It turns out this isn’t a bad piece of work. The band decided to celebrate the 30-year mark since their debut album by dipping back into their influences and cranking out eight tracks of classic/60s/brit-rock. They start the 27-minute fest with a replay of The Who’s “Summertime Blues”. This isn’t a jokey stab at a cover, like a tongue-in-cheek attempt a band would throw on a b-side or a fan club giveaway disc. It’s an honest attempt at capturing the spirit of Townshend’s execution of the Eddie Cochran original. The guitar is awesome! This rocks in a Zep-blues way even more than the earliest Rush. There’s tons of feedback pouring off of the heavy riffs, thick bass lines, and pounding drums. This doesn’t sound like a band that’s been doing their own thing for three decades – it sounds like a garage band slamming out old-school rock in a bar.

There’s more Who, two cuts by the Yardbirds, two by Buffalo Springfield, and one each by Love and Cream. All of the cuts are more of the same straightforward jamming. Geddy is not Neil Young vox-wise, but “Mr. Soul” is decent. It’s odd to hear “For What It’s Worth” (i.e. the song used in every other Vietnam protest montage in a film), but the mellowness gives you a nice breather from the rest of the scorching on the album.

I dig their take on “The Seeker”, which shows Alex Lifeson’s ability to channel Pete Townshend and really windmill through the power chords. There’s also a good Love cover of “Seven and Seven Is”, where Neil takes off on the drums. (It’s funny that on the original recording of this, Snoopy Pfisterer couldn’t keep up with the 30-some takes needed in the studio, and frontman Arthur Lee had to take over for him. Peart, of course, has no problems with this.)

The hottest cut on the album is “Crossroads”, the old Robert Johnson classic best known for its coverage by Cream. Alex does just as good a job as Eric Clapton on the feedback-laced fretwork for this one. You can tell the band had a lot of fun with this EP by the way they blast through these songs, and this is no exception. It’s funny that many panned Rush’s first album as being a Zep/Cream ripoff, and thirty years later, they’re covering a prototypical Cream song. What’s even funnier is that they sound so much like a bunch of 19-year-olds playing this stuff out at a local gig, and not a trio of multi-platinum artists who have spent decades filling stadiums by playing odd-meter geekfests of songs about nuclear war and talking trees.

I really enjoy this album, although it started a bad precedent. They toured in support of this EP, and a few years later, they’re releasing a live album for the tour supporting the live album they released when they recorded a DVD of a tour they did supporting an EP that they… hey, when is a new studio album coming out? Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I think we all wish they would get back on the four studio albums/one live album rotation. I’m glad they had fun with this one though.

Rating: 8.5

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Let’s face it: at this point, Rush stopped selling mass numbers of albums because they were interesting or good, and managed to sell a lot of records because they were Rush records. I’m sure there are many people who would argue that this was the greatest stuff ever, but I’m not one of them. However, there are plenty of completists that will buy anything released by Rush without question.

I won’t deny that the trio was still trying new things and attempting to progress musically. If you look at the albums between Hold Your Fire and Counterparts, there’s sort of a bell curve of writing style where the band wavers, overcorrects, and eventually drops into a good groove. Fortunately, that means Counterparts is excellent. Unfortunately, that means there are many missteps along the way.

One interesting example is an instrumental track, “Where’s My Thing?, Pt. 4: Gangster of Boats Trilogy”. It’s great that the band dipped back to their prog roots and decided to do their first instrumental track since “YYZ”. Unfortunately, it’s a synth-laden, fake-brassy track that’s doesn’t stand out as a feat of technical prowess. Most of the album has the same dynamic; things aren’t catchy, and songs blur into each other, with none of them standing out. The only ultimately memorable songs to me are the opener, “Dreamline”, which has a catchy chorus, and “Heresy”, which is Rush’s “the wall fell down” song (which was a big fad of the time.)

And then there’s the title track. And the rap. Geddy Lee raps. I don’t even know how to process this. A RAP. Jesus H. Christ on a cross – I mean, I have nothing against rap, and I even own a few records of the genre and can enjoy them, but this is like when your parents try to act cool and learn like one word of youth slang and then use it incorrectly to gain some kind of cred with you. I wish I could just pretend this whole album never happened.

