Captured from Facebook - and updated. This was written after Rush had retired as a band, before Neil Peart’s passing; in the last few months as this is written, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee announced that they are going to go on tour with Anika Nilles on drums. There’s a postscript, as a result, but I’m preserving the original as it was.
I’d like to present my thoughts on a resurgence by Rush, one that really shouldn’t exist: the last two studio albums by Rush, where they really recaptured the form they’d had in their “classic years,” the period from 1976 through 1982.
To understand what I mean by “resurgence,” let me state as an assertion that Rush had two periods where their creativity was absolutely fantastic, and most of their musical efforts were bang on, both commercially (well, for what that term means to Rush, which means “earns gold records or better, and gets listened to for decades”) and creatively.
The first period was from “Fly By Night” through “Signals,” roughly 1974 through 1982, with “Caress of Steel” being the one “miss” in the entire period. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a good album, and it has advocates (“Caress of Steel was their best album!!1!11”) but I think from a commercial and artistic (and historical) view, it had good offerings and it reached for the stars… but wasn’t the equal of the albums that preceded and followed it. (In other words: sure, it was good, but “Fly By Night” and “2112” were both better, and I really don’t think most people would argue against that assertion.)
The second period where their creative and commercial acumen were really on point was with “Snakes and Arrows” and “Clockwork Angels.” I’d include “Vapor Trails” in this group, because I love that album, but I think the band was still trying to rediscover what it mean to be Rush for this album, and I think some of the things that drove the previous six or seven albums influenced Vapor Trails too much.
“Ah,” my astute readers are saying to themselves: “What are some of those things that influenced Vapor Trails?”
I’m thrilled you asked, astute readers! I praise your astutitude to the sky! (And I think “astutitude” is a made up word, but I’m running with it because it makes me laugh.)
One of the things that I think hurt the “middle period” of Rush - “Grace Under Pressure” through “Test For Echo” - was the nature of the music industry itself… and us, the fans.
Back in the early days, back when men were men, women were women, and small furry creatures grooving with Picts were small furry creatures grooving with Picts, the music industry was driven by a combination of artistry and, for lack of a better word, “money.” And “money” is the best word, because it’s the right one. But we can’t leave “artistry” out, because commercial viability was a giant aspect of what drove music, but individuality was, too.
If you sounded exactly like (some successful band’s name here), that was great, but you had an uphill climb ahead of you, because if people wanted to listen to the successful band, well, why wouldn’t they just listen to that band instead of yours? You had to differentiate yourself somehow. If you sounded unique but didn’t sell, well, the music industry wasn’t a charity; why would they shovel money in your direction? (Answer: they wouldn’t.)
When Rush really hit their stride, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the gold record was the standard: you toured like mad because you wanted your albums to sell, and that’s how you paid off the advances and earned royalties on music.
The point was that you wanted people to buy your albums.
But in the 1980s, something changed. At some point the money changed, and bands started having to rely on different revenue streams. Instead of touring to sell albums so they could make money, bands toured to get people to attend their concerts, and that is where they made the money; selling albums was important, because it got people to attend concerts, but it became almost (almost!) a secondary goal.
But the primary revenue stream, where the bands themselves saw the most profit, was the concert. If your tour went well, you did well; the album royalties paled by comparison.
In this environment, Rush did very well for themselves, because Rush’s fanbase is rabid, in the most positive sense, with many fans seeing the band multiple times on each tour.
The effect, though, was a touch corrosive: albums took a back seat in priorities, and the album contents changed, too.
Rush was still Rush, so they still pushed themselves to sound unique and do new things on each album (play me one bar from any song and I can tell you what album it comes from, I think) but… realistically, every song had this sheen that spoke to how it would play in a live context.
This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, and it gave us a lot of great moments from those seven or eight albums. The tours went fantastically, generally speaking. Everyone benefitted.
But the albums… they felt slightly like market campaigns, seasoned with art as expression.
My resentment of “Feedback” is fueled by this, I think. To me, “Feedback” was the “Hey, can we put together an R30 tour in short order?” album; I think it’s done about as well as such an effort could be done, but it still suffers from the corruption of being driven by a desire to tour. I don’t resent the band for leveraging its stage popularity and skill, and I’d far rather they have given us an album (as they did) rather than a cynical “Hey, let’s tour with nothing to support,” but “Feedback” was artistically abortive. It was Rush playing through someone else’s songs, not Rush really showing us anything new.
That leads us up to “Snakes and Arrows.” This album feels to me like Rush finally got back to a feeling they had in the early 1980s: “We’ve done it all, we don’t NEED to do anything for people to attend our concerts, why don’t we do stuff that we want to do, say things we want to say?”
So you had playful scherzos like “The Larger Bowl” and “Hope” on the album, outliers in the larger Rush catalog… except outliers like these have proud precedents like “Different Strings,” “Broon’s Bane,” and “Losing It.” Rush sounded like they kept the momentum from albums like “Test for Echo” and “Vapor Trails,” but the sense and feeling was different, more artistic, more internally driven…
It felt less driven by “who would attend a show that featured these songs” and more driven by “Wait, we’re Rush, we can play bloody well anything we like.” Fans would buy the albums and attend the shows, after all, and true fans were likely to appreciate what Rush had laid before them.
“Clockwork Angels,” too, had the same devil-may-care approach. You can see it with “BU2B2,” “Halo Effect,” and “The Garden” - among others. They’re songs that are good songs - but not necessarily crowd-pleasing songs, unless the crowd in question is predisposed to being pleased by those songs.
And since the songs were great in the context of the album, the crowds WERE predisposed to enjoying those songs. It’s a self-fulfilling process.
But it’s one that I don’t think Rush was necessarily managing as well as it could have, for a stretch of six, maybe seven, studio albums. When they hit “Snakes and Arrows,” they returned to “art as expression,” and recaptured MY imagination, at the very least.
Thanks for reading, if you endured with me for this long!
The Postscript
I wrote this originally as a pure retrospective, looking back on a band’s career as a static, finished thing. It ain’t done, y’all… and I can’t help but wonder and marvel at the idea of what Rush might do, even if it’s only on stage, with nothing left to prove, no ghosts to answer, and able and willing to look both forward and back with knowledge and impunity… and ownership.