Last week I watched a documentary about the Canadian rock band Rush.
While I really like some of their songs, I’m not a Rush fan. I don’t follow their work, don’t own any of their albums, and couldn’t name half of their songs.
But after watching the documentary, I have monumental appreciation and respect for this musical trio: Geddy (bassist/vocalist/keyboard); Alex (guitarist); Neil (drums/lyrics).
Here’s why:
- They went against the grain of the typical rock band stereotype. When they toured with Kiss, for example, Gene Simmons remarked how shocked he was that the Rush guys didn’t indulge with them in their carnal decadence after the shows, but hung out in their rooms and watched television. Rush was all about the music.
- Each member was impeccable at their own instruments. They are often regarded as the most talented band man-for-man. The exception being Led Zeppelin and possibly The Who. To an accomplished musician, Rush’s music is incredibly sophisticated and complex.
- Neil Peart is regarded by many experts as perhaps the greatest rock drummer in history. He’s the band’s chief lyricist. Peart is super well-read and the lyrics of his songs reflect that. Even though he spent years honing his craft as a highly acclaimed drummer, later in his life he tutored under a more experienced drummer with a different style, and incorporated that style into his own. By this act, he showed the world that even “the best of the best” can learn new things from someone else. A testament to humility and growth.
- With the exception of Alex, the other two members were regarded as odd, strange, and unpopular to their high school classmates. But look at them now [cough].
- Whether one is a fan or not, the fact that only three musicians could create such rich and robust sounds together is remarkable.
The documentary was fascinating. It contained actual footage of Alex (the guitarist) when he was in his teens conversing over the dinner table with his parents. The topic of conversation? Alex wanting to drop out of high school to pursue his dream in music. His parents tried to talk him out of it. It’s the real thing, folks, not a dramatization.
Watching it was remarkable, knowing that despite his parents’ attempt to convince him to finish school, Alex later went on to become one of the most acclaimed guitarists in music history. And someone thought to film it back then!
What up wit dat?
Another thing that intrigued me was the friendship that these men have had over so many years. Alex and Geddy were buddies way back in Junior High School. Did you read that . . . Junior High!
How many best friends do you have from your Junior High days . . . people you spend time with on a consistent basis?
Today, they are still best friends, co-workers, band-mates, and performers.
Incredible.
But beyond all this, Rush is a band that’s been consistently marginalized and ignored by the voices of the rock music establishment. They’ve yet to be voted into the rock hall of fame. They’ve been consistently and unfairly criticized by the high-and-lofty pens of the rock critic establishment.
I’d be surprised if they ever made the cover of Rolling Stone. While they should have clearly been voted in the top 20, if not the top 10, of the greatest music artists of all time, they weren’t. They were ranked far behind.
While Rush has walked along the shores of the mainstream, they have been (and still are) a cutting-edge band that has never become part of the mainstream.
They were, as it were, “outsiders to the system.” Yet incredibly effective in that arena.
So despite their towering talent, multi-platinum and gold records (statistically, they come in third behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in consecutive gold and platinum album sales), their amazing cache of albums (20 studio albums) and hit tracks, they’ve never gotten the approval of the rock critics or the rock music establishment.
In short, I learned a lot by watching this documentary. At some points I was emotionally touched by their story. For me it wasn’t just a saga about a profoundly “under-rated” rock band that’s sustained themselves for 40 years, but about issues that go far deeper.
In closing, here is . . .
My favorite Rush song: Closer to the Heart
See also Lessons from Led Zeppelin
I love Rush, and enjoyed this post, and I am completely unconcerned that they don’t share my Christian beliefs.
I heard it said that belief is a poor substitute for experience. I agree. Who knows what these men have experienced in their heart?
Christ knows everyone’s heart.
A great band with a great history. If you are a music fan and love great stories with a deep human element, I recommend you read “Ghost Rider”. It is the story of drummer Neil Pearts journey of healing after the death of his daughter then within a year later, the death of his wife. Neil jumped on his motorcycle and traveled the roads of North America and Mexico in search of understanding and healing. Sort of a “running from pain” and “running to catch yourself” story. He is an unbelievable writer.