Anyway, I have a minor conspiracy theory about how such a shoddy album could chart so well: RTB was the first Rush release in the Nielsen SoundScan era. Prior to SoundScan’s adoption on March 1, 1991, the weekly Billboard 200 chart was assembled together from vague statistics reported manually by store owners based on inventory changes and normalized with secretive statistical voodoo. But starting in May of 1991, actual barcode scans in stores with computerized point-of-sale systems were directly used to measure performance on Billboard charts.

This led to a strange shift; instead of being based on a weighting of store owners’ perceived sales figures, they were based on actual sales figures. This meant that some albums that you wouldn’t think were chartable would show up and rate high. The first #1 album on the post-SoundScan Billboard 200 was a Michael Bolton album. Heavy metal albums, which traditionally were not well-reported, suddenly tore up the charts. Skid Row’s second album, Slave to the Grind, entered the charts at #1, and then rapidly fell back off, because a surge of people bought it during a single week. And remember when Guns ‘N Roses had the big Use Your Illusion midnight purchase rush? Actually, pretty much every big band started having those Tuesday night come-in-at-midnight store events, mostly because it was a good way to juice SoundScan stats. (It was also a good way to get people to line up to buy a crappy Guns ‘N Roses album of cover tunes, but that’s another review.)

Amazon and iTunes have similar rating systems, in which titles with large purchase numbers at very specific time periods skew statistics. A perfect example of this in 2008 was when Stephen Colbert urged all of his fans to buy his Christmas album on iTunes at one specific time. This threw off the system and unseated a much larger-selling Kanye West album from the top position. So when you have a band with tons of loyal fans that all rush out at midnight on a certain day to buy the band’s new album sight unseen, it just might chart very well, even if it sucked total shit and had Geddy Lee doing a god damned rap in one song.

I remember this album coming out, and being excited that a new Rush song was on the radio, but I didn’t hurry to the record store and wait in line all night for this one. In fact, I think I listened to it once at a record store and decided to pass on it. Much later, I picked up a used copy, listened to it a few times, and must have sold it back, because I had to go out and buy another copy on iTunes to write this review. Maybe the reason I never got into this album, aside from its contents, was that so much else was going on at that point in music. A ton of excellent metal albums came out around then (Entombed – Clandestine; Carcass – Necroticism…; Death – Human; Motorhead – 1916) and this got lost in the shuffle.

Rating: 4

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This album was recorded in historic Massey Hall in Toronto, a 2700-seat venue with a vivid past, serving as the location of classic acts from Charlie Parker to Frank Zappa. Terry Brown and crew captured their June 11-13 1976 shows on tape, from the tour supporting 2112, restructuring the order of their set into an hour-and-ninteen-minute series of two LPs’ worth of live tunes.

The older, hard rock side of Rush is solidly displayed here. They start by rocking out “Bastille Day” and then pounding through live versions of stuff like “Anthem” and “Something For Nothing”, plus medleys, like starting with “Fly By Night” and segueing into “In the Mood”. All of this shows Alex’s ability to plow through the rhythm and then switch to a screaming bluesy solo and back, without the aid of overdubs or a rhythm guitarist behind him. This is helped with Geddy’s bass, which is chunky and follows the guitar well.

If you’re looking for more in the prog vein, there is a truncated version of the first side of their latest album at the time, 2112, which removes the “Oracle” and shortens the “Discovery” sub-songs, clocking in at just over 15 minutes. (And a minor gripe is that this is tracked on the CD as a single song, so you can’t skip around easily, which sucks, because sometimes I’m in the mood to just jump to “Grand Finale” and rock that part out.) On the tail of that is a twelve-minute rendition of “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”, which is pretty faithful to the album version.

