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Great thread to post on the day before the one-year anniversary of Neil Peart's death, and fabulous work. Love it, and in honor of Neil's accomplishments--though the following is also largely critical--I offer this rather lengthy disquisition.
Big Rush fan here--of the early stuff, that is. I think 2112 was a fully mature album, and can't agree that it's got any serious problems; it's a little rough, but everything from there to Moving Pictures was real gold. Hemispheres was the unchallengeable, marvellous high point--an incredible combination of musical complexity and lyrical profundity overlain with a melodic continuity that made the whole album, even the epic title track, genuinely listenable at a level that no other prog-rock outfit ever came close to achieving. (For me and my high-school friends, anyway. Still is for me.) The Villa is the very best rock instrumental ever composed, and The Trees actually sounds like it's happening in the woods, what with Neil's woodblocks and the way Alex's guitar simulates wind soughing through leaves (and after the solo, his transitional chunky palm muting actually sounds like tree bark, if tree bark could talk). Absolutely incredible. Then after a slight, but not objectionable, dip with Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures tightened things up but maintained an extremely high level of quality. Signals wasn't half-bad either, though I was alarmed at the stylistic change--rightly so, as it turned out. I kept tabs on them for the (approximate) decade after that, but with disappointment after disappointment I stopped being a glutton for punishment with 1996's Test for Echo.
However, in homage to the anniversary of Neil's passing, over the past two weeks I've carefully listened to their entire catalog from beginning to end, and have also read Neil's musical memoir, Traveling Music. So am in a good position to make a final assessment (mine only, of course, not presuming to speak for anyone else). This thread is therefore serendipitous.
I noticed that--perspicaciously--the OP didn't say, "anyone like Rush?" But rather, and more accurately, "anyone like the Rushes?. Because there are indeed two distinct bands. Signals (1982) "signalled" a big stylistic shift but still offered that old Rush edge. However, two years later with Grace Under Pressure, Rush was gone and a new band was playing those instruments, and the original members never came back. As they went forward, the material they produced could often be classified as excellent indie rock. Challenging rhythms and great lyrics from Neil--Neil's lyrics were the one thing that actually improved a bit in the later music--tasty basslines from Geddy, with accomplished accompaniment by Alex. But that's it. Just a good indie pop-rock band with a few songs I like per album. Nothing special, no sharper edge, nothing that stood out significantly from any other good indie-rock band except Neil's lyrics.
What other band changed so drastically and still stayed together with all its founding members from beginning to end (considering Fly By Night to be their first real album)? Here's how Neil justified what has to be the single most dramatic transformation in rock history:
"When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late 70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, 'what am I supposed to do, forget how to play?', and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned." (292) [Here Neil cites Peter Gabriel, Trevor Horn, and Ian Anderson.] Then he goes on to say that by the time of Moving Pictures, "punk and new wave had themselves, inevitably, progressed . . . . By 1980, the leading edge of pop music had metamorphosed into ambitious, creative bands like Ultravox and the Police, and all that flux crept into Rush's music. 'You are what you eat,' or what you hear".
But what Neil was choosing to hear--and not to hear--is telling. There was a lot more new stuff available in the late 70s than "punk and new wave." Elsewhere, Neil gives a telling list of his "best" guitarists, aside from Alex: "Hendrix, Santana, Jeff Beck, Dave Gilmour" (167). Who Neil doesn't list here is just as important as the list he gives. Where is his appreciation of the metal guitarists, whose technical skills were generally greater than the musicians on Neil's list (even Hendrix's solos mostly aren't all that difficult to play; Jimi's monumental legacy lies in innovation rather than virtuousity)?
Here, it's critical to remember that late 70s and 80s metal raised the level of musicianship in the rock idiom by quite a bit, at least for the guitar. OK, Tony Iommi is not really that virtuosic, but the guys in the Scorpions, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden are blisteringly competent. And especially, of course, where is Neil's recognition of EVH (whom we also just lost, and who Neil never mentions once in his book)? And perhaps most importantly for subsequent developments, where is Randy Rhoads? All of those guys were out and solidly successful by Neil's big 1980 date, and except for Judas Priest, they were all as new as the "punk and new wave styles" Neil extols and therefore just as valid in terms of future trend-setting. (The Scorps weren't new in Europe but they only achieved success in the UK and USA in 1978.) But Neil takes great care to pointedly ignore all of them in his book.
