On Going Solo
I just got around to watching the documentary about Rush 'Beyond the Lighted Stage'. It rekindled my memories of the days when I was an ardent fan.
I was thinking that Rush may in fact be better than the Beatles in some respects: 23 albums compared to the Beatles' 12, and all members are still alive and not estranged, joining cults or becoming dilettantes.
They are an amazing quirk of the music business. A search for 'Rush' on Wikipedia will put 'Rush (band)' at the top of the list, even before 'Rush Limbaugh' at least alphabetically. They epitomize the essence of music geekiness in a very endearing way.
The strength and longevity of the band may be attributed to the close relationship of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, chums since childhood, and the ostensible lack of a primary ego, like a Sting. While Lee fronts the band he is the leader only in a putative sense. Peart has had no problem being the 'new guy', a permanent ringer for John Rutsey, but as the primary lyricist he would be the most likely ego to inflate. Apparently Rush were a big fan of the Police, but the band's social structure couldn't have been more different. Sting was a dominant, autocratic songwriter. Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland made small contributions to the writing (probably by a capitulation by Sting), but they didn't 'write' songs per se. The 'writing' involved the parts they were playing, the guitar sounds that were used, and so on. But if Geddy were like a Sting, it is unlikely the band would have survived as long as it did, arguably. Both bands are standing the test of time for various reasons, but both for their ability to make their erstwhile fans nostalgic.
On Geddy Lee:
Aside from his strident vocal style, his real talent may be how he can fuse the complex prosody in Peart's lyrics with a contrapuntal bass line, something that does not come automatically or naturally without practice. Singing against a busy bass line can be a bit more tricky than singing and strumming a guitar. Performing the two parts together forces the negotiation of words, phrases, narrative and meaning with the bar line. If the lyrics are too wordy, all the words need to be packed into sometimes jerky metric schemes. This may be the reason that Rush uses odd meters so naturally, as it allows the rhythm of the language to flow naturally--in a kind of rock recitative. I don't suspect much of their music was written at a piano or with an acoustic guitar--I think it was Geddy singing against a bass as an accompaniment instrument. Some people can't conceive of writing songs on a bass, but I suspect he did.
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Speaking of the music in language, here is one of my favorite examples of a translation of speech prosody to a guitar solo--Steve Vai's So Happy. Some people thought this was done with a vocoder, but it is actually Vai manually following the contour of the voice.
[9/2/2024: A few months ago I was watching an interview with Peter Cetera taken around 2010 and he was talking about his split from Chicago and the launch of his solo career. The interviewer asked him about the Chicago 18 album, which didn't have him on it, yet sounded like he was. The popular songwriter tends to dominate the sound of a band, so, arguably, the best pop music is done by dominant songwriters. Band songs tend to become popular because people like the popularity of the band--they're not looking at the popularity of one of the members. If Geddy Lee does another solo album it won't sound like Rush; it will sound like Geddy Lee and then if Rush reunites and he does most of the songwriting, any album that Rush releases is going to sound like him, even inadvertently--like Chicago 18 sounded like a Peter Cetera record, not Chicago].