A big reason I like this album more than the other Rush live albums is there’s a lot more of the human element shown here; it’s probably the most honest of the live albums. The band isn’t spot-on perfect here, which is good. You can see the holes where overdubs weren’t compensated with walls of Taurus synth and triggered MIDI and other sampled wizardry. They got around the limitations the old-fashioned way: by improvising, cutting corners, and making it sound good. Add to this that Massey Hall isn’t a huge place. I myself am by no means a talented musician, but in college, I played bass (for one gig) for a band that played in a sold-out hall twice the size of this one. For me to think of Rush playing in a theater half that size boggles my mind. And you can hear it; There isn’t constant audience noise. For some numbers, the crowd is quiet, and then waits for the end of the song to applause. This is much more appealing to me than a giant arena where people are cheering for every second because Rush is the biggest thing in the world, or a “live” album recorded in a studio with a constant crowd sound dubbed in from a stock audio reel. This small venue dynamic shows them as a working band, just starting, still struggling. And I like that.

The small things add up, too. A few times, Alex gets a touch of feedback in places where it didn’t sound planned. Neil fills in with his cowbell here and there, and sounds like he’s having fun on the set. When they go from the slow to the heavy part of “In the End”, Geddy counts off with “one, two, buckle my shoe”. There are a lot of little fills and runs at the ends of songs that shows that they’re still organic.

Probably my favorite bit is the medley of “Working Man” and “Finding My Way”, which completely rocks out both songs, and adds a trademark drum solo by “the professor on the drum kit”. I have to say, compared to later stuff, you can tell Neil is still building his chops here. This is a pre-electronic, pre-trigger, pre-MIDI drum solo, nothing but skins and a little bit of cowbell.

A minor nit: the old CD had to clip the quad-side album at 75 minutes, and that meant dropping “What You’re Doing”, and also dropping this bit of chatter between the band members as they ran offstage and then slammed a door behind them. This got fixed in the 1997 remaster/reissue.

Overall, this is a nice time capsule and a great way to end the early hard rock era of the band. From here, things got a lot more proggy and the band left behind the desire to be another Zep clone. But it’s still fun to go back to this every once in a while and see a recap of what the band did for those first four albums.

Rating: 8

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Listening to Alex talk is always an interesting proposition for me. I always think of Geddy as the voice of the band in the literal sense, but so much of what I’ve read over the years, both in books and in the actual lyrics, are written by Neil. So the thought of Alex doing anything other than playing the six-string is out of sorts for me. But it turns out he’s a wonderful conversationalist in this interview. A good chunk of the talk deals with how the band approaches music, and he details their unique writing process. When the band hides away on a Canadian farm for a few weeks to write, Neil is in one end of the house, shuffling papers and penning lyrics, while Alex and Geddy are at the other end, noodling on their stringed instruments, taping riffs and jamming away at embryonic songs. It seems strange that a band with lyrics and complicated music twisted tightly together can write like that, but it works well. Each night, the band regroups and laminates together the raw pieces into well-crafted songs.

One of the funnier bits in the interview is a discussion about the early days, in which Alex admits that back in the day, he used to work at a gas station pumping gas during the week, and then the band went out on weekends to gig. He also said in the early years (the mid-70s), he was barely making rent on a tiny apartment, and when he wasn’t on tour supporting albums like Caress of Steel, he was working as a plumber for his dad. It’s hard to imagine Rush as anything but successful, but according to this interview, they struggled until Moving Pictures.

Lifeson seems to have his head on straight, even if they are somewhat more famous by this point. He emphasizes that the music is most important to them, not the partying, which kept the band together for so long. He also talks about family, and how his then-17-year-old son was more of a friend than a kid to him (he was 34 at the time). He also mentions his son’s teenaged attempts at music and bands, which is humorous.

This interview sounds like it was recorded in a restaurant. Alex is recorded well, but the interviewer’s voice is a bit muffled and has a heavy accent, so it’s hard to hear exactly what he’s asking. There’s not a smooth start or stop on this, and it is by no means a pro release, but it’s an interesting snippet of conversation. You’ll have to hunt to find this one, but if you’re a fan, it’s a nice little view into the late-80s world of Rush.

Rating: 7

Neil Peart, fresh off an 18-month stint of starvation, dead-end musical attempts, and a demeaning job of selling trinkets to tourists in London, joined Rush two weeks before their first US tour. In addition to adding his manic drum stylings to the band, he also became their chief lyricist. Both skills are obvious from the get-go on this eight-track LP, with the first song, “Anthem”. Even in the first sixty seconds, we hear Neil Peart’s drumming can drive more complex rhythms than the simple 4/4 Cream/Deep Purple rip-off beats of his predecessor. And the song’s about the Ayn Rand book of the same title, showcasing Neil’s bookworm-dom which would become apparent over the next few albums.

