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Canadian trio Rush refuses to give up

Aidin Vaziri,
Special to The Chronicle

Friday, July 9,
2004

It is not by any means clear how Rush has lasted this long.
The Canadian prog-rock trio, which celebrates the 30th
anniversary of its first release with a pair of Bay Area shows
this week, has done just about everything wrong.

Its early album covers were impaired with paintings of
mutant owls and Salvador Dali knockoffs. Bassist and vocalist
Geddy Lee sang in a high register that suggested that he had a
badger attached to his testicles.

And then there were the songs -- horrendous little things
like "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" and the six-part, 20-minute
"The Fountain of Lamneth" -- sci-fi epics so far out even Pink
Floyd would have found them too preposterous.

If nothing else, wasn't the mere fact that they were a
Canadian prog-rock trio enough? That should have put the
brakes on their career within the first three minutes.

Even Lee -- whose speaking voice, incidentally, is
pleasantly smooth --

is a little amazed the band made it this far. "When I
listen to those records now, there are moments I love and
moments where I go, 'What the hell were we thinking?' " he
says. "You can almost smell the hash oil coming off them."

Yet while old peers like Styx and Asia have resigned
themselves to playing between pig races and hot-dog-eating
contests at county fairs, Rush is still able to pack major
sheds.

It's all the more baffling because Lee, drummer Neil Peart
and guitarist Alex Lifeson, who later came up with respectable
FM rock staples like "Tom Sawyer" and "New World Man," never
actually delivered a huge crossover hit like "Come Sail Away."
They didn't even have a "Mr. Roboto."

"Maybe that's part of the key to our success," Lee reasons.
"We never ran the risk of overexposure."

That's an understatement. Most of the critics hated Rush.
And the ones that didn't simply ignored the band. Rolling
Stone didn't review any of their albums until 1982, when it
finally offered a measly two out of five stars for "Signals,"
calling it a "wasted effort."

Lee says he and the other members just took the punches and
kept moving. "When you're young, you feed off of that stuff
and it kind of stokes your fire, " he says. "And if you stick
around long enough, you get enough positive criticism that
offsets whatever negative criticism."

The band's last studio effort, 2002's "Vapor Trails,"
earned a whole three stars from the rock bible.

But it's this stubborn determination -- the band has
released 17 studio albums, four live discs and a handful of
compilations -- that has earned Rush the kind of class-A
obsessive lunatic fans that other bands dream about. Although
chances are that fantasy wouldn't include a following made up
mostly of grown men who are in love with comic books and video
games.

But Lee says even that is changing. "A couple nights ago,
there were girls in the front playing air drums and singing
all the words," he insists.

It seems unlikely that Aerosmith's Steven Tyler would have
to stop the conversation to make the same claim.

This is the first time Rush has officially acknowledged an
anniversary. Its 25th was undermined by tragedy.

In 1997, shortly after completing a tour supporting the
disc "Test for Echo," Peart lost his 19-year-old daughter,
Selena, in a car accident. Less than a year later, his wife,
Jackie, died of cancer.

The band stayed off the road for six years.

"It was just awful," Lee says. "I don't know how you get
through that, but you do get through it. You just put one foot
in front of the other and try to carry on with your life."

The experience took so much out of the members of Rush that
their latest project, "Feedback," sees them regressing to the
very beginning -- even before the high-minded heavy metal
tendencies sank in -- with stripped-down covers of eight
classic rock tracks by the likes of the Yardbirds, Buffalo
Springfield and Love.

"It feels like we're wiping the slate clean," Lee says. "It
was a good reminder to not overthink things. Sometimes our
worst enemy is not just our intellect but our neurosis."

They were bound to get it eventually.

Rush plays at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Shoreline Amphitheatre,
Mountain View. $36.50-$83.50. The band also plays at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday at Chronicle Pavilion, 2000 Kirker Pass Road,
Concord. $29-$79. (415) 421-8457, http://www.ticketmaster.com/.

Page E - 9

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