Guest Post from Travalon: Rush - The Band I Grew Up With (Part One)

Back when I was in 6th grade in 1976 or ‘77 at little St. Mary’s School in Pewaukee (sadly now torn down) we had a group of hard rock fans in our class who really raved about the latest album called 2112 by the Canadian prog rock trio known as Rush. This is the first time I had ever heard of them and something about their name and the facts that they were only three guys and that they were from Canada intrigued me. I didn’t even hear a single track from the album, but I wanted to be one of these “ cool kids” so with enough allowance money on my walk home from school I stopped at the local record store Double D’s. The owner played the record for me before I purchased it and it was like nothing I had ever heard before: hard driving guitar (Alex Lifeson) and hard crashing drums( Neil Peart- known to be the greatest rock drummer of all time) twangy bass and a high pitched screechy voice singing the lead vocals (this was Geddy Lee who’s voice has been compared to a cat in a blender or Mickey Mouse on helium, its also been said he looks like a male witch) and the crazy lyrics:


We’ve taken care of everything, the words you read and the songs you sing, the pictures that give pleasure to your eye.
It’s one-for-all, and all- for-one, we work together common sons, never need to wonder how or why..

We are the priests of the Temples of Syrinx, our great computers fill the hallowed halls,
We are the priests of the Temples of Syrinx, all the gifts of life are held within these walls …


Weird, heavy stuff! One of these kids at school mentioned “ I wonder what kind of drugs they were on when they wrote that? “ Also the album cover with the huge red star in outer space and the picture on the back of the band dressed in white kimonos was unlike anything I’ve seen in rock art. Anyway, I was intrigued and pretty blown away, and didn’t hesitate to buy it. It was a concept album, based on the book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. 

I brought the album to music class where we could have any ( clean) record played. I think 2112 freaked out our teacher and some of the more strait laced girls but the small contingent of Rush fans loved it. I was considered cool to them ( at least for a short time) just because I bought that record. I remember showing the record to my parents. My mom said “ if that bunch of noise is what you want to blow your money on, ok” and dad said “ I don’t like records with loud blaring trumpets “ like it was a jazz record. I listened to the album ( not too loudly at home) and got to know it well. There was also a song with drug related lyrics called “ A Passage To Bangkok” with the opening lines:


Our first stop is in Bogata, to check the Colombian fields, the natives smile
and pass along a sample of their yield..
Sweet Jamaican pipe dreams, golden Acapulco nights, then Morocco and the east, fly by morning light..


I probably didn’t even realize what it was about back then. My sister-in-law had the next Rush album A Farewell To Kings in her record collection, I was surprised to find it among many classical and folk albums. She said her brother just left it with her and I could have it. “ Cool, thanks so much ! “ $7 saved for me too.
I love the song Xanadu from it with it’s unique lyrics: 

To seek the sacred River Ath,
To walk the caves of ice,
To break my fast on honey dew
and drink the milk of paradise..
I have heard the whispered tales of immortality
the deepest mystery, from an ancient book
I took a clue. I scaled the frozen mountaintops
of Eastern lands unknown, time and man alone
searching for the lost Xanadu..

Rush is hard rock for well- read nerds! There were very few love songs in their catalog, most were sci-fi, fantasy and mythology along with some philosophy, with the well-read and intellectual Peart writing all the lyrics. 

A year later one of my Rush loving classmates bragged about seeing them live in concert at Alpine Valley and his buddy climbed the fence and apparently snuck in for free. He said the song The Trees was “decent!! “ which was slang back then for “awesome” I guess. I had to hear this song and found it was on their latest release called Hemispheres. The song has very intriguing lyrics about how the oaks in the forest take up and control way more space than the maples. I read recently that it was a reference to Canada’s fight for independence from Great Britain. I bought the 8-track of it at Woolworths, frustrated that it broke up two great songs to switch programs. Then I also discovered their second album Fly By Night on the radio listening in the back bedroom to the WLPX 97 FM classic six-pack show on a Saturday night. I taped it with a Woolworth’s cassette on a cheap tape recorder, the technology of the times. A few years later I bought their 1980 release Permanent Waves at a Kohl’s Department store, which back then actually had a record department, along with toys and sporting goods. Now it’s so boring with just clothes and housewares. Sears actually had a record department back then too!

The biggest year in the long career of Rush was 1981, when I was a high school sophomore, and their top ten album Moving Pictures with the hits Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, Limelight, and YYZ came out. I was salivating when a friend on my school bus showed me the album and let me read the liner notes. As with Permanent Waves, these lyrics were simpler than on the previous albums. I also bought that 8 track at Woolworth’s. I’m not sure why I didn’t just buy the album on vinyl for just $2 more, I would’ve pulled more weeds at home for it. 

After the excellent double live album Exit Stage Left ( A saying taken from the cartoon character Snagglepuss, reflecting the band’s sense of humor), by the mid-1980’s Rush changed their style a bit with more keyboard driven, slower and slightly softer songs. I eventually bought their newer albums Signals, Power Windows and Hold Your Fire. I still enjoyed listening to them. but I wasn’t quite as fanatical about them as in previous years. My total enthusiasm for Rush was rekindled when I got together with a couple of buddies I graduated from high school with to watch the film version of Exit Stage Left drinking beers and singing along loudly. I also went out and bought their early Seventies albums Caress of Steel and All The World’s A Stage, this time sticking with vinyl. These albums aren’t ones guys usually play with their girlfriends around, they’re for diehard fans only, which seem to be mostly males. Today in 2025 their female fan base seems to have slowly grown.

Finally, in 1990 when I was in college and had a car my best friend ( at the time) asked me if I wanted to see Rush live with him at Alpine Valley on their Presto tour. It was a very reasonable $30 for our lawn seats and we got down pretty close behind the reserves. They were great, did pretty much all the old songs we wanted to hear and Peart’s drum solo just blew us away. They used good props too, such as blowing up two giant inflatable rabbits at each side of the stage. Little did I know concert ticket prices were to rise and even skyrocket in the near future, but I went to a lot of shows anyway and a lot of things about rock and roll that seemed like they would always be the same were soon to change. A lot of my rock and roll idols would get old, some would retire and others would pass away. Rush were very innovative, and their popularity grew over the decades. They were known to be the biggest “ cult” band in the world. Often experimenting with new styles, they kept rolling on through the 1990’s and into the 2000’s as I did with a lot of life changes.


To be continued…

Travalon