One important fact Neil lets slip in another part of the book is that (very surprising to me, from arguably the most accomplished of all rock drummers to date) he never bothered to educate himself to the point where he could appreciate classical music or jazz, and he didn't feel that that was a problem (250). He only had a very basic understanding of harmony--the only harmonic instrument he ever played was a little bit of piano as a kid, which he quit as soon as he could get away with it (58). So he was badly equipped to understand classical music, which really requires a fair amount of theoretical background and stylistic education to fully appreciate. And that also meant that he was ill-equipped to comprehend the classically based possibilities for the rock idiom which Rhoads pointed toward and which would soon be exploited to such magnificent effect by people like Yngwie Malmsteen, Tony McAlpine, Jason Becker, Paul Gilbert, and all the other neoclassical shredders--and mellower but still fabulous instrumentalists like Eric Johnson.
So, "ride their dinosaurs into extinction", my ass. The next freakin' ten years--the whole rest of the 80s (speaking of rock, of course, not top-40/pop)--was the decade of the hair bands and the neoclassical shredders, all of whom held high standards of guitar-playing virtuousity, which showed that there was a profitable place in the music scene for complicated material. Even nondescript bands like Motley Crue & Ratt had very good guitar players. The sign of the times was Michael Jackson's "Beat It", put over the top as one of the decade's best-selling singles by EVH's shredder solo. And remember that this lasted for the whole decade and, indeed, a bit longer--grunge didn't muscle its way into the larger national consciousness until ca. 1992, and even then it wasn't totally monolithic. E.g. Tesla didn't have a problem going gold in 1994, and it's too bad they imploded before they could release another album.
So Neil's assessment was terribly premature, and that's a tragedy. Given what Rush did on Moving Pictures, they were poised to dominate a large segment of the 80's pop-metal scene. Musically, Rush was already there before that scene got started, and with better overall quality than anything that scene produced. But instead, apparently under Neil's heavy insistence, they quickly shifted wholesale to the "Ultravox/Police" model, turning their back on the heavier idiom, abandoning the leadership they could have exercised. Rush was most definitely not the Police, and they shouldn't have tried to be. But they did, and the loss is palpable. It's hard not to fantasize about what might have been if Rush had stayed in the driver's seat, setting an example for players like Yngwie, who might have been inspired to temper their guitar mania, trading it in for more tasteful Rush-like arrangements which might have brought the guitar down a bit but elevated the other instruments, per Rush's style, and made the neoclassical movement in general more accessible to a larger audience. A generation later, there might have been a whole lot more Dream Theaters than just one--and under Rush's continuing tutelage, those bands would have been a whole lot more listenable than the Dream Theater we got. And then, in 1992 rather than 1982, Rush could have released Signals and gone down their current road, or some other road--but having left a much heftier legacy behind.
This isn't just a pipe dream. We have an actual glimpse (just one) of what might have been: on the last album, Clockwork Angels, give a listen to track 2, "B2UB." It's not quite what they could have done right after Moving Pictures, but it gives at least a kinda-sorta idea of what of what it might have been like if they'd chosen to ride the pop-metal zeitgeist rather than the new-wave one in that fateful 1982 release. Think of what else was going on at the time: Ozzy's second album with Randy had been released the previous year, as had been Def Leppard's High 'n Dry (double platinum), and both Ozzy and Leppard were about to release notable followups the next year (Pyromania would reach DIAMOND); Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Van Halen, and the Scorpions were in full swing with Number of the Beast, Screaming For Vengeance, Diver Down and Blackout. And I could go on. The 80s metal decade had well and truly begun. Imagine if Rush had released a whole album of "B2UB"--and because they were just coming off Moving Pictures, I suspect it would have contained a few gems significantly better than "B2UB". But even a record that stayed at that level (with the addition of a few Villa-level solos from Alex) would have positioned Rush for the decade of dominance that could easily have been theirs. They wouldn't have achieved quite the commercial success of bands like Def Leppard and Quiet Riot, but they would have been the clear leaders of the pack that relied mostly on album sales rather than singles--the Judas Priests, the Iron Maidens, the Ozzy Osbournes. I am fully confident they would have enjoyed much more financial success than their new-wave path yielded.