I’ve been a RUSH fan since my early years. In my book, Neil Peart is probably about as insightful as C.S. Lewis. They certainly are uniquely talented in their composition, character, and duration. Many would criticize their lyrics and themes as being humanistic and godless. Indeed, they are. They’re godless people expressing their godlessness. However, I would prefer listening to their thoughtful but godless music over some of the drivel expressed as “christian” music today.
As a bass player “Jacob’s Ladder” was my rehab after being in a truck accident after which I couldn’t play bass with my left hand.
The best thing that I like about Rush is that their music makes you think. Not the lyrics so much as the music itself. As a musician, I cannot “just listen” to Rush. I have to isolate the parts, dissect each and every riff, chorus and transition. There’s a lot to concentrate on and yet, the whole big picture comes together on each song.
Best thing about the band in my opinion? Definitely, the asymmetrical meter. Keeps me on my toes!!!
Great post. I was reading through Pagan Christianity and came across this blog entry.
I’ve been a RUSH fan for decades. I showed one of my English professors the lyrics on one of their album jackets. The class was on poetry.
One of my favorite song from RUSH is Losing It. It is one of the few (only?) times the band used an outside musician on a recording. In this case it was a violinist. The violin solo still sends shivers up my spine.
“Losing It”
The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspiration
Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire
With just the briefest pause
The flooding through her memory
The echoes of old applause
She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door
The writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more…
Some are born to move the world
To live there fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be
Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee
The bell tolls for thee..
The song is on YouTube if you want to give it a listen.
Mr. Viola, I am really enjoying Pagan Christianity. It is well written and thoroughly researched. It is a subject that has been dear to my heart since my mother read parts of Foxes Book of Martyrs and The Two Babylons to her young children.
Thanks, Frank. I’ll send one out as soon as I return from Africa next week. : )
Mark: send it to the contact address at http://www.ptmin.org
Great story. Rush are not alone in this, great band though they are.
Consider a British band called Marillion. They were big in the mid-80s – you may remember a song called Kayleigh. But the press dismissed them – much as they did Rush – as prog-rock dinosaurs, and when their original lead singer walked out, it looked to everyone else as if it would be all over.
It wasn’t. It still isn’t.
This is a band that embraced the Internet before there was HTTP. They changed the nature of the relationship between fans and band: to belong to the Web (the Marillion fan club) was to be part of the band’s extended family, not the recipient of a few dodgy photocopied pictures three times a year. This is a band that went to its fans and said: We want to record an album – please will you pre-order it now to fund the recording sessions? – and 12,000 fans did, and 12000 names were duly credited when the album appeared. This is a band whose fans paid for its publicity, and got its singles into the UK Top 20 when the major radio stations were refusing to play them.
If that doesn’t say something about what a determined, focussed community can do – and shame a lot of churches into raising their game – nothing does.
Oh, and by the way – Grace under Pressure – great, great album.
James
Frank,
Great post. Love hearing about other Christ-followers’ take on media and those in it (especially music).
I enjoy Rush (personal fav. is FreeWill), and put value on their thoughtful, heartfelt– albeit unconventional–lyrics and it is good to see some of that echoed here.
So, what documentary? Where is it located? I’d like to see it.
“Thanks Just: We aren’t sure how/when we will release the rest of the series. Perhaps if the demand is great enough, we’ll do that. But thanks for your feedback.”
Piping up with another request, then. I let my mom borrow the CD and by this afternoon she called asking if you had the other nine out. 🙂 I told her I had asked on the blog and she just called again, asking me if you answered. lolol. I think she really wants them, too.
great post. yea, I think there’s a music establishment and a Christian establishment. I don’t think the Christian establishment ever captures the best and most important.
by the way some of my favorite classic RUSH songs:
La Villa Stragtiato
Natural Science
Countdown
The Trees
wow! Frank Viola is commenting on my favorite band! While I enjoy listening to many genres of music, RUSH is definitely the only one band that I can listen to anything they have made and enjoy. Since going to their Signals tour in Atlanta, GA back in 1982 (?) I was hooked. Watching them perform “Countdown” was amazing (although most don’t care for the song). (The song is about the first space shuttle launch.) Neil has a real grasp of human nature and is amazing how much stamina he has had to deal with due to the loss of his wife and daughter in such tragic circumstances. His ability to write lyrics that have such emotional and intellectual depth is amazing. Geddy’s and Alex’s friendship is so unheard of. Their ability to write and play music so complex and yet so mixed with emotional energy is crazy! The documentary was nothing but outstanding (short of some of the language, lol).
