2010 Preface
Seems to me it’s chemistry…
Preface
Since their inception, Canadian rock trio Rush had the cards of popular music stacked against them. Today, to many, it is like they never existed – and yet, the wall- to-wall platinum and gold discs and the shelves stuffed with awards at their management offices in Toronto tell a different story. Rush have enjoyed success on a scale that many more famous stars would die for, and consistently achieved this success across more than two decades. Many of today’s more eligible rock bands, from Godsmack to the Manic Street Preachers, claim some kind of inspiration from the trio that no pundit has ever really managed to categorise, and Rush continues to draw crowds in every corner of the world they visit. And yet, and yet… there is no place for the band on the podium of mainstream music, alongside the rock illuminati – the Zeppelins, Queens and Nirvanas. The band has never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nor is it likely to make the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
While it is rare for Rush to be heard on the radio, when the band first reached out in the early seventies, it was radio – through characters such as Cleveland’s WMMS- FM programme director Donna Halper, CHUM-FM DJs David Marsden and Don Shafer in Toronto, Mercury label representative Cliff Burnstein and the like – that gave the band its first break. It is no coincidence that these same characters are recognised mavericks in the industry, even today working against the current to deliver more than musical opiates for the masses. Lucky perhaps that Rush should fall in with these people but the relationships were not theirs alone, the management company SRO’s joint chiefs of staff, Ray Danniels and Vic Wilson being no strangers to the maverick tendency.
In an industry driven by radio play, perhaps success cannot be judged by sales of records, tickets or t-shirts alone. On the surface, the arguments are simple – Rush’s music was never truly appropriate for widespread radio, so they say, and there is little point denying that the esoteric musical style and very literary lyrics that characterise the music, have appealed largely to a dispossessed subset of male listeners, themselves in search of more than yet another, rejigged regurgitation of the twelve bar blues. While there was always a place for such music, it wasn’t going to be Rush that broke through the mass-appeal conservatism that was rife in the biz. This would come a decade later with the arrival of grunge, spearheaded by the punk-influenced, but distinctively hard rocking, likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
A common argument is that Rush’s music was far too complex for “ordinary people” to get; this has been the basis for many a critic’s withering review. If there’s anything we can learn from the current popularity (on both sides of the Atlantic) of more progressive bands such as Radiohead and Muse, or even sci-fi rockers The Flaming Lips and The Mars Volta, it is that the final target for music, the listening public, is a lot more discerning than is generally assumed. Rush may have roused the ranks of the dispossessed, but this is in no small part because this audience refused to bow to what the majority of labels and radio programme directors were telling them. As if to cock a snook at mass marketing, Rush took this audience and made it its own. More than perhaps any band in the history of recorded music, Rush achieved success fundamentally and absolutely on its own terms.
Rush are more than a phenomenon. They are a statement, which runs something like this: music journalists, you were wrong. Observers of mainstream culture, you were wrong. By complaining about the music, the screeching vocals, the supposed political statements, you did your industry a disservice. You felt you could dictate what people listened to, and you failed.