Rush: Classic or Dud?

xpost Now, see, I think you're an outlier! Just as some still connect Rush to Rand based on that one aspect of that one album, I think Rush for a lot of people means Geddy's early years screech (similarly c. "2112"). But every aspect of the band mellows out after the '70s without, imo, a drop in quality. Just a shift.

Yeah, I tried listening to Counterparts, but the layered Geddy harmonies were an insurmountable hurdle. Which is too bad, because I kinda liked what I heard otherwise.

i really don't see how they are the most hated band ever

listened to Clockwork Angels again yesterday, like it even more now than when it came out

however - can ANYONE understand how those songs fit into the "story"...even by loose concept album standards, idgi

tbh, sheffield's thing seems a bit dated to Gen X...i think ppl of our generation there was still more a reaction against some aspects of classic rock (look at almost any early part of a classic rock thread on ILM for example)...because of what i do, i work with lots of ppl 10 yrs younger than me (or younger) and i feel like they just LIKE classic rock, even if it's not what they listen to all the time, they respect it just as "quality music" and like the big hits and the song from Guitar Hero and Rock Band...so I think he's describing stuff that doesn't exist anymore...

if you asked a lot of them what "shit music" was it would be Skrillex probably or like Creed or ICP or something

Yeah, Gen X rebelled against classic rock by, um, listening to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

Is it self-parody if I wish Clockwork Angels broke out of 4/4 a little more?

Yeah, Gen X rebelled against classic rock by, um, listening to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Friday, August 9, 2013 11:24 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i know it was dumb but again read all the classic rock threads on ILM, there was a certain mentality

My embarrassing story of 'how I got into Rush' was having to sing Limelight on Rockband and going 'wow this song is really awesome' and then I wanted to listen to them all the time.

I had always liked 2112/the Temples of Syrinx song but none of their songs had ever really drew me in.

Honestly? I think part of it is the weird timing changes in the songs made me have towork a bit harder to like them and I wasn't ever really patient enough to try til I was older.

M@tt: no, I totally remember.

i think the change is maybe due to the fact that it's not your parent's music, it's your grandparent's music....not necessarily something to rebel against, just a part of the cultural landscape, a relic of a time when things were cooler than they are now

trying to picture my grandma listening to Rush. failing.

Haha all I can think of is Geddy's mom in "Beyond the Lighted Stage" saying "It wasn't my kind of music...Perry Como was my kind of music"

Yeah, my second cousin who was 15 for Moving Pictures and played Rush and Police covers in high school just had his first kid a couple of years ago. Mark S's theory that rock movements are about rebelling against your older brother as opposed to your parents is probably OTM.

I think it is true that younger generations who didn't read alternative music mags from late 70s to the 90s go in for classic rock easier.

Johnny Marr hates Rush and it makes me like him slightly less.

doesn't he like the Jam or some shit

I doubt Johnny Marr has given Rush enough thought to provide a valuable opinion. My guess would be he, like many, use Rush as a sort of dismissive shorthand while what they probably mean to vocally "hate" is Yes.

one of the big revelations of the news Smiths book was that Johnny Marr was a huge Tom Petty fan

i actually don't totally see Rush as a "prog band" proper

I don't consider Rush a prog band at all. No more than Zeppelin, really.

Or the Police.

i guess hemispheres is as close as they got to prog proper....but yeah an expansive musically adventerous hard rock band IMO

Rush isn't a prog band? You should tell that to all the prog fans who feel otherwise. Or to the band itself who have had no problem self-identifying as a progressive act.

But I do know what you mean. I hate prog music for the most part, but I adore Rush. And a couple other bands on the spectrum - Yes comes to mind as does Primus. But that's because those bands all had something quite elusive in prog: Songs.

Although one of my favorite Rush songs is "Working Man" which always made me feel that Rush put songcraft ahead of wankery. Literally in that case, but also figuratively later on.

That Geddy Lee quote is the band (or Lee) explicitly saying he doesn't consider Rush prog, at least not how people use the term. "Our roots are in hard rock more than they are in ELP or something like that." He considers the band generically "progressive," which is to say, interesting, changing, ambitious etc. I mean, sure, some people consider the band prog. Radiohead, too. And Pink Floyd. And a bunch of other acts. But while there are always exceptions, I think of prog as the likes of Yes, Genesis, ELP, et al., bands with chops pegged to neo-classical pretensions. Not judging, but Rush only flirted with that for a bit in the '70s, then moved on (like King Crimson, post hiatus) to new wave and stuff in a more I feel natural evolution than Yes, Genesis and ELP (well, Asia) managed. Rush in the '80s was obviously massively influenced by the Police. "Owner of a Lonely Heart" might sound like the Police, but it was a more cynically commercial move.

