Trivia / Rush (Band)

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• Career Resurrection: Test for Echo becoming unsuccessful and the band's collective Creator Breakdown in the late '90s (see below) tore the band apart for several years. The group eventually reunited to record Vapor Trails, whose huge success placed them back on top. While they permanently disbanded again in 2018, it wasn't caused by any particular failure or discord between the members.
• Channel Hop: The band switched to Atlantic Records from Mercury Records for distribution outside of Canada with Presto. In 2011, they switched to Roadrunner Records for the remainder of their career. In Canada, they released their debut on Moon Records, which led to their deal with Mercury. The band then moved to Anthem, where they stayed until their retirement, though Anthem itself switched distribution several times, from Polydor to Capitol, to Sony, and finally to Universal.
• Chart Displacement: Their only top 40 hit in the US and chart-topper in their native Canada is "New World Man". And the best-remembered of their 10 top 10 songs on Mainstream Radio (a stretch that included 4 #1 hits) is 1987's "Time Stand Still", which hit #3.
• Creator Backlash:
  • They'd love to forget their first live album, All the World's a Stage.
  • Same with Caress of Steel and Test for Echo, although they also acknowledge that 2112 would not have been possible without Caress of Steel.
  • Peart seems to regard his early association with Ayn Rand as this after enough backlash. While he admits that her work meant a lot to him in his youth, he later described himself as a "left-leaning libertarian" now, and downplayed her influence on him in recent years. It's safe to say that most Ayn Rand fans would be fairly horrified by how his position has evolved over the years.
  On that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I'm an idealist. [...] Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we're all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that's when I evolve now into...a bleeding heart Libertarian.
  • Hemispheres is considered by much of their fanbase to be one of their best albums, with a decent number of fans (including Les Claypool and John Petrucci) citing it as their favorite. Geddy, however, is not as fond of it, saying "I don't know if I can ever possess the necessary objectivity to be able to see what people see and hear what people hear in Hemispheres. Reasons include having to sing in a difficult key on the title track (he later noted that they wrote the songs without really thinking about how easy it would be to sing in the keys they'd selected) and fatigue with the length and predictability of their side-long songs.
  • Geddy also expressed distaste for "Lakeside Park", calling it a "lousy song", though he agreed to resurrect it for the band's final tour when Alex expressed interest.
• Creator Breakdown: Neil's late-90s Trauma Conga Line spurred one collectively. After the death of Neil's only child and wife, Alex hung up his guitars and didn't even listen to music for about a year, Geddy considered the band more or less dead and also broke away from music (returning in 2000 to record his only solo effort, My Favourite Headache). Neil went off on an epic motorcycle journey that took him from Quebec to Alaska, down the West Coast of the United States, and into Belize before going back up and eventually stopping – for good this time – in Los Angeles. He was still hurting pretty badly as of 2001, when Vapor Trails was in production, if the album's angry, mournful tone is anything to go by.
• Enforced Method Acting: Neil wanted his drumming on Clockwork Angels to sound more spontaneous, like "This guy never played that before, and he just barely made it." So instead of spending many hours (or even days, as he did earlier in his career) preparing composed parts before recording, he just listened to each song a few times before recording the drum tracks.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Neil's favorite Rush album is Clockwork Angels. While it's definitely among the fans' favorites, older fans are more likely to name 2112, Hemispheres, or Moving Pictures as the band's magnum opus. Younger ones do like Clockwork Angels, Moving Pictures, Hemispheres, and 2112, but they may also mention Signals, Power Windows, and Counterparts.
• The Pete Best:
  • John Rutsey, their first drummer, was fired from the band due to health concerns as well as creative differences in 1974. Still, he narrowly averted this as he played on the debut album. He barely even toured with them before he had to leave due to his diabetes, and that's how he was replaced by Neil Peart, who stayed behind the kit through the end of the band's very last tour 41 years later.
  • A better example would be Jeff Jones, a founding member of the band, who was replaced within less than a week of Rush's formation by Geddy. Jones later resurfaced as the bassist for Red Rider, of "Lunatic Fringe" fame.
  • Lindy Young, the band's ex-keyboardist well before they hit any kind of fame, who left the band because he was going to college [he was slightly older than the rest of the band]. The kicker, though? Geddy and Lindy are brothers-in-law (Geddy married Lindy's sister Nancy)!
  • Mitch Bossi, who for a very brief time in 1971 was the rhythm guitarist in Rush, before the band reverted back to a three piece, Alex says Mitch became a teacher and wasn't very good at guitar.
  • Joe Perna, who replaced Geddy as bassist and lead vocalist for a couple of months in 1969. He came in when Alex and John decided to get rid of Geddy, but they changed their minds in a hurry after one gig with him went completely wrong.
• Running the Asylum: Nick Raskulinecz, the producer of Rush's last two studio albums, is a major fan of their '70s output and tried to push them back towards it with Clockwork Angels.
• Troubled Production: 2112, Hemispheres, and Grace Under Pressure.
• What Could Have Been: Once Neil Peart wrote the "rap" section of "Roll the Bones", the band toyed with several ideas for how to approach it, from working with an actual rapper to getting John Cleese to do a campy spoken word style performance. In the end, Geddy Lee did it and they pitch-shifted his voice to be considerably lower.
• Write What You Know: Neil was the band's primary lyricist, and his personal beliefs shaped a lot of his output (in particular, 2112 with Objectivism). Taken to the logical extreme with "Ghost Rider" off Vapor Trails, which was basically a condensed version of his memoir of the same name.
  Pack up all those phantoms, shoulder that invisible load
  Keep on riding north and west, haunting that wilderness road like a ghost rider
  Carry all those phantoms through bitter winds and stormy skies
  From the desert to the mountain, from the lowest lows to the highest highs, like a ghost rider.

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