Anthem: Rush In The 70s , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Martin Popoff

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

215 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

With extensive, first-hand collections from Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, as well as from family, friends, and fellow musicians, Anthem: Rush in the 70s is a detailed portrait of Canada's greatest rock ambassadors. The first of three volumes, Anthem puts the band catalogue, from their self-titles debut to 1978's Hemispheres (the next volume resumes with the release of Permanent Waves) into both Canadian and general pop culture context, and presents the trio of quintessentially dependable, courteous Canucks as generators of incendiary, groundbreaking rock 'n' roll. Fighting complacency, provoking thought, and often enraging critics, Rush has been at war with the music industry since 1974, when they were first dismissed as the Led Zeppelin of the north. Anthem, like each volume in this series, celebrates the perseverance of Geddy, Alex, and Neil: three men who maintained their values while operating from a Canadian base, throughout lean years, personal tragedies, and the band'

Sujets

Musician

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	04 juin 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773055039
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Anthem
Rush in the ’70s
Martin Popoff

Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Early Years
Chapter 2 Rush
Chapter 3 Fly by Night
Chapter 4 Caress of Steel
Chapter 5 2112
Chapter 6 All the World’s a Stage
Chapter 7 A Farewell to Kings
Chapter 8 Hemispheres
Discography
A: Studio Albums
B: Live Albums
C: Offical Compilation
D: Selected Singles
Credits
Additional Sources
About the Author
Martin Popoff — A Complete Bibliography
Copyright
Photos
Discover the Series!

Introduction
The comparison is a lark — but it’s funny, so I’ll give it anyway.
Under the black country skies of Trail, British Columbia, in the mid-’70s, heavy metal ruled. It was as big a deal in my hometown as in the dual cradles of metal civilization — Detroit and Birmingham. Where they had steel and car parts, we had a lead and zinc smelter, an employer of thousands in our small town and a satanic mill that sat on the hill, looming over the city center. In fact, that’s where you went after high school if you weren’t going to university; you went to work “up the hill.”
Okay, comparing Trail to the towns where Sabbath, Priest, the Stooges and MC5 were created is laughable. Plus my dad was a teacher, my mom was a nurse and I grew up wanting for nothing in a spacious house built in 1970 by the family in the idyllic suburb of Glenmerry. But me and my buddies were still all angry young metalheads, and I’m pretty damn sure we were listening to Rutsey ’n’ roll Rush at eleven going on twelve before 1975.
So “Working Man” indeed, if not exactly for me and my immediate circle. That song really connected in Cleveland, and it made a hell of a lot of sense for the busted-up hard partiers working at Cominco. In my late teens, running the record department and selling stereos at a couple different stores, I got to know quite a few of those people (from a wary distance). They were scary and cool, and more than occasionally they would drop ten grand on a pair of Kl ipschs, JBLs, Bose 901s or carpet-covered Cerwin Vegas, usually powered by a new Yamaha 3020, much to the delight of my boss Gordon Lee, who still runs Rock Island Tape Centre forty-something years later.
Of course, all these guys were Rush fans too, cranking “Bastille Day” in their Camaros and Mustangs (yes, Gord threw me in the deep end as an installer) and pontificating over 2112 while they nurtured their private pot stashes growing in the cupboard. They knew about Rush because I sold them their friggin’ Rush records but also because we had the quintessential rock radio station in KR EM-FM, broadcast over the border in glorious high fidelity from Spokane, Washington, where they worshiped these wise Canadian swamis of sound. In fact — fond memory — they played the entirety of 2112 when it came out, and of course we were all ready with two fingers to hit play and record as the sun set.
But there was another bed-headed gathering of beer buddies poring over the seven Rush albums we will be celebrating in this book, and that was the aspiring players. I was one of those. The day I jumped in my purple ’77 “baby Mustang” (a Toyota Celica) and drove seventy miles to Nelson to pick up my nine-piece set of black Pearls, inspired equally by Neil Peart and Peter Criss, was magic. (Forty years later, I got to show Peter the receipt as he signed some records for me at my book table at Rock’N’Con in London, Ontario.)
Indeed, this is why it was such a joy writing this book, remembering the camaraderie in bands, however short-lived, talking over Neil Peart fills with Darrell and Marc, Geddy bass lines with Pete and Sammy and Alex licks with Mark and Garth — and yes, he looked exactly like Garth from Wayne’s World , and I wasn’t too far off Wayne. Rush was our rarefied, mystical music textbook, Neil and his wordsmithing challenging our brains at the same time. (I’m sure for a long time, we thought Geddy was scribbling all these fortune cookies.) Rush made you want to excel on a bunch of levels at once, and I swear that was their purpose for high school kids worried about what comes next.
Geez, man, they were perfect. Prog rock proper was too creepy. Tales from Topographic Oceans may have well been the Moonies coming to get you. At the other end, all our metal bands — Sabbath, Purple, Nazareth, Rainbow, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Kiss, Aerosmith, the Nuge and at the obscure end, Legs Diamond, Riot, Angel, Starz, Moxy and Teaze — were friggin’ all right with us. But Rush made you try harder. They politely asked to pour your energies into something more positive. Eat right, use those weights in the basement.
Neil was pushing the philosophy and literature at one end, and as players, man, what they did for kids’ self-esteem is immeasurable. We had a purpose, a hobby that was a never-ending hard nut to crack. And yet I gotta say something about Rush: they made it just this side of attainable. I think if we’d got the slide rules out and did the math on Close to the Edge , The Inner Mounting Flame , Aja , Red , Brand X or Buddy Rich, we’d have all hung it up. But Neil with his regular rolls down those tuned toms? More often than not, building his beats with only one of his two bass drums? Much of what Rush did . . . well, you could get there as a kid. I could get there as a kid.
That’s a personal reminiscence of Rush in the ’70s, to be sure. But from what I’ve gathered from friends all over the world (admittedly, most of them white men in their mid-fifties), it’s a near-universal experience.
I want to tell you a bit about the history of this book. As you may be aware, this is my fourth Rush book, following Contents Under Pressure: 30 Years of Rush at Home and Away , Rush: The Illustrated History and Rush: Album by Album . And since those, there have been a number of interesting developments that made me want to write this one. To start, only one of those three books, Contents , was a traditional biography — an authorized one at that — but it was quite short, and given that it came out in 2004 before Rush was officially retired, it was in need of an update. I thought about it, but I wasn’t feeling it, not without some vigorous additions.
That, fortunately, took care of itself. In the early 2010s, I found myself working with Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen at Banger Films on the award-winning documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage . Anybody who works in docs will tell you that between the different speakers and non-talk footage that has to get into what might end up a ninety-minute film, only a tiny percentage of the interview footage ever gets used, the rest just sits in archive, rarely seen or heard by anyone. Long and short of it, I arranged to use that archive, along with more interviews I’d done over the years, plus the odd quote from the available press, to get this book to the point where I felt it was bringing something new and significant to the table of Rush books.
So there you have it, thanks in large part to those guys — as well as the kind consent of Pegi Cecconi at the Rush office — the book you hold in your hands more than ably supplants Contents Under Pressure and stands as the most strident and detailed analy sis of the early Rush catalogue in existence.
Martin Popoff

