@JC

Two things I read the past week describing Geddy’s voice; 1) testicles crushed in a vice; and 2) makes Robert Plant sound like Leonard Cohen. Both made me laugh.

I also learned this week that Geddy is not his real name. His actual name is “Gary,” but his mother was a European Jew (holocaust survivor) and always pronounced “Gary” as “Geddy” and since he was a kid that’s what his friends called him and it stuck. That might have been covered in the documentary, but if it was then I forgot it.

Peart wrote a song for Geddy about his mother, on “Grace Under Pressure,” from stories she told. If there’s actually such a thing as a cool uptempo rock song about the horrors of Holocaust, “Red Sector A” might be one of the few.

Was reading today that Godsmack drummer said Peart was sick before the end of the last tour; and he said Peart had been confined to a wheelchair for months and couldn’t speak. Very sad. Nice to see people are discovering his legacy, though...

Rush Claims 23 of 25 Spots on LyricFind Global Chart After Neil Peart's Death

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/chart-beat/8548267/rush-lyricfind-global-chart-neil-peart-death

@Godder said in R.I.P. 2020:

RIP Rocky Johnson. Former WWE tag team champion and Hall of Famer, but best known for being Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson's father.

I saw him wrestle several times in person, and fondly remember when The Rock made his debut in WWE (as “Rocky Maivia”) my buddies telling me he was Rocky’s kid. Must have made Dad extremely proud to see the enormous success that Dwayne had. RIP.

@Bovidae The Washington Post published it’s 4th tribute yesterday, a story by one of their columnists about how Peart saved a relationship with his father. But that’s beside the point. What boggles my mind is that number. The Washington Post published FOUR tributes to a drummer of a Canadian metal band.

@JC By-Tor was one of the earliest songs that I liked, as far as 70s prog goes it’s an amusing fun song. They supported Kiss on a number of tours, played quite a few dates when Kiss exploded ‘74-76. In the Rush documentary Simmons talks about how they were always trying to get Rush out to party and score females, but were dismayed ‘cos they just wanted to go back to their hotel rooms and read books.

They were Spinal Tap, if Spinal Tap were virtuoso musicians.

@booboo

I’d say not. I seem to recall hearing “Closer to the Heart” played on Hauraki, maybe once, in 1978, and that was it.

Although they released a ton of records (incl. many, many live records), they were really a touring band. They made it a point of their identity that they didn’t want to make studio records that the three of them couldn’t replicate live on stage, so they were touring constantly — but they never made it to NZ or Oz.

It’s also notable that critics hated them for the first decade of their existence, and Geddy Lee’s voice was certainly a part of that. They didn’t get accepted into the mainstream until the Moving Pictures album in ‘81, and then they kinda exploded. I believe there was only 5 platinum-selling rock records in the USA that year, the worst year for rock record sales since the birth of rock, and Rush fully accounted for three of them (new fans who discovered them started buying the earlier releases). As far as hard rock meets prog at the time, Bonham was dead and Yes became The Buggles v2, which left Rush holding the bag.

Critics still weren’t on board, but the kids were, and the more the critics lambasted them, the more it galvanized those kids and made them intensely loyal. Nobody gave critics the middle-finger the way Rush fans did. And then they started dominating the musicians polls, Peart especially. He was treated like he was superhuman philosopher-king, which was why he retreated from public life. The fandom was suffocating him. How many times can a man hear “You’re the greatest ever” before he wants to climb into a hole, and he was hearing this from the time he was 24 years old.

I remember many observers being gobsmacked in the mid 1980s when Los Angeles radio station KROQ, at the time the pre-eminent classic-rock and contemporary rock FM station in America, was having annual listeners “Battle-Of-The-Bands” tournaments and it was coming down to Rush vs Zeppelin, and Rush was winning!!

My own preferences for hard rock-prog-fusion in the 70s/80s were more for Crimson, Jeff Beck, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever etc., I didn’t really rate Rush. But some of their songs were guilty pleasures, and I’ve come to appreciate them over the years simply because there was nobody touring like them.

Check out youtube some time, search for “Billy Corgan” + “Rush” and you’ll get an insight into the intensity of the band; He claims if they came out now “Pitchfork would be all over them, because they’re strange-as-fuck.” And if you want to see one of the best rock documentaries ever, download “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage.” After I saw that, I surrendered. I couldn’t help but like the band and their values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush:_Beyond_the_Lighted_Stage

Friends have been sending me links to photos of billboards along freeways across the U.S. commemorating Peart. Fans with big wallets are forking out to honour their guy.

@antipodean One of the things I’ve read in several tributes that never really dawned on me before — since Peart wrote all the lyrics, he knew where the drum parts were supposed to go before the other two musicians were even handed the lyrics. He’d said a number of times in interviews that he pitied the drummers who didn’t write the songs (meaning: nearly every rock drummer, ever) because he couldn’t image receiving a song with so little time to prepare and solve where the fills were supposed to go and when to get out of the way of the lyrics.

And it makes me smile reading stories about how he passed the audition to be their new drummer, and they immediately asked him to be their songwriter too, because they hated writing lyrics and saw his nose buried in a book all the time. He’d never written a song in his life, they already had a recording contract under their belt, he was trying to concentrate on developing his impossibly high standards on his kit, and he agreed to start writing songs! Amazing.