Another copy from Facebook.

TL;DR: “me likes the Weppon.”

There. If you’re not interested in reading a long screed about a particular song on a particular album, and yet for some reason you really, really want to know what the essay is about, you have it in the first sentence, four words, short ones, grammar errors and misspellings and all. No need to continue.

The rest of this is for those nerds who like to read and who might be interested.

To reiterate: I love “The Weapon,” from Signals.

Signals had the first instance of a song from Rush that I loved - that I knew was Rush. I was riding with my mother in a car in Leesburg, FL, and “Analog Kid” came on - and I was entranced. The DJ came on and told me what band it was, and thus my decades-long enjoyment of Rush began in earnest.

The real first song was “The Trees,” which I had on a cassette that had been recorded from … somewhere. Maybe it was the world’s nerdiest mixtape; I don’t know. Whatever it was, I just had the song, but no idea what the band was.

Tying “The Trees” to the band was a formative moment for me: I will never forget sitting on my sister’s couch in her living room, my brother-in-law laughing benignly at my expression, as he played Exit… Stage Left’s side three at fairly decent volume.

“The Weapon” was another formative moment. It took a while, but when it finally clicked for me, it was nearly as important for my career as a musician - such that it is - as realizing that Rush was “that band.”

I started out as a drummer, because surely hitting things was easier than learning to play an organ (what I thought all keyboards were, largely because my mother had a Wurlitzer), I didn’t have a guitar, and the school I attended had a drum kit and a benevolent (and indulgent) music teacher. So I joined the school band, playing radio hits of the time like the Go-go’s “We Got the Beat” and The Cars’ “Shake It Up,” and “Start Me Up,” from the Rolling Stones.

It was a good gig for a kid in school, and I’m pretty sure I understood none of the music.

My best friend in the band - well, my best friend at the time, period, and a guy I still talk to every few days forty-some-odd years later - played bass.

I don’t want to say I am a competitive person, but… just because I don’t want to say it doesn’t mean I’m not a competitive person. I couldn’t stand my friend knowing something I didn’t, and plus I had Geddy Lee and Roger Waters as inspirations, so I surely had to learn how to play bass, too.

Skip ahead a few episodes, and I’m traveling to Miami over the winter holidays, and I have a cheap Casio and a just-as-cheap acoustic guitar with me (as I am a “musician,” you know), and a house fire destroyed everything else I had.

Thus I became a guitarist - I knew all four chords, you know, and all 8.6 notes - who used a keyboard to “write songs” a la Rick Wright.

And then “The Weapon” clicked.

I’d always thought The Weapon was the epitome of Geddy’s bass playing. How in the WORLD did he play that opening bass line? That arpeggio on bass… how big was his bass in the first place? How’d he hit those high notes? How in the WORLD did he write notes like that? I bet when he hit the verses and changed sounds and just … held the notes… I was imagining the cognitive relief he must have felt, recording that, and had no idea how he’d approach it in concert.

The man MUST have been the God of Bass. And to play THAT BASSLINE while playing chords on the keyboard-thing…

Of course, this was a raving of the ignorant. That opening line wasn’t a bass guitar; it was a synthesizer, an Oberheim OB-X (I think!) playing a sequence generated from an arpeggio. And the keyboards playing chords, well, they were done well - with the right notes being chosen every freaking time - but if you had the sequence down, the synthesizers MADE the song, without dominating it.

The lights came on when I realized this. SYNTHS. They weren’t an affectation, they weren’t toys for someone to noodle with when you just didn’t want to play a piano or an organ… they were a tool. If you could find the sound, you could construct a song around it.

“The Weapon” opened up the rest of Pink Floyd. It opened up Stockhausen. It opened up both east- and west-coast synthesis, started me on a quest to find math-rock and generative music, opened up my eyes and ears (and heart) to using the studio as a canvas - a guitar doesn’t HAVE to sound like “this,” you can use the bass like that, you can use the drums to do this other thing, you can do anything you want, really, and the art deserves itself.

That’s all from “The Weapon,” a song that was constructed by synthesizer, with Peart playing what is (for him) a fairly simple drum part with really cool syncopation, Alex Lifeson doing very very Lifeson-like things, and a killer lyric about fear to go with it all.

It took a while, but it’s an amazing song that managed to open up a whole new world of music for me.