There was another video interview done with Geddy and Alex in Canada (I think) and they were asked what they thought of the documentary. Geddy made an astute observation: the power of friendship.
How as unbelievers these three men and their families could have such friendship to care enough for each other and the freedom to allow each other to pursue their individual styles within the band, even though they disagreed, and still stay together is short of a miracle! I believe they did so because they knew it made them stronger. What an indictment to institutional Christianity
To see how people can actually have that kind of care yet not acknowledge Christ is the wonder of the human soul. Some things every church could learn from: freedom to share with each other and have fun, each an equal contributor and participant, caring enough to listen, and a focus on the main thing (for church the headship of Christ).
They have some great songs planned for the next album, one of them is Brought Up To Believe and seems to be a move of Neil’s heart toward acknowledging a God, in the face of his previous lyrics of Freewill and Faithless, but I pray for him and Geddy and Alex that they might receive Christ Jesus as Lord.
Me and the family will be at our next RUSH concert this Saturday here in Houston (with ear plugs on, lol). The Time Machine Tour is supposedly their best yet, even after some 4o years. Amazing!
I’ve been a prog rock fan ever since I first caught bands like Rush, and Kansas on the radio. The fact that such groups have never gotten the respect they deserve has always been a source of frustration. I don’t have much time for critics who take a snobbish attitude toward complex music. What’s with that? At any rate thanks for the great post. I’ll have to check out the documentary sometime.
Thanks for posting, Mark. How did you hear about this blog?
Hi Frank, I have a question. Just listened to the CD that came with your shipment of JESUS MANIFESTO and was wondering if you were going to be providing the other nine lessons that you had given? The CD itself? Amazing, awesome, paradigm shifting.
Thanks Just: We aren’t sure how/when we will release the rest of the series. Perhaps if the demand is great enough, we’ll do that. But thanks for your feedback.
I’ve been a Rush fan since before I became a Christian and I’ve struggled about the band’s place in my life over the years but they are still there for a number of reasons.
Seeing this documentary only bolstered my interest in this band along many of the lines you mentioned.
I learned in this film their career was teetering toward the end not long after it got started. Then, they wrote “2112,” which put them on the map and forever slammed the door in the faces of record execs who begged for hits.
Twenty-one years later, they entered another dark period in the wake of the losses Neil Peart sustained through the deaths of his daughter and first wife. His band-mates gave him the space he needed to recover. They pulled it back together in 2002 and are now in a phase of their careers which can only be described as amazing.
Their professionalism, resilience, prowess and artistic integrity are unmatched in recorded popular music.
I hope to see them again for the ninth time over 27 years, this time in Houston.
These men who profess no allegiance to Christ can teach us many things about the church, including its perceived arrogance and exclusivity. Peart says in the 2007 song “Faithless:” “And all the preaching voices; Empty vessels ring so loud; As they move among the crowd; Fools and thieves are well disguised; In the temple and market place.”
It is my hope that sometime in their lives, these men and their legion of fans will discover the authentic church, its genuine object of faith – Christ Jesus – and ignore the hollow husk of religion.
“What lessons or analogies can you draw from the Rush story to contemporary Christianity?”
Um, how shallow it is…
Frank,
Believe it or not, I once booked Rush into my high school when John Rutsey was still the drummer. (It was a double feature – with a band that did Beatles’ covers – I preferred them.) Even though I’m a proud Torontian, I was never much of a Rush fan – until I bought the Rush documentary on iTunes.
My eldest son, Liam and I watched it together about a month ago and we were both impressed with the story-telling by the documentary producers and the story itself. And there were a number of moments that brought tears to our eyes. (Those three are real Canadians, eh!)
The power of sustained friendship through rejection, trials, success, failure, success again along with tragedy has much to say to the too often ego-driven church in the West – where “my ministry” is more important than those around me.
Great post. And to those who don’t like Rush, watch the documentary anyway. There’s lots to be learned in it.