Chapter 1 Early Years
“We didn’t have a mic stand so we used a lamp.”
No question that the Beatles were and still remain the patron saints of rock ’n’ roll. And February 9, 1964, the first of the band’s three consecutive appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show , would provide the nexus of that sainthood: that night, the Beatles inspired myriad adolescents to take up the rock ’n’ roll cause, including the heroes of our story.
But if you wanted to drill down, get more hardcore and find out who might be patron saints of playing , it wouldn’t be out of line to bestow that title upon those heroes — Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart and their Canuck collective called Rush.
Of course, Nei l, “the Professor,” chuckling through his Canadian modesty, would deem that premise absurd, citing the likes of his personal saints of playing, perhaps folks like The Who and Cream, maybe Jimi and his band, Led Zeppelin or maybe “underground” origami rockers like Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. But pushing back at Neil, one might point out to the drum titan that time moves on. Over generations, waves of bands and rock ’n’ roll movements ebb and flow. Film stars from the ’30s and ’40s are forgotten, big band orchestras are forgotten, doo-wop bands are forgotten, ’60s and even ’70s radio playlists are ruthlessly pared down to what can fit on the back of an envelope — no one cares what you think anymore.
And so, as time passes and the ’60s greats are forgotten, the members of Rush seem poised to become the new “patron saints of playing.” And maybe they’ll stay there. In the mid- to late 2000s, the world turned to pop and hip hop with more and more music made by machines. If indeed rock died further through the parallel precipitous contraction of the music industry, marked by recorded music being made essentially free, then we might be able to pick those patron saints once and for all.
As drummers are wont to point out, no parents ever had to force their kid to practice their drums, and by side glance, this is why the patron saints of playing are not some sensible choice like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gentle Giant, Kansas or Brand X. It takes some fire in the belly, some excitement, some fuzz pedal, to light up a teen and their dreams. And that is why Rush is the band that wrote the manual for more of our rock heroes from the ’80s and ’90s than anybody else. They inspired those who have made all the rock music before the genre’s miniaturization a few years into the 2000s. Debatable as it might be — and these abstracts, of course, are — if the widest