(I say this as a huge fan of Genesis and, well, "Owner of a Lonely Heart." Don't like ELP and its offshoots).

They were an anomaly of sorts: a band that became hugely popular in the late 70s playing music that was equally influenced by early 70s hard rock and early 70s prog. They were coming from a different place than English hippies were five years earlier but we don't need to pretend like they weren't doing rock operas with overtures.

Xpost

Rush isn't a prog band? You should tell that to all the prog fans who feel otherwise. Or to the band itself who have had no problem self-identifying as a progressive act.

i really don't care what prog fans think about anything

but yeah josh basically pegs it, they are fundamentally different than most of the UK prog bands

also - rush - to my knowledge never really jammed and did extended explorations on their songs in concert, times i've seen them have been super faithful renditions

they have prog elements, but musically they feel cut from a way different cloth than prog proper

i also don't think pink floyd - despite doing stuff like dark side and meddle and the wall - is a prog band in the true sense, though i see them referred to as such

That's true of many prog bands, too, who were often big on the compositions per se.

Xpost yeah, I agree, M@tt. Just think it's overstating things to say they were no more prog than the Police.

I think of everything from Fly By Night up to Hemispheres as their prog era. They always said Yes and Genesis were big influences at that point.

xpost Which is ironic, given the Police has actual bona fide prog roots!

Yes/Genesis never really jammed live either though, just basically duplicated all their studio solos note-for-note, didn't they?

xxxpost

Yeah, I dunno if jamming is a tenet of pro. Neo-classical pretensions traditionally is, though. But where others were aping classical composers, Rush was referencing cartoon music and weird middle eastern scales.

I was trying to find footage or clips of Andy Summers in Soft Machine, but here's Stewart in Curved Air!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8BJoKNLSG8

prog is essentially meaningless but imo if a band does enough material with the kind of song lengths, and non-standard song structures and time signatures as Rush has, it's at least moderately useful as a default definition. there's not really any point in fighting it.

Speaking of cartoon music/"Powerhouse," shouldn't the credits on "La Villa" include Raymond Scott, seeing as how that's about 1/3rd of the song?

some dude but you could argue they were a hard rock band at the beginning then basically a new wave/hard rock band by the end of the 70s and basically stayed as such for awhile, then gradually returned a bit to proggier elements but i still say they are an odd duck in rock history not prog

xpost Nah, it's just a few measures. I don't think the band needs to credit Tchaikovsky on the "2112" overture, either.

they're hardly the only band that did complex epics in the '70s and then something more streamlined in the '80s though. should we say Genesis are categorically not prog because of Invisible Touch?

I mean, quoting Tchaikovsky in the OVERTURE to a multi-movement work seems like a blatant allusion to art music to me, especially when I really think they were trying to use the overture to introduce the thematic material in the rest of the work. Are there more obvious classical allusions in "Supper's Ready"?

Not saying this proves anything per se but Geddy Lee includes Yes, Tull, Floyd, and Genesis amongst his favourite albums of all time fwiw: http://thequietus.com/articles/09210-rush-geddy-lee-interview-favourite-albums?page=14

Btw, I know that guys in the Police used to play in prog bands but I still think the Police's own music was more traditionally pop in its song forms, compared to what Rush was doing in the late 70s. (I don't consider Journey a Latin rock band either.)

Oh for sure Rush had its '70s prog apex. No argument there. It's just reductive to call them a prog band as the term usually connotes.

The Police famously dumbed down its prog chops to get a piece of the punk pie. Rush, I think importantly, never dumbed itself down a la, again, Yes or Asia or Genesis. Rush just got more efficient at what it did, but nobody would consider their '80s stuff pandering or catering to the radio like those other bands. If anything, the '80s stuff is even busier and more adventurous than a lot of the '70s stuff, oddly enough. The band just became so good at what it does that the transition/evolution was largely seamless. No awkward growing pains record in the Rush catalog, I don't think, let alone even a single standalone AOR sop they're embarrassed about or have disowned.