If you compare Fly by Night with the band’s first effort, there are many similarities. Although production is more consistent and solid, it still has the mid-70s echoey sound, as opposed to the cleaner recording on later albums. This was also recorded at Toronto Sound Studios, but instead of a 1″ 8-track, they used 2″ 16-track tape on a Studer deck with a Neve console, which gave it a warm sound and let them be more flexible with overdubs. And behind that Neve console was Terry Brown, the band’s long-time fourth member, who would produce this and the band’s next eight albums.

This album is split almost down the middle into two types of songs: “Life is rough on the road being a rock star”, and “I bet it would be smart to market ourselves to nerdy 15-year-olds who play a lot of D&D”. Case in point on the latter is “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”, a near-nine-minute literary epic that introduces the band’s use of concept in their album-oriented music. It’s a prototypical rock music battle, much like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, except it was never featured in a John Travolta album, and the lyrics are more suited for the kind of guy who tries to make his own chain-mail out of soda can tabs and wear it to high school for yearbook picture day. Musically, it’s pretty impressive stuff; Peart is all over the place on the drum kit, and Alex Lifeson contributes a lot of shrieking guitar, including a very bluesy solo towards the end.

The band also showcases their love of J.R.R. Tolkien in the song “Rivendell”, which features some of the stupidest lyrics possible in a song. “Lying in the warm grass / feel the sun upon your…. face.” Ugh. And I should clarify for those of you born in the 1980s that back in 1975, it was not cool in any way to like Tolkein. This was long before the films made it cool, and you were looking at a serious ass-beating if you sat in study hall and perfected your Elven calligraphy between readings of The Two Towers. Taking metal music, the art form of Satan and Ozzy himself, and taking a sudden turn into dreamy poetry about Elves was prime grounds for your parents to whisk you away to some kind of backwater evangelical reprogramming camp, where the ex-con counselors could beat the living shit out of you until they were certain you were heterosexual and would never roll a 2d12 again.

This album’s not all bad. The title track, with lyrics penned by Peart to describe his exit from Canada to London, is a bit foppish but has some decent soloing in it. “Beneath, Between, & Behind” has some cool drumming, including probably what’s the first double-bass on a Rush album. “In the End” has a great sound to it, especially the more-electric second half of the song. (I do have to question a vocalist with such questionable sexuality choosing to sing a song called “In the End”, but I’m not the one having to answer that question on a constant basis.) Aside from “Rivendell” and “By-Tor”, most of the album is only a slight progression from their first LP’s extremely straightforward hard rock sensibilities. But it’s a good progression, and the birth of what later became a very unique formula.

There are a couple of oddities on this album, so I’ll put them in a nice bulleted list for you:

• “Beneath, Between, & Behind” was the first song that Peart worked on, and the only Rush song that Geddy Lee did not work on in any way.
• “Making Memories” is the only Rush song featuring slide guitar.
• “Rivendell” is the only Rush song that does not include drums.

This is a short one, clocking in at a mere 37:18. But if you can overlook the dorkiness, it’s a decent $8 investment for a listen at the first shot of this band’s golden lineup.

Rating: 7.5

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Okay, so this album is supposed to be a big deal, because Rush put out a lot of nerdy Tolkein-rock on their first three (well, second and third) albums, and this is the one that got people to go to the record store and put down their cash. It’s arguable whether or not this album or the following All the World’s a Stage pushed their work out there more, since the live album carried these songs a bit more. But either way, this is the biggest of the first “set” of Rush albums, and it’s one that everyone wants in their collection.