Bill. That’s an AMAZING story.
I agree — the documentary hits you at an emotional level. And I’m not even Canadian! 😉 I was struck by how much “class” those 3 guys have, even amid the way they have been unfairly marginalized. They just stayed on course and put their energies into their passion, not looking to the left or the right.
You’re so right, many lessons to be learned. I’ll have to re-watch it again in a year or so.
Thanks so much for contributing here, bro.
“Rush didn’t indulge with them in their carnal decadence after the shows, but hung out in their rooms and watched television. ”
Ah?? So they did then…
I’ve been a Rush fan for many years, dating back to my teenage years. They are one of the best of all times. I would like to see this documentary.
I can see a strong correlation between this story and the one I see playing out with our attempt at organic mission. There is a great resistance with my brothers in the institutional church to ignore this movement of God, even though I am finding out more and more people who believe it is the best way.
Much like Rush, there is no agenda. We just “love the music.” We just want to be Jesus, allow him to be the head, and let come what He wills not us.
The machine of rock and roll will likely never see Rush as a top ten group, as the machine of the institutional church will likely never see us as anything but a fad.
God bless us all as we seek Him.
By the way, my favorite Rush song: Tom Sawyer.
Great Article…I saw the same Documentary….talk about endurance…Neal’s hanging in after what he went through….not giving up…following the course.. Good Article Brother…..
“Rush was all about the music.”
I think this is what sets the great artists apart from the simply “popular” artists.
The same goes for any vocation. As an author, I’ve gotten to know many writers over the years. Some live and breathe the written word, books and writing. Others consider it more of a job. While this may not indicate their popularity either way, there is something SO inspiring about those who LOVE writing.
Same for music or anything else. If I struggle with anything, it’s probably having too many interests. Many of us do. This causes us to be divided and “pretty good” at a lot of things rather than “really great” at one thing. I frequently try to quiz myself on my priorities and interests–bringing my compass back to what I love.
I’ll be going to my 70th Rush show next week so yes, I’m a bit of a fan! That documentary was indeed amazing.
Geddy has openly spoken about being an atheist which is disappointing to me. Neil is pretty much an agnostic and Alex is relatively silent about his faith.
I do love their music and and pray that they come to know Christ in time.
Thanks for the post….two of my favorite things coming together in this forum really made my day!
Thanks Steven. Btw/ the question at the end is the whole point of the post.
Excellent post. I think too many christian authors sell out to be noticed and accepted by the mainstream. I applaud the few who haven’t and have written what they believe despite the controversy it may cause.
Liked your comment about Rolling Stone being the voice of the establishment in music. Is Christianity Today and Leadership the voices of establishment Christianity? If not, then which magazines are?
Another great post Frank. I’ve just caught on to the fact that you always put a question at the end of your posts in blue. Nice touch. I almost missed the question after listening to the songs.
to your question, I think there are some christian leaders who are like this band. They haven’t sold out to the mainstream so the mainstream establishment keeps them at arms length, but they are making a big impact on the body regardless. It’s about being true to yourself and to God. Never compromise.
Q. What other rock band can use the word “unobtrusive” and still rock?
A. None.
I love Rush. Ever since I was a kid and the garage band next door used to cover their songs.
When you know what you are, nothing can knock you off that path. I can do that now, that I’m heading into my 40s, but to fiercely cling to it when they were in junior high is amazing. And good art is always underrated by the established taste makers.
I have friends from early HS that I still hang with (at the kitchen table last night for 2 hours hashing out who our God is NOW as opposed to when we were in our 20s), and my husband has friends from grammar school-they are the best of friends. Such a loyalty to that friendship-it’s a beautiful thing.
Frank, great post. I guess I’m a self-admitted Rush listener. While some of their secular-humanistic themes have not been without controversy, (even more so, their “star” logo) they are refreshingly positive, “clean”, and as you said probably some of those most collectively and individually talented musicians in recent history. I’ve always appreciated their well-written lyrics, many times influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand. (Closer to the Heart, The Trees, etc.)
Neil has been through a lot of tragedy, the types of loss that I do not know how one “survives” without Christ as our hope. Yet, he presses forward in life.
Thanks for your reflections!
Closer to the Heart…of Christ, -SMK-