My instincts were telling me not to click on the Sheffield link but apparently I hate myself.

they got constant airplay, way out of proportion to their actual record sales.

This is blatantly false, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_discography

xpost

nobody would consider their '80s stuff pandering or catering to the radio like those other bands

I think many people do. I don't know if I'd exactly say they were intentionally pandering but I do find them less interesting in the mid- to late 80s, for the most part, sometimes considerably so.

Like, Hold Your Fire was by the same guys who did A Farewell to Kings?

xpost Nah, it's just a few measures. I don't think the band needs to credit Tchaikovsky on the "2112" overture, either.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, August 9, 2013 6:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, yeah, I suppose. But I don't think "Powerhouse" was public domain in 1978 (not that the money would've necessarily gone to Scott's estate).

Considering Paul's Boutique was way after 1978, I doubt a polite nod to Raymond Scott was a big issue at the time.

Funny that people are even discussing whether or not Rush is prog. I'd say they clearly are in the larger sense of the word--same way the Beatles were progressive. Constant reinvention is progressive by nature. If you're attempting to put Rush in a genre less broad than "rock" you're going to fail because they are simply bigger than any term you can come up with.

They are #3 to the Beatles and Rolling Stones now in the most consecutive gold and platinum records by any artist. They recently bumped Kiss and Aerosmith behind them. If they keep it up, they'll be #1 of all time. Not that they have anything left to prove.

I'm not a big fan of the 80s stuff, but this last tour was fantastic. They can take their most banal era and breath immortal life into it on stage. Plenty of people blindly "hate" them, but that's all lazy ignorance. Just watch Beyond the Lighted Stage and it's tough to stay vehement against 3 such nice guys and pure artists.

xpost Yeah, but who would have expected "A Farewell to Kings" from the guys who did "Working Man?" Or even "Fly By Night?" Or, hell, something as awesomely bonkers but strangely concise as "Spirit of Radio" just a year or so after "Hemispheres" (which has only four songs!)? The band wanted and needed to pare things down. So I don't hear the '80s stuff as pandering so much as embracing current styles a la the Police. My point is that something like "Hold Your Fire" does not come out of nowhere. They'd been developing in that direction for years. And because of that, the group could get away with an almost all '80s live set this time around, new material aside.

Sometimes I think the biggest bullet the band dodged was losing Steve Lillywhite as the producer of "Grace Under Pressure." Love Lillywhite, but he would have been totally wrong for the band, and also cemented them to that very specific time.

Has anyone ever heard any Rush demos? Have any such things ever leaked? I think I've maybe heard an alternate "Tom Sawyer," but that's it.

Hey, look, Power Windows demos! This is awesome!

http://www.rushisaband.com/display.php?id=1341

I wonder why Rush would ever need to demo anything, except for each other. They've always kept their various labels pretty much at arm's length (I say this as someone who works for their current label); they make their albums entirely on their own terms, and turn them in when they're done. Nobody in the back office gets a "no" vote on anything. When they told us that their latest album was gonna have a 28-page CD booklet (which drives up costs considerably), well, they were gonna have a 28-page CD booklet, end of discussion.

In the case of Power Windows, I bet it's specifically because Geddy and the producer had to work on a lot of the sequencer stuff, and then Alex came in a little later to rework his guitar to fit the stuff that was more or less fixed in place. Iirc. This is why Alex sometimes complains about those late '80s records. He was a little constrained (even though they feature some of my favorite guitar things).

Peter Collins:

"When I first worked with them, they wanted to be involved with the technological breakthroughs that were happening in England at the time, the Trevor Horn sound that he'd achieved with Yes and Frankie and those sort of bands. So I was able to help them move into that area, and be a foil, a sounding-board for Neil Peart on the drums and push him into different areas. When I first got involved, Alex Lifeson had this horrible mismatched guitar pedalboard, which needed a lot of work -- or, rather, lot of work had been done to it, and that was the problem. It was just a question of coming in fresh, and getting them to change some things they'd always done. If there's somebody to say to them 'Guys, I think that section could be better, it could be more exciting, or it could be more laid-back,' or whatever, they like that. They like to be challenged.

"In the case of Rush, they strive to be better with every record, they strive to progress with every record. AC/DC strive to sound exactly as they did on their first record on their 14th record, and that's their strength, but Rush want to be different on every record and to progress. As human beings, that's the way they are, they're very interesting people, and they need continual intellectual and musical stimulation."