Nerd Band

The most recent issue of Rolling Stone featured an in-depth article on none other than...(let's have a massively elaborate drum roll please, complete with such flourishes as chimes, crotales, timbales, and melodic cowbells)...RUSH! And no, they were not critical this time, but finally objective enough to say,"Music taste aside, the scope of Rush's achievement is undeniable - 18 studio albums, more than 35 million records sold worldwide, a legion of fans as loyal as Deadheads and the Kiss Army. Still, much of the world ranks Rush somewhere just north of the mullet. Their hypertrophic musicianship is mocked by critics, their lyrical pedantry spoofed by hipsters, their singer's voice a subject of churlish speculation..."

Wow, "just North of the mullet," huh? That is an insult I have never heard. But no, I have no qualms with the article. So, I will move on, and include some snippets that I found interesting. I'll do it this way, I'll pose a question, and answer it with quotes from the article. In fact, I'll keep all the questions geared on the undeniable stimga that Rush is a "nerd band."

What is your stereotypical Rush fan like?

"Under bright houselights, the 17,000-capacity venue is quickly filling with fans of the Canadian rock trio Rush - many resembling the two young men I find sitting 10 rows from the stage: brow-fringing hair, utilitarian glasses, sprouts of chin whisker. They look straight out of an '82 yearbook photo of the after-school D&D club - a suggestion neither finds insulting. 'We fully embrace that,' says Sam, 21, an electrical-engineering student with a Ziggy Stardust tee and Harry Potter tattoo. 'That's definitely our lifestyle, the whole nerd thing. We play video games and listen to Rush, we play video games about Rush. That's what we did all last night in preparation for this.'"

So, Rush fans are nerds?

"The American-Nerd Age is nigh. Today, everyone from the bed-headed club promoter to the siliconed spokesmodel calls themselves a "nerd" because they play Sudoku or can operate an iPhone. But 34 years ago, when singer-bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart first emerged on the music scene, the n word had teeth. And if you were heavy into Rush - three skinny Canadians with a fixation for sprawling rock epics and Tolkien references - you had found your home."

So, the members of the band are nerds too?

"A ruddy 55-year-old with a Robert Mitchum-ish brow, Peart stands drinking bottled water, dressed head to toe in a ninjalike black suit topped by a black tarn bearing the logo from Rush's 2007 album, Snakes and Arrows. One pant leg is cinched by a bicycle clip. His feet are in dancing shoes. "

Yep, you heard it here. Neil Peart dresses like a Ninja with dancing shoes.

"'This is to absorb the sweat,' Peart says of his outfit...'They're so you get the dance and glide on the pedals like you get on a dance floor.'"

That's it though, I mean, they never look like characters out of some fantasy novel, right?

"With his long hair, soul patch and round sunglasses, the 54-year-old Lee suggests either a French semiotics professor or an abstract expressionist. He's often noticed but frequently misplaced. 'For some reason, Latino people think I'm Ozzy Osbourne,' says Lee. 'I don't know-big nose, long hair? Others say Bono.'

When Rush emerged as a hard-rock power in the Seventies, Lee entered the history books as one of the genre's truly sui generis frontmen: gimlet eyes, ectomorph frame, noted proboscis. Robert Plant may have sung about Tolkien's mystic realm of Mordor; Lee looked like he'd been there."

It's true. The man really looks very witch-king-like.

But does he act nerdy too?

"Sitting under Toronto's former Sky-Dome, Lee recalls Rush's U.S. debut, at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena in 1974. "They asked us if we wanted anything in our dressing room, so I asked for some Southern Comfort," he says. "I read that rock singers drank that before they went on. So I had this little shot when we go on, and I'm like, 'Holy mackerel!' I've got all of 26 minutes to play, and I'm dizzy for half of it.' Behold Rush's entire history of onstage intoxication."

Now while some might argue that any rock stars that are responsible enough not to get into the drug/alcohol scene at all must be nerds, I think that what I'm really aiming at here as evidence of the nerd factor is the phrase, "Holy mackerel!" Now, that's pretty nerdy.

