I know what you’re all thinking right now. “Oh great, he’s going to talk about Rush again. Enough already! We get it!”
Well, yes. I am going to talk about Rush again but follow me along as I put a new spin on an old subject.
Following the wildly successful efforts of their album, “Moving Pictures”, a work of seminal importance to both their fan base and the wider rock audience, Rush embarked on a course that would ultimately alienate not only some of their more hardcore fans but also the rock critics as a whole.
Rush had already spent the bulk of their musical career thumbing their noses at both critics and industry insiders by choosing their own path and ignoring the tried and true formula for success that had been written in the big book of “What Not To Do” by the “wizards of smart” that seemed to control the music business.
Rush took that book and all the rules for musical success, poured gasoline on them and lit them on fire for their 4th album, “2112”.
I need not remind you of the phenomenal success of that particular album but it serves as the paradigm for all the risks they would take in their future output.
2112 was the Rush version of a big “Fuck you” to the geniuses in the halls of power in the music business and a pronouncement that they would henceforth do things their own way, rules be damned. In truth, after the failure of the previous album, “Caress Of Steel”, the band believed their musical career was at an end. That failure prompted them to adopt a scorched Earth policy towards what was their last contractual album.
Thinking they had nothing left to lose, they wound up making one of, if not the best, conceptual albums of all time. In essence, they used failure as the impetus for change.
Following the incredible and rightful success of “Moving Pictures”, they once again took the opportunity to implement a sea change in how their next album would sound but this time, they would use success as the impetus for change.
“Moving Pictures”, both the album and the subsequent tour to promote it, were both so popular that it made the band pretty much bullet proof against the critics who had maligned them for years.
Even if the band had broken up at the moment “Moving Pictures” was released, they would still have been placed in the pantheon of rock gods. Never a band to rest on its laurels, they chose instead to do the unthinkable. They went back into the studio after an exhausting tour schedule that would have killed most other bands and proceeded to once again redefine both their own sound and their value to the rock world in general.
The result of that redefining was the album, “Signals”, an album that put Geddy Lee’s keyboard work firmly out front and fan expectations in limbo.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is an industry maxim that has always been the standard by which all bands are measured but Rush decided long ago to take a big, steamy dump right on top of every “standard” they ever ran up against.
Fans, critics and industry insiders all believed the next Rush album would essentially be a sequel to “Moving Pictures” because the music business is run on formulas and unshakable rules. Fans expected a sequel simply because that’s what the industry had been putting out for years. The critics expected it because they too were used to the rules.
But Rush was not a band that used formulas or rules because they believed their fans were smart enough to follow along as they changed the face of rock music forever.
It was that very belief in the intelligence of their audience that rankled music industry “big wigs” and critics alike. Neither of those two entities wanted smart audiences, they wanted audiences who would faithfully do as they were told because that’s what made them rich and powerful.
Let me pause and explain that when I use the word “critics”, I mean primarily “Rolling Stone” which had for years used a lot of ink and column space to try to convince everyone to hate Rush because they did. The smaller, independent critics liked Rush because they understood what the band was trying to do just as the fans did. “Rolling Stone”, on the other hand, had decided that Rush was a joke and did all they could to marginalize if not ignore them completely. But I digress…
The 1982 release of “Signals” was met with puzzlement from the fans, condemnation by the critics and outward hostility by the purists.
Despite all that, it was an album of significant change and value to the Rush catalog as whole. It yielded 2 singles in “Subdivisions” and “New World Man”, both of which were met with excitement by the fans because they would once again be able to hear their favorite band on the radio, something that was altogether new even in the wake of “Moving Pictures”, an album that had netted them a permanent spot on AOR radio for all time.
The album was a mosh of keyboard laden almost “euro-pop” with only occasional allusions to Alex Lifeson’s always brilliant guitar work.
Having called on their long time producer, Terry Brown, to run the recording desk, the band broke new ground in a variety of areas. Gone were the long, prog-rock epics and totally undanceable and sometimes confusing time signature changes of the past. Several of the songs on this album bordered on being “dance tunes” for the simple fact of their straight 4/4 time and pulsing bass drum. This was completely unheard of in the shadow of Neil Peart’s amazing and always inspired drumming.
Many serious critics laid some of the confusion of the album at the feet of producer Terry brown because he had made his mark producing their concept albums and was the guiding force behind the success of “Moving Pictures” and seemed out of his element producing an album filled with layered keyboard tracks and a guitar sound that would occasionally get lost in the mix due to the omnipresent texture of Geddy’s new keyboard rig.
Geddy is at his bass playing best on the song “Digital Man" as is Neil with his penchant for always doing more than the average drummer would do.
Immediate sales were quite good but as word spread of the new direction the band was taking, those sales cooled rather quickly despite another grueling but successful tour to promote the album.
There were times on the album where it seemed Alex was struggling with this new voice that was invading the sonic space that had once been the sole domain of his guitar and was barely able to find his new place in the grand scheme of things.
Where once keyboards were used as the icing on the cake, they were now the cake itself and Alex became the icing instead.
Don’t get me wrong, Alex has moments of true brilliance in his soloing and some of his accompanying rhythm guitar work but it was unusual to hear such preeminent key textures on a Rush album.
As a fan myself, it was hard to know how to feel about this album when taken in context of the last one. The last album was a work of singular genius and inspiration in the annals of rock history but the new one seemed almost schizophrenic in how much keyboard work it had.
After the first time listening to the whole album my only thought was, “What the HELL was that? What did I just hear? Where the hell did Alex go?”
After hearing it for the first time, I pictured Alex tied up in a closet during the making of the album and being let out now and then to add the occasional solo and to play second fiddle to this new electronic interloper.
The Rush faithful let their feelings be known with an almost hostile and sometimes angry posture. Sadly, I was one of those.
I just didn’t get it at first. Where once I was treated routinely to some of the most inventive and complex guitar solos of all time, I was now subjected to hearing keyboard solos and (gasp) a violin solo. “The Analog Kid” proved to be one of only a few moments of the old Alex I was used to and the solo was breathtaking to behold.
I listened to the album again and was still left with a feeling of emptiness at the lack of guitar virtuosity I had grown accustomed to. When the tour came to Texas, there was no question that I would go. They would be headlining the “Texas Jam” that included both .38 Special and Ozzy Osbourne in support of his “Bark At The Moon” album. That show would be capped off by seeing my favorite band playing music from an album that, at the time, I didn’t really much care for.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I managed to put my disappointment in “Signals” aside and learn to appreciate it for what it truly was. This was simply Rush being Rush. It was, in actual point of fact, the thing that had drawn me to their music to begin with. They were outside the mainstream. They had a “stream” of their own and they charted their own way along it year after year.
I look back on “Signals” now and realize that it is actually one of my favorites for how different it was.
There are moments of real beauty, the song “Losing It” for instance, about having something that defines you as a human slowly taken away through age, the voice of Hemingway being sung by Geddy.
Like the character in “Losing It”, Rush would not go gently into that good night though. They would rage on until the fans caught up with them.
We eventually did catch up with what “Signals” was but it proved to be a harbinger of things to come with their next few albums.
But that is a story for another day...
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