Attention All Planets of the Solar Federation

If you recognize that quote, you’re a Rush geek like me.  If not, I really can’t help you.

There may be no other band in popular music that has so sharply illuminated the divide between critics and normal folks.  On one hand, cool guys like Robert Christgau and JD Constantine despise them.  On the other, they’ve sold 40 million records and they continue to fill arenas worldwide.

If it were my career, I’d take the opinion of millions of loyal fans over some guy who gets paid to write witty boilerplate any time.  I’ve always wondered how the guys in Rush felt about all this, and now we’ve got the answer.

Beyond the Lighted Stage is a documentary produced by the same guys who did last year’s great Iron Maiden film.  For a band that’s been around for nearly four decades, it’s well past time we got something like this.

And fortunately, it’s marvelously done.

Rush have always had something of an image problem, that problem being that they don’t have much of an image in the first place.  Sure, they wore some pretty embarrassing stage gear in the  1970’s, but you won’t hear stories about drug habits, celebrity romances or vandalized motel rooms.

The mainstream press ignored them for the most part, and the only interviews I ever saw were in magazines geared towards musicians.  Most of those pieces were focused on equipment and technique, with very little insight into their personal lives.  Not that it mattered, as I was a budding musician at the time, and I was more concerned with what made their music tick than I was with their personal lives.

(You can’t play bass and not know who Geddy Lee is, any more than a drummer can be ignorant of Neil Peart.)

I had most of their records by the time I was a sophomore in high school.  I saw them live several times, and there was a time when I could play Geddy Lee’s part on YYZ without fail.  It took two weeks to learn it, but I showed up that guy who worked at the music store.  Darn straight, I did.

They were always changing from one album to the next.  The point of entry for most people is 1980’s magnificent Moving Pictures.  By then, they’d outgrown the blues-metal trappings of their first two records, and they’d largely moved past the side-long epics like 2112 and Hemispheres in favor of concise songs.  This wasn’t a concession to radio; rather it was a streamlining of their aesthetic, and a successful one at that.

After Moving Pictures, they began adopting synthesizers in earnest, and fans found themselves divided.  Many lamented the fact that Alex Lifeson’s guitar work was being pushed to the sidelines, and the arrangements lacked the agility and challenge of their prior material.

I was able to appreciate (and enjoy) what they were doing on Power Windows and Hold Your Fire.  Presto was a welcome return to a more straight-ahead rock sound, and it exerts something of a sentimental hold on me considering it was the soundtrack to my last summer in high school.

I lost touch during college, though.  Part of it was that I had other things going on, and part of it was the infamous rap bit on Roll the Bones.  They’d taken some chances before, and they’d thrown their audience more than one (welcome) curveball, but the embarrassing rap thing nearly robbed me of the ability to experience happiness.

So, they took a direction that just didn’t blow my skirt up, and that’s alright.  I still have twenty years of their catalog to enjoy, and I won’t hesitate to see them live if they come through.

So, back to the documentary.  Is it any good?  Yes.  Even if you’re not a fan?  Yes.

During the end credits, the guys are sitting in a restaurant talking to the camera.  Geddy Lee warns the director, “don’t be surprised when you discover how boring we really are.”  That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but if this film proves one thing, it’s that they’re normal guys.

Despite the occasional charges that their music can be pretentious, the people making it are affable and forthright.  Lee opines with a smile that he’s “terminally unhip,” and when the interviewer runs down a list of adjectives about his sometimes-keening vocals, he responds with good humor.  Describing their early start playing at local high-school dances, he mentions that, “we probably bummed out a lot of people on their high-school memories.”

There’s no real “angle” to the documentary, and I don’t get the impression the directors were trying to make a “statement” of any sort.  What we get is a thorough and informative film that’s beautifully presented.

Gene Simmons describes his experience touring with them as an opening band (the backstage proceedings were a constant orgy, yet the guys in Rush stayed in their hotel room reading).  Trent Reznor, Billy Corgan and Jack Black offer surprisingly good insights into the band.  Donna Harper, the DJ who broke Rush in the American market, makes some really interesting observations on their early success, and the interviews with the band’s families are engaging.

There are some nice observations from management and people who were in the industry at the time the band was picking up steam, and the consensus seems to be that nobody knows how Rush managed to be so successful yet so obscure.  Described as the best-known cult band on earth, they toured relentlessly in their early days, opening for such acts as Uriah Heep, the Faces, Manfred Mann, and anyone else who would have them.

When Neil Peart came on board, the lyrics took a more literate turn, and arrangements became more complex.  They nearly lost their audience with Caress of Steel, and the subsequent tour seemed to signal disaster.  The band was given the order to make a record that would be more commercially viable in hopes of saving them.

Instead, a fun bit with Peart describes their decision to disregard those demands, and the band made 2112.  Something had changed in the meantime, and the record that should have been their stubborn swan song took off.  A new generation of listeners picked up on it, and the band found themselves resurrected.

The group makes it clear that they don’t know exactly what happened to make 2112 a success where Caress of Steel had failed.  Nonetheless, it had given them something few acts can ever hope to achieve: complete creative freedom that pays the bills.

Nonetheless, critics continued to either ignore or castigate them.  At one point, the film shows pages of negative reviews, such as this gem:

But the music was complex only in that the songs are a cancerous network of haphazard key and time signature changes, with no apparent sense of order, in my opinion.  The lyrics were carelessly over the top, and on close examination, were a lot of smug, hypocritical, pseudo-symbolic drivel.

One can only wonder what reviewers must have thought of King Crimson at the time.

There’s a long section where they discuss the arduous process behind recording Hemispheres.  As it turns out, it was just as hard as everyone imagined, if not more.  The band is quite candid about the sheer difficulty involved and their decision to ramp things back a bit in terms of scale.

Their “synth pop” period during the 1980’s is touched on only briefly in comparison, which leads to the only serious omission that I can see.  The band switched producers for Grace under Pressure, a dark and sterile album that still divides fans to this day, and at one point during the recording they came close to breaking up.  I’d like to have known what was going on, but it’s not touched on here.

A great deal of time is given to the tragedies in Peart’s personal life, of which I’d known little.  While Lee and Lifeson are more than happy to engage fans, Peart has always been more reticent, and he rarely talks much to the press.   As such, I was very surprised to see him speaking openly and at length about his grief, the ensuing sabbatical, and his road back.  I’m not sure how the directors got him to open up to this extent, but he speaks freely and amiably, and he’s quite engaging.

All in all, this is a heck of a film.  Nothing feels forced or staged, and its casual feel is a perfect fit for a bunch of modest guys whose only real motivation seems to be making good music.

Here’s to another 40 years.