I don’t need to say much about the Orwellian 2112 song. It’s 20:33 of rock opera that has some quiet moments, some other decent songwriting, and ends in a huge finale of dueling guitar and bass and a booming robot voice proclaiming “ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION: WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL”. Even though their record company tried to steer them away from writing another giant suite of conceptual music (on the heels of Caress of Steel which was a huge commercial failure), the band decided to belt out this giant story of a totalitarian society in the future that bans music and art. Meanwhile, a dude discovers an old guitar, learns how to play it (in just over three minutes, which is part III of the song), and then presents it to his masters, who smash it. The guy go hides in a cave and offs himself. The song ends with a giant space battle and an ambiguous ending, where either the high priests of the new order destroy everything and assume control, or some new power overthrows the priests and assumes control. (We don’t know which, although I’m sure I will get a few emails from people saying what the real meaning is supposed to be.)

Chief lyricist Neil Peart was heavily influenced by the Ayn Rand book Anthem for this story, although he later claims he didn’t realize how much he ripped off her story until he looked back at it later. Either way, he thanks her in the liner notes. Oddly enough, the band does another song, “Anthem”, also based on Rand’s work. And years later, the movie Footloose was based on the main premise of “2112″. (Okay, it wasn’t.)

“2112″ is a cool bit, but it’s also a curse, because you don’t want to be forced to play a huge cumbersome twenty-minute piece during every one of your live sets. And decades later, when they pulled this out of the chest and reintroduced a shorter version to live shows, Geddy Lee could no longer hit all of his older shrieking high notes, requiring a pitch shift downward that made it all sound weird. Still, good stuff and pretty much a decent ref back to 1976 for all of us.

The rest of the album doesn’t hold up well at all. “Something for Nothing” is a straight-up rocker that still finds its way into modern setlists. “A Passage to Bangkok”, a little ballad written about smoking hash, probably seemed like all the rage back in ’76, but the band tried to later wash its hands of it during the Reagan-era “just say no” years, even deleting it from a live album when it got re-released to CD. “Lessons” is marginal (and one of few songs where Lifeson wrote the lyrics instead of Peart), and “Tears” is straight-up weepy (with lyrics by Geddy.) “The Twilight Zone” takes the mark for the strangest little song they ever released. The little romp through a handful of Rod Serling-hosted horror episodes was filller written at the last minute while the band was in the studio, something they admit used to happen on each of their albums. Aside from the titular cut, if they released this CD with none of the other tracks except maybe “Something for Nothing” and maybe padded it with live stuff, I’m not sure anyone will notice.

This is an interesting album for historical reasons, but it’s not a regular in my playlist. “2112″ has been redone at least twice on live albums, plus any boots you might have, and they are all much more listenable as far as the other tracks before and after. Buy this if you’re a completist (and get the gold disc if you’re a completist with a lot of cash) but focus on the later albums if you’re on a budget.

Rating: 7

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This is probably the cleanest recorded Rush live album of the five (or six) officially offered by the band. It’s hard to even tell it’s a live album during most of the songs, because there’s absolutely no crowd noise, and the conditions are absolutely perfect. It’s also important to note that Rush almost never deviates from the recorded version of the song, except maybe an extra “ba-bum” at the end of a song. Combine the two, and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish if you’re listening to the live version or the studio version through a lot of the album. Rush fanatics absolutely love this, and think it’s the highest form of perfection and a demonstration how well the trio can play. I’d be more impressed if they could mix things up a bit more, maybe not as much as Frank Zappa did on his ever-changing, ever-mutating setlists, but maybe an extra or different solo here or there.

This album captures the era of Rush after Moving Pictures, but before the band slowed things down and became more irregular with their studio and touring schedule. They blew their wad on the classic, rockable stuff over their previous two live albums, and the only old tune that survives here is the closer, “Closer to the Heart”. Yes, they did play “YYZ” and “Tom Sawyer” on the tour, but this album is just a 75-minute collection of the best parts of the evening, not a historical bootleg-type capture of the whole show. So they really trimmed back the tracklist to only showcase the new stuff.

That means you’ve got a lot of the more dire, more synthified, less guitar-oriented numbers. We’re talking half of Power Windows, a lot of Signals, and a lot of Grace Under Pressure (although not the songs I’d want, and they do “Red Sector A” toward the end of the CD, which usually puts me to sleep.) The one advantage is that the live sound is much better than some of the studio sound on some of these numbers. For example, “The Big Money” (the opener, after a track of the Three Stooges theme music) has a much crisper and a slightly bassier sound to it, and I like it better than the cut on the original album. This is consistent across all of the tracks; without spending hundreds of hours spinning knobs in the studio for that polished sound, they introduce more of Geddy’s bass and a good live guitar sound that challenges the synth-heavy landscape.