But instead of following that logical progression, they did the exact opposite. After wussing out during the 80s and the early 90s, with Counterparts in 1993 they got heavier again, on a few songs. Test for Echo continued this trend (again, not all the tunes, just some), then Vapor Trails and Snakes and Arrows, their two next-to-last albums, were in fact mostly heavy. The last album, Clockwork Angels, returned to just partly heavy, but did feature "B2UB", Rush's most genuinely metallic song since parts of "Natural Science" from Permanent Waves. But all this was way, way, too late. They had long lost their heavy-progressive sensibility, and with the exception of that single song, the newer heavy material just doesn't fly well, for me at least. It's not that I'm stuck in the past. I'm a big fan of the current crop of hard rock/metal, and I badly, badly want to be able to categorize Rush's contemporary work as equal to it. Unfortunately, however, the modern hard rock/metal groups working now like Breaking Benjamin, Disturbed, Five Finger Death Punch, Skillet, and a whole bunch of others just do better at it. These groups don't have half of Rush's chops, but they've got twice the "feel". Neil, Geddy, and Alex stayed away too long, and they lost it. If they had just been able to get themselves back to the Moving Pictures "vibe" and then give that a somewhat heavier edge, Rush would have fit in fine with the bands formed during the re-emergence of hard rock/metal in the very late 90s/early 2000s. Or, rather, Rush would have stood head and shoulders above them. But that was apparently impossible; the compositional style they used for the heavier material on their final five albums was a kind of amalgamation of that early 80s new wave with which Neil was so smitten, combined with the "nu metal" developing by a little before 2000. For me, this reborn heaviness--though I find some of it attractive--generally falls pretty flat. I'll give Rush honorable mention for tossing out a few instrumentals post-1991 (on Roll the Bones, Counterparts, Test For Echo, Snakes and Arrows), and three of them are nice, but none can match YYZ, let alone La Villa.
I guess you truly can't go back home again--especially when you don't want to, and Neil clearly didn't want to. His last word on this issue, just a few pages away from the end of the book, is this: "personally, I would not mind if my first five years of drumming and lyric-writing with Rush could be consigned to oblivion" (342). This would flush down the toilet not just Fly By Night and Caress of Steel, which I agree are beginners' efforts, but even the incredible Hemispheres and, on either side of it, both the nicely polished Farewell To Kings and the even more sophisticated Permanent Waves. That would eliminate classics like "Closer to the Heart" and "Spirit of Radio" which most everyone would agree have significantly enriched our musical lives.
So that statement gives a pretty good indication of Neil's musical preferences. When he encountered new wave, something in it deeply attracted him and he decided he wanted to stay there. Now, this is just speculation on my part: but I can't get over the feeling that Neil strong-armed the other two guys into the Signals/Grace-Under-Pressure shift, softening the transition by using the boiling-frog tactic, getting them a very tiny part of the way there first with Permanent Waves, a slightly bigger fraction with Moving Pictures, then a whopping 50% there with Signals, and finally all the way with Grace.
Again, I'm basing an awful lot on a few statements in his book, his general antipathy to classical/jazz, and extrapolating that to his unstated but clear disdain for virtuousic metal. And I'll admit that I may be giving Geddy and Alex too little (dis)credit for the change; after all, they're the ones who do the composing in the band. It'd be nice to have something written by them as well to see whether or not my speculations hold water.
Oh well . . . dzsmith, I love your 2112 inlay. Brings back great memories of discovering Rush for the first time, me and my geeky musician friends knowing that while all the lunkhead athletes liked Led Zep and Black Sabbath and sometimes Floyd, we had stumbled upon the mainline cocaine of music, the real stuff. And it was ours, exclusively.
RIP, Neil. Like a jilted lover, I'm hurt over the betrayal--but setting classical music aside, you gave me the great musical love of my life.
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