The Professor

Celebrating A Music Legend Named Neil

The cover of Exit…Stage Left features a photo of the stage in Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo (my hometown) when Rush was on tour in the early 80s. I regret I didn’t see Rush in the 80s during those early tours.

When Neil Peart died this week, five years ago, Little Bean was five.

We had just started hearing about this thing called Covid-19. Soon we’d be locked down, she’d be pulled from the rest of pre-school, and Kindergarten would be set up in our kitchen.

We’d begin what would be her first forays into music, and at the time that meant, MY music.

I saw Rush live once, on Nov. 10, 2002 in Manchester, N.H. as part of their Vapor Trails tour, an underrated album if you asked me. They opened a two part set on that tour with “Tom Sawyer” so that song was the first Rush song I’d ever heard them play live.

I’d always regretted not catching them earlier, when I was a young man, during the Moving Pictures / Signals years. I’m certain, in retrospect, that seeing one of those shows as a high school kid would have changed my life. Somehow.

My friends at that time all listened to Duran Duran or Flock of Seagulls. I listened to Rush. To be fair, I also listened to Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls, but I was convinced at the time that nobody whose favorite band was Duran Duran was listening to Rush as well. Only Rush fans had the intellectual curiosity to listen to all sorts of other music! (I was young.)

I loved music back then (as I do now) but I didn’t know music theory or what an octave was. I just knew Rush was different. I just knew that what they were doing, nobody else was doing. They were weird looking, awkward. They were well read. They were singing about things that were more than just dating, or girls. I wasn’t exactly sure WHAT they were singing about, but I knew it was different.

Before Rush, I had the Beatles, or Electric Light Orchestra, or Pink Floyd. But Rush’s music somehow felt like mine. It didn’t feel like I was sharing that music with the rest of the world. Being a Rush fan felt more intimate.

And so, nearly 40 years after it was first released, after hearing about Neil’s death, I asked Alexa to play “Tom Sawyer” for Little Bean.

She’d never heard Rush before. She was building a Frozen puzzle. I captured 45 seconds of that experience. Imagine listening to this song for the first time, can you remember? I’ll bet it looked a little something like this:

Little Bean Dances to Rush

I write about music in these pages often because of days and times like this. Music is healing, and connecting - music has given the two of us a bond and so much of that started for her as a little girl, in a warm living room, making a puzzle and dancing to Rush for the first time. We remember and new soul carries on.

Do we have any Rush fans among our readers? Did any of you see the band? Let us know!