when singer-bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart first emerged on the music scene, the n word had teeth. And if you were heavy into Rush — three skinny Canadians with a fixation for sprawling rock epics and Tolkien references — you had found your home.
"I've never thought of us as particularly cool," says Lifeson, now 54 but still in possession of much of his thick blond hair. Within Rush, Lifeson is known as "Lerxst" — a band in-joke from years ago, when the three members entertained themselves by inserting extra syllables and accents into proper nouns. But, "We were filling these places, and I noticed everybody knew all the lyrics, knew the drum fills and had that mentality like, 'This is my band. I found these guys,' " says Lifeson.
As a current tour attests, that connection remains firm. Music taste aside, the scope of Rush's achievement is undeniable — 18 studio albums, more than 35 million records sold worldwide, a legion of fans as loyal as Deadheads and the Kiss Army. Still, much of the world ranks Rush somewhere just north of the mullet. Their hypertrophic musicianship is mocked by critics, their lyrical pedantry spoofed by hipsters, their singer's voice a subject of churlish speculation, including a '97 Pavement song that asked, "What about the voice of Geddy Lee/How did it get so high?/I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy."
"Yeah, I heard that one," Lee says, like an ordinary guy. "I thought it was funny."
Tonight in New Orleans, there is no such snickering. As the clock approaches eight, smoke starts billowing from stage left. The crowd rumbles, then leaps to a roar as the arena goes black. The aroma of cannabis rises. Screens above the stage flicker to life. The heroes appear.
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What follows is difficult to describe. It involves hysteria. It involves tears. It involves air-drumming of a brio rarely witnessed — not just the standard cymbal-snare pantomime, mind you, but a dizzying recital of tom, bell, cymbal, wind chime, all in perfect sync with the onstage movements of Peart, Rush's drum god and lyricist. It's a kinetic genuflection, variations of it occurring all around me. To my right an unaccompanied woman in camp shorts raises a thumbs-up sign every eight bars. A few rows up, a man is air-drumming, guitaring and bass-playing simultaneously (a spectacle resembling full-contact hacky sack). From behind, a fortysomething man yanks my shoulder during a solo to yell, "That's an ES-355 guitar he's got there!" And for the next three hours, during songs about religion, suburbia, tidal pools and trees, most of this crowd will sing along with every word.
In a dim, soundproof rehearsal space on the shore of Lake Ontario, the men of Rush are in their last rehearsal before their tour. Each stands in a separate area surrounded by axes, pedals, knobs and modules. In the late Seventies, when Rush wanted to expand their sound without adding a fourth member, the band began multitasking with doublenecks, bass pedals, synths and other accoutrements. Today, the official Rush Website's gear list for each member is an array of Trace Elliot Quatra-VR power amps, SansAmp RPM bass preamps and Palmer PDI-05 speaker simulators. Here at the rehearsal space, such items are discreetly tucked away in cabinets that presumably house an Intergalactic Space Modulator and a Doctor WhoTARDIS.
In the center of the room stands a red and gold octagonal box that looks like an Oriental prop from a magic show: It's the rotating riser that bears the drum set of Neil Peart. There are rows of toms, snares, bells and whistles, all customized down to the experimental black-nickel drum-shell plating and developed with Peart as part of Sabian and Drum Workshop's R&D team. There are racks of Roland Brains, Glyph hard drives, MalletKat pedals — the triggers assigned not just to wood blocks and glockenspiels but guitars, keyboards, vocal effects and sound sequences from Rush's entire catalog. Since the early Eighties, Peart's growing percussion arsenal has included electronics. From the looks of it, it seems quite possible that Peart — who often displays total separation between his upper- and lower-limb patterns — could perform as Rush alone.
A ruddy 55-year-old with a Robert Mitchum-ish brow, Peart stands drinking bottled water, dressed head to toe in a ninjalike black suit topped by a black tam bearing the logo from Rush's 2007 album, Snakes and Arrows. One pant leg is cinched by a bicycle clip. His feet are in dancing shoes. "This is to absorb the sweat," Peart says of his outfit, his sonorous baritone recalling Harry Shearer's folk bassist in A Mighty Wind. The dancing shoes come from his study with jazz musician and drum guru Freddie Gruber in the mid-Nineties. "They're so you get the dance and glide on the pedals like you get on a dance floor."
[Excerpt from Issue 1056-1057 — July 10, 2008]
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