There are only four tracks from the album this tour supported, which is also strange. It’s a good grouping from Hold Your Fire, though. They all sound pretty much identical to the album version, which doesn’t do much, but it’s always enjoyable to hear them again. “Mission” was a remarkable live track, because that’s the song where they dropped a million red balloons into the crowd, ala the three red spheres on the cover of the album. It was sensational to be on the first deck of this auditorium and see all of these red spheres float
down into the crowd on the floor and then spread out like crimson paint. Unfortunately, you can’t hear this on the live album, but the song’s a nice reminder if you were there (or saw a video).

The highlight of this album is “The Rhythm Method”, Neil Peart’s drum solo. Unlike other albums, this is a standalone solo, not merged in the middle of another song. Peart does a bit of the old-school stuff, but halfway through the solo, his drum kit turns to reveal his electronic drums, and he plays between both sets, using the e-drums to trigger MIDI synth beats that sound like stuff from a big-band number. It’s a completely unique sound and approach, and even though it’s less than five minutes long, it packs a tremendous amount of drumming in a short space.

This isn’t a bad live album. At first, I thought I’d give it a lower rating, because I seldom listen to it, and it’s not a lot of things. It’s not long, and it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of stuff on it. It doesn’t have the old favorites. It doesn’t do anything dramatic or weird or neat (aside from Neil’s solo). It’s a very straightforward capture of one CD’s worth of a concert that was recorded well, end of story. But looking back, it’s such a great-sounding capture of the band at a very key time in their career that’s usually forgotten. I don’t think most people would buy this album to get started on Rush, because there are all kinds of collections and compilations of the old stuff, and I don’t think a fan looking for a good live album would pick this, when they could get one of the older classics, or get a much greater value out of the 3-CD Different Stages CD. But for some reason, I keep listening to this CD, and I think back to when I got it, and it’s just such a perfect little time machine to then, that I realize I do really like this.

Rating: 8

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"Bastille Day"
    Beamsville, Pittsburgh, Louisville
"I Think I'm Going Bold"
    Saginaw, Fort Wayne, Lansing
"Lakeside Park"
    South Bend, Saginaw, Terre Haute, Cincinnati
"The Necromancer"
    Los Angeles, Toronto
"The Fountain Of Lamneth"
  "In The Valley"
    Beamsville, Atlanta
  "Didacts & Narpets"
    Beamsville, Toronto
  "No-one At The Bridge"
    Beamsville, Dallas, South Bend
  "Panacea"
    Beamsville, Corpus Christi, Atlanta
  "Bacchus Plateau"
    Atlanta, Beamsville, Northampton Penn
  "The Fountain"
    Beamsville, Chicago, Dallas, Lansing, Detroit, Louisville

On to the review. This is a really lopsided album, I hate to say. It’s as if the band simultaneously realized they could write long-length prog rock epics, but needed to write short little AOR ditties to get on the radio. How did they reconcile this? By writing three little songs and two really big ones. They did some good stuff in here, but as an album, it’s not balanced. And the record company thought the same thing, especially since this album did not outsell its predecessor.

Both of the long tracks (“The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth”) remind me entirely of playing D&D in my mom’s basement. Actually, they remind me a little more of the days before my driver’s license or the invention of the opposite sex, when I used to build model airplanes (when they still had the good glue) and listen to Rush tapes on repeat, over and over. Both of the long tracks are excellent and overly geeky, with lots of weird drumming and some strange vocal effects and stories of mystical times and placest. “Necromancer” is totally about Lord of the Rings, while “Lamneth” is a more philosophical take on addiction and life. The former even includes a short tie-in to the last album, aka the song “By Tor and the Snow-Dog”, also a long-format tune that I guess needed just a little more. It’s great to listen to this stuff for the pure nerdiness of it, and to also see a precursor of what would later lead to 2112, among other things. My favorite little bit is “Didacts and Narpets”, which is nothing more than a really quick drum part from Neil Peart, with Geddy shouting a bunch of weird, unintelligible stuff over it. (Yes, I know there are exact lyrics and even a meaning for the title, but I’m too lazy to google for it, and I’m to afraid that if I paraphrase, I’ll get a million Rush fanatics correcting me. The truth is out there.)