How was their luck with the ladies?

"Now for the sex. This wont take long either. Lifeson is married to his first girlfriend, Lee is married to his high school sweetheart, and Peart was with the same woman for 22 years until she passed away in 1997. Of Rush's 150-odd songs, not a single one concerns that rather popular rock & roll topic: chicks - which, when compared to the likes of Kiss, makes Rush more or less the AV Club of 20th-century rock."

Songs without chicks are probably pretty nerdy. What did they write about?

"When Peart signed on as Rush's drummer, he also took on the band's lyric-writing duties, beginning one of the most infamous oeuvres in the entire rock canon. Peart did not write like a lyricist. He wrote like a philosopher. A German one. In translation. 'I was ambitious and had wide interests,' says Peart. 'So I kind of tried writing about everything: autobiography, science fiction, fantasy, social commentary and junior philosophy.'"

Did the fans like it?

"...Rush dived off the deep end of prog with Caress of Steel. The album, whose five songs contained the 12-minute "The Necromancer" (which drank deeply from the well of Tolkien) and the 19-minute "The Fountain of Lamneth" (about a search for the fountain of youth), tanked. The band went on an internally dubbed 'Down the Tubes Tour'...But at this rock bottom, Rush found their moment of clarity...

The result was 2112, widely considered Rush's masterwork: a seven-part, dystopian fantasy complete with interplanetary war, robotic vocal effects, instrumental fireworks and clerical bureaucracies straight from the Dune trilogy. With a theatrical pitch somewhere between Jesus Christ Superstar and Pink Floyd's The Wall, 2112 portrays a galaxy controlled by one Red Star of the Solar Federation, whose Priests of the Temples of Syrinx dictate all cultural life. In the titular year, a young hero discovers an ancient, mind-freeing relic - yes, an electric guitar - and brings this Promethean gift to the Talibanic priests, who promptly wreck it and ground him, sending him off to his bedroom, where he presumably smokes bud, bums out and eventually kills himself. After which a coup brings a new galactic order and completes the most heroic rendition of the cranky-adolescent-male consciousness ever committed to vinyl.

2112 went multiplatinum and won Rush their independence. But it did more than find an audience. With philosophical touchstones in Orwell, Nietzsche and the band's acknowledged hero, Ayn Rand (whose politics got the band members labeled cryptofascists in the late Seventies), the album played a role analogous to that of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology-launching book, Dianetics - eventually amassing the most die-hard, detail-obsessed rock fans in history."

I think that that paints a pretty good picture of this author's initial claim that Rush is a "nerd band." And perhaps this is why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame overlook them time and again, despite their obvious success. "Nerds have no place in Rock and Roll!" I can hear them protest. Or, perhaps they have something against Canadians. Anyhow, I like that the closing remarks of the article reflect the bands' feelings about this well-known rejection into the hall of fame.

"Self-effacing poise may be rare to arena rockers, but like Green Party candidates and Nascar heroes, the members of Rush have adjusted to both idolatry and disregard. Just prior to tonight's dinner, they were once again snubbed by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which instead inducted no greater rock luminaries than the Dave dark Five. But Rush seem convincingly unfazed. 'I just keep saying we're too young to be in there,' says Lee.

'Yeah,' says Peart. 'Unlike all those other people, we're still working.'

'I think it really upsets our fans,' allows Lifeson. 'It's a big issue for them.'

It's true that Rush doesn't mean today what it did in '76 or even '96. It may mean more. Back when Peart was lost in America, Lee remembers knowing that his friend's path back would be through music. 'Because that's who he was,' Lee says. 'The quickest way to health is to be who you are and do that thing that you love to do.' And if today's Rush stands for anything besides dazzling chops and heady abstractions, it may be that simple, oddly courageous conviction: doing what you love - whether it gets you called a nerd, spurned by your label or turned into an icon."

So, if you've read this far, you've basically read half the article. But here it is in full. And if you've read this far you know the message I want to leave with you. Do what you love! Be who you are! Even the n word, just like Rush, but the n word with teeth.