I was crammed into the back seat of Robert’s Dodge Charger, alongside a few candy wrappers and any number of cassette tapes, when my friend Nic, in the passenger seat up front, popped a tape in the deck.
A voice came wailing out—a man? woman?—over the top of most complex drumming I’d ever heard, mixed with some crazy electric guitar. It was hard rock, but also… melodious?
The two of them were nodding along and air drumming, which they could do with some semblance of realism, seeing as how we were all part of the drumline together in the AHS Colt Marching Band.
“Who is this?” I asked, befuddled.
“You’ve never heard RUSH?” they both asked, almost in unison. “And The Greatest Drum God of All Time?”
And so began my Rush education.
I thought of that moment this week as I plowed through the autobiography of Rush’s bassist, vocalist, and keyboardist, Geddy Lee. And I was thinking how funny it was that I’d read autobiographies of not one, but two of their band members. (A decade ago, I’d found my own feelings about the death of my husband reflected in drummer Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, a memoir of his grief after losing his wife and daughter.)
Now I’ve read memoirs from 2/3 of the members of Rush, and that makes me seem almost like… a fan.
That’s what’s so unexpected and funny and weird to me, because my musical tastes, if displayed in visual form, would look something like a ransom note: individual letters cut from old magazines, nothing organized, nothing that makes sense.
Though my parents are both music lovers, most the music in our house we made ourselves: mom playing the piano, or us singing hymns in four-part harmony, something my dad required of us every night before bed. It was annoying at the time, and, like most musical education foisted upon children, something I appreciated only later.
The stack of records around our old turntable included such sought-after albums as:
- Hooked on Classics, a weird mash-up of classical tunes and disco
- The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Greatest Hits
- Sing Along with Mitch, by Mitch Miller and the Gang
- Greatest Hits of 1790 (it was Beethoven’s year, man)
- and Smurfing Sing Song
When it came to popular music, I was on my own, and consequently my internal timeline of music from the 60s to the 90s is a jumbled mess. Unless I knew a song was “old,” I would think of it as being contemporary to the time I first heard it.
When I went back to school years later, I missed an extra credit question on an organic chemistry test because of it.
“You’re a mad scientist in the 80s experimenting with your new manometer. What song do you have on repeat?”
Manometers measure pressure. The answer, clearly, is “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie, but I hesitated because of the date. I didn’t remember hearing that song in the 80s; it only showed up in my mind in the 90s, so instead I wrote “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” thinking of the exploding popcorn house at the end of the classic Val Kilmer flick Real Genius.
I still got the bonus point, but it irked me that I hadn’t put the “right” answer, especially since I love that song!
I didn’t really know much about either Queen or David Bowie, though, because pre-Internet, my popular music knowledge came from the radio or album liner notes. Rolling Stone and MTV might have shed a little more light, but we didn’t have either in our house. As a result, I rarely knew anything about the bands behind the music, and to this day I’ll find myself surprised that Band X wrote that song too.
My Rush fandom, then, was a bit of a fluke of place and time.
The drumline were arguably the coolest kids in the marching band (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one), and I’d fallen in with them not because of my drumming prowess, but because my parents had made the choice to start me with oboe lessons in the 4th grade.1
Oboes don’t march in the marching band. We double reed players found ourselves thrown into “the Pit,” the assortment of keyboard percussion instruments on the sidelines, and thus members of the drumline.
Hanging around the drumline meant listening to what the drumline listened to, and liking what the drumline liked. And they very, very much liked Rush, because they very, very much worshipped Neil Peart, the aforementioned Greatest Drum God of All Time.
Little musically naïve me suddenly found myself, for the first time ever, owning multiple albums by one band, knowing the names of everyone in that band, and even knowing a bit of trivia about the band itself. At first it wasn’t so much a devotion to the music on my part as it was a desire to fit in with the guys, but the end result was the same: I was a Rush fan.
When I went off to college, this little oddity had an amusing side effect on multiple occasions. I’d be chatting with a random guy, and if I let slip that I liked Rush, his interest in me would careen from casual to potential soulmate in about a nanosecond. The downside was that this only worked on especially nerdy guys, who wore large glasses and had bad haircuts and wore wolf moon t-shirts and read science fiction and studied engineering.2
My cassettes are long gone, but I’ve been listening to those old albums online this week and am not surprised to find they hold up. In high school, I could appreciate the drumming prowess (obviously), the complex time signatures, the key changes, and the poetic and literate lyrics.
Now that I’ve learned a wee bit of guitar, I’m listening to Alex Lifeson’s solos in a whole new light, and hearing the interplay between the percussion and bass, which Geddy Lee is managing to shred while singing at the same time (a feat I’ve yet to master).
Could it be that the Greatest Drum God of All Time shared a band with the Greatest Bass God of All Time and the Greatest Guitar God of All Time?
I’ll leave that to others to argue, but suffice it to say, those guys could rock. And I might just be a fan.
- WHY OBOE?! I asked them recently. They had no idea. I never loved it, but thanks to my experience in the Pit, I would eventually become a fairly decent marimba player, enough so that I very briefly considered pursuing a career as a symphony musician. The oboe business wasn’t all for naught.
- All of whom probably grew up to be hot and wealthy (while continuing to be nice and absurdly smart), but when you’re 18, you just can’t see it.