Of the other three songs, “Bastille Day” is strong, and gives us a little history lesson wrapped in a Zep-like rock number. It’s solid, but always bugged me for some reason. “I Think I’m Going Bald” is absolutely stupid, and evidence that the band ran out of material in the studio. (It was actually written for Canadian band Max Webster.) “Lakeside Park” (written in South Bend!) is a mellower tune, talking about hanging out on Victoria Day at St. Catharine’s, on Lake Ontario. It’s a very sweet little song talking about hanging out with friends on the holiday, and I’ve always liked it. It got the band a fair bit of airplay, especially in their native Canada (although Geddy Lee, in a 1993 interview, says the song makes him cringe.)

Overall, this isn’t a bad album, although back in the days of tape, I had to do some careful fast-forwarding. It’s dated, and it’s not perfect, but it’s a good effort, considering all of these songs were written in hotel rooms after the band put in a full night gigging on the road. I wish I could give this a higher rating, but it’s not exactly like the kind of thing I’d leave in my car and listen to every other day. It’s probably my favorite of the pre-2112 albums, but that’s when things suddenly took off in full-prog-ahead mode, so this is more of an overlooked era for many.

Rating: 7

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The easiest way to sonically describe this is Led Zeppelin clone with a chick singer. The band blows through eight numbers that are straight-up, simple, forgettable AOR rock. And I guess that’s forgivable. I mean, listen to some of AC/DC’s early stuff and it sure isn’t Back in Black. It’s barely metal as we know it today. Same with KISS, same with a lot of other bands that started before things really got categorized and defined. So here are some tracks of simple bar-band blues, and that’s fine. And Neil Peart wasn’t in the band yet, so you’re trading the all-time best drum wizard for regular old guy John Rutsey clonking away the basic beats. (Rutsey quit the band after their first release, saying that they weren’t going anywhere, and also citing his diabetes as being a problem with extended touring. He, oddly enough, got into amateur bodybuilding after he dropped out of music.)

Probably the biggest problem on this album is the big love-it-or-hate-it of Rush, being Geddy Lee’s vocals. Some people are immediately turned off by his high-register singing, which sounds slightly feminine or falsetto. I personally don’t mind his singing a lot of the time, but there are usually a couple of runs or notes per album that grate at me a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff on this first album falls under that category. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more “oooh yeeah” phrasing in the hard rock style, and by the time they started singing more sedate stuff about Dungeons and Dragons and not “baby-baby” bar music, he stopped doing that.

There are a couple of gems in this album. One is the song “Working Man”, which became a live staple for a while, and rocks out well. It also, like many of the songs here, shows that Alex Lifeson is a damn good guitarist, and can really jam away like he just got done listening to a bunch of Hendrix and wants to do similar work. This song is the reason a DJ in Ohio started spinning the record, playing the song on Friday afternoons to their working-class fans. (This later resulted in the band’s deal with Mercury records, and the wider rerelease of this album.) “Finding My Way” is a good opener, and “In the Mood” is funny, but maybe a bit corny. The other stuff is so un-Rush-like it’s only interesting as a historical note. Probably the most interesting thing about this material is that it deals with straight-up, hey-baby sex stuff, which became taboo as the band went on to talk about inevitable nuclear war and starships vanishing into black holes.

The album itself has some interesting history, in that it was pieced together from two different studios. The band’s first release, a cover of the song “Not Fade Away”, was recorded with an original B-side. This work was done at Toronto’s Eastern Studios (where Gordon Lightfoot was putting down most of his mid-seventies albums, too) in a series of graveyard shifts, and included two other original songs, plus the versions of “In the Mood” and “Take a Friend” that ended up on the LP. The band also laid down some more skeletal work on other songs on the studio’s 8-track before becoming dissatisfied and moving to Toronto Sound Studios and self-producing the rest of the album. No record company would touch the album or the “Not Fade Away” single, so the band and manager Ray Daniels formed Moon Records to release both. When the album got picked up by Mercury, long-time Rush producer Terry Brown re-mixed the album into the form most of us have heard.

(Also worth noting: in 2008, the band found an old tape with a different version of “Working Man”, including an alternate solo. This was released directly to the Rock Band video game, and then later released on iTunes. It’s worth the 99 cents to hear this slightly different version if you’re a Rush fanatic.)

All I can really say about this album is that it got a lot better really fast. Completists will obviously want check this out, but it’s a tough sell for the casual fan of the later music. If you’re only familiar with “Tom Sawyer” and newer, a better dip into the old catalog would be starting with Fly By Night, and catching the couple of good tunes here on the first live album with Neil on the drums.

Rating: 6.5

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Here’s what might be throwing me: This is the first album since their sophomore effort that wasn’t produced by Terry Brown. It’s said the switch to Peter Henderson had to do more with accessibility, which seems strange following Moving Pictures, which produced the only song for which 90% of the population knows of the band at all. (Henderson was previously known as the producer of Supertramp’s biggest albums, as well as an engineer for Frank Zappa, among others.) And I guess the soundscape might match pop back then a bit better. (It’s also worth noting that Steve Lillywhite was supposed to produce this album, but pulled out of the project at the last minute, almost derailing the entire project. Henderson was their last-second replacement.)

The easiest way to describe this album is to first go into the differences between it and previous albums. First, there’s not a lot of bass on this album. And while I mean thin-sounding bass, I also mean that there’s at least one song with NO bass, where Geddy Lee just plays synth and sings. And there’s a lot more synth on this album. Previously, the band just filled out their sound with bass pedals, and Geddy reached over to play a line or two here and there, like a solo opposite from Alex’s guitars. But here, there are more places where MIDI madness has taken over not only Geddy’s performances, but also those of the guitar. This album is the first to have markedly less guitar, or more “atmospheric” sounds of droning chords for a measure or two at a time, but less leads and powered strumming. The drums are still there, and Neil Peart still lives behind the 97-piece drum kit, but his playing is much more methodical and exact. There aren’t many stray or extra beats anywhere, and certainly no heroics in the solo department. It’s all very exact. And I guess that reminds me of the era, of everything becoming so exact. Computerized watches! Fuel injection! Mechanized assembly! Welding robots! 2000 would be here soon, and we’d all be living on the moon, so make your prog-rock as efficient and exact as possible.

The other thing is that this album takes a rather dark turn toward social and political issues. The opening song, “Distant Early Warning”, describes how the nuclear war is going to start in moments, and what humanity has brought onto itself. “Red Sector A” (the bassless song, for those keeping track) talks about concentration camps in World War II, a place where Geddy Lee’s parents survived before fleeing to Canada. “Between the Wheels”, “Kid Gloves”, and “Red Lenses” are all political gesturing to the superpower-driven Cold War.

All of these songs are interesting sonic paintings of the time. But if you’ve ever seen them performed live, they’re also very tedious. I seem to remember a videotape of a concert from this era, and it was seriously like sitting through the Canadian Socialist Worker’s Party convention. I’m surprised that “Distant Early Warning” remained a staple for live sets as long as it did. For me, I was always thankful for this song, because it was a good time during their live sets to get up and go to the can. (This was later replaced with “Nobody’s Hero”.)

Oddly enough, the album as a whole seems to be greater than its parts, despite the fact that it’s not a concept album in the strictest sense. When you play it from the beginning to end, it flows well, and has an even sound that carries you easily. When I’m working on some writing or taking a long car trip and I need something to kill some time, this album always seems to end up in the player. There are songs that I like (“Red Lenses”, “Between the Wheels”, “Afterimage”), and like I said, it’s a very true look at what 1984 was like for me (no Orwellian pun intended.) The only reason I can’t give this a higher rating is that it doesn’t rock. Go listen to “Tom Sawyer” or “YYZ” and then listen to “Red Sector A”. Where are the guitars? The solos? The rock? Rush is a rock band! They took themselves too seriously on this one, and that’s why I’m saying it’s only slightly above-average.

Rating: 8

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