Word came this year that a documentary movie about Rush, ‘Beyond The Lighted Stage’, would be shown in theatres in select cities this summer. I pledged that I would go to Louisville, even drive as far as Chicago, to experience it first hand on the big screen. D-93’s Tommy Starr kindly orchestrated a rare-for-me road trip to Nashville with himself, Fenner Castner, and Hunter Goatley to enjoy it in the tres hip, full bar-serving Belcourt Theatre in Hillsboro Village, where I had seen so many movies growing up…movies like ‘Superman’ and ‘Watership Down’. The RUSH movie totally delivered, as I knew it would. It was astoundingly informative, hilarious, and emotionally exhausting. The producer of some of their later albums starting with ‘Power Windows’, Peter Collins was on hand to introduce the movie and field Q&A afterwards. So glad I got to relive a bit of my youth through this…And apologies to my family who missed my all-too-brief visit; I just don’t think they would’ve shared my enthusiasm for this cinematic event.

There are but two things that can get me to my hometown…Christmas presents and a movie about RUSH. Last night wasn’t Christmas, so you can connect the dots as to why I was in town. I suspect that today’s topic warrants its very own full-length blog/essay/rant, but there’s just not enough time in my current day to do it justice, so I’ll stick to sharing a few highlights…besides, some of my favorite RUSH related anecdotes are somewhat incriminating…Okay, thoroughly incriminating.

I’ll start by saying that RUSH was the primary soundtrack to my junior high and highschool years. These Canadian masters, whose first album sounded nothing like the album I stumbled onto them through (Moving Pictures), are very largely responsible for my unwitting decision to pursue music as my life’s calling…AND were central to an elaborate chess match with my parents as to what was acceptable influence/presence in the Thompson household.

This all began the summer after my eighth grade year…Okay, summer school following my eigth grade year. All the neighborhood kids of curious age were up to no good in the devoid-of-adult-supervision Mearacle/Parsons household. Brothers Jay and Rodney Ford, Mickey Long, Jeff and Gina Hoover, my best friend David Mearacle, and his older brother and our collective guru, Eric. [I hate that I impose the sanitizing of chapters/details for all concerned’s safety…The stories I’ll keep to myself are hilarious in their tragic and terrible natures.]

We were all regularly gathered around an old JC Penny turntable where a wide variety of music was spun…Marching band albums, Sugar Hill Gang, Ted Nugent, Van Halen, and ultimately, RUSH. I remember walking in on the extended live YYZ drum solo off ‘Exit Stage Left’ with everyone present air-drumming and lying as to their respective ability to play like that on an actual kit, which none of us had.

Within the week, I scored/borrowed/etc. my very own copy of ‘Moving Pictures’…on 8-Track tape! I had just become the proud steward of my uncle Allen Murphy’s quadrophonic stereo system, its decibels charging the air of my teen bedroom with waves of change. Within a couple of days, I was inspired to twist two pants-dowells off my father’s suit-hangers to fashion a working pair of drumsticks, pull up a chair to the couch in my bedroom, and proceed to whale on it daily to the point of beating holes in it…all while listening to this album.

I soon had to have more RUSH…but the only thing I could convince Eric to lend me was their first self-titled album. As I scanned the back, I was like, “Hey, who’s this guy? Where’s Neil?”. I was told that this was their first drummer and that the album was no lesser because of him and to get out of his room. What I was unaware of was that RUSH had pulled off one of the greatest practical jokes in the history of recorded music. Side one had a prolonged, low-volume intro…”Why is this so quiet?” I thought to myself as I maxed out the system’s volume for a better hear-see. “YEAH! OHHHH YEAH!” – Without warning, the full onslaught of the band’s music and lyrics catapulted me backwards out of my chair onto the floor, scrambling to reach the volume knob before my folks came to see what the hell was going on in here…”YEAH! OHHHH YEAH!…”. What I wouldn’t give for a gag-reel of the bests-of this scenario playing out in the bedrooms and households of youths around the globe. When they entered my inner sanctum and saw the stuffing protruding from the numerous holes that had been beaten into the couch, an executive order was given to have the couch removed from my room. My protests were in vain and I was left susceptably naked, raising my arms in pointless defense against a red star of authority.

This incident only cast gasoline upon the bonfire of my obsession with RUSH. I began assembling makeshift drumsets out of our garbage area behind the garage and giving prolonged ‘performances’. The best kit ever involved several useful items that my mother had intended the garbagemen to have dibs at, but after the ‘concert’s’ conclusion everything had been smashed, beaten, and broken to a point of no use to anyone. Upon discovering the ‘stage’, my mother hit the ceiling…another milestone in their thinking that there must really be something wrong with me…and that maybe these damned Canadians were behind it all. At any rate, I subsequently gave up my dreams of becoming a drummer, picked up a tennis raquet, and began pretending to be Alex Lifeson, while gooning in the mirror, as my growing collection of RUSH albums played on, subconsciously contemplating having the short in my real guitar soldered back into operation.

Now at some point, I decided that I wasn’t doing enough to pad RUSH’s coffers and that my walls’ RUSH-adornment levels were dangerously low. I think the very first poster I ever purchased was a moderately-sized depiction of the band in its natural setting – live on stage. It was from their ‘Moving Pictures’/’Exit Stage Left’ tour, and trying to gauge this from my father’s standpoint, this paper flag seemed to be within the boundaries of permissable decoration. Let’s see…there’s only one hippie in this band, the others seem to have some damn sense; the guitarist dons a red blazer and the drummer seems to be wearing some sort of white button-down shirt.

This litmus test apparently gave off some sort of false reading; deeming the coast to be clear for further RUSH accoutrement, I hastened back to Spencer’s in 100 Oaks Mall and purchased a GIANORMOUS poster of my Canadian overlords to take up any remaining space on my walls. Remember the trend in the late seventies/early eighties of wallpapering an entire wall or room with some variety of scenic nature views? This poster was to do the very same thing…only instead of mountain scenery, babbling brook fernscape, or woodland solitude, my version was nothing but RUSH. The ‘problem’ with this banner, aside from its all-consuming size, was that it was depictions from ‘2112’ era RUSH…I’m talking long, long hair (one of ’em was sporting a moustache), kimonos, and…makeup?. When I returned home from school the next day, I entered the garage to check on our litter of puppies, and much to my dismay/astonishment, I found that the mighty presence of RUSH had been removed from my wall and placed on the garage floor…as training paper. Puppy-scat embellished the faces of my false idols…Geddy, Alex, and Neil…NNNNOOOOOOO!!!

Following incidents went on to to further drive a wedge of RUSH between me and my folks. They had a terrible habit of having long-distance calls with relatives and invariably used the phone in my room. During these discourssions, they liked to root around in my space and belongings to see what they might turn up. The sort of contraband that could get a fellow grounded for an entire summer was found nestled in the sleeve of ‘A Farewell To Kings’ (to my credit, the following year and ensuing summer grounding’s contraband was found jammed into my Classical Greek [for which I won a national award for scholarship] notebook). Another unfortunate finding surfaced in the sleeve of ‘Hemispheres’; not contraband per se, but volumes of lyric parodies…basically RUSH lyrics that bassist John Main and myself had rewritten about members of our church, in particular our associate minister. I can hear my father now, “When I was your age, my friends and I engaged in some low-brow/off-color humor every now and then, but this? This is SICK!”…”Why were you digging through my record collection?”…”Well, I was talking to your grandmother on the phone and was just looking around, and here’s this very strange looking album with a nude man and floating brains,…I thought I better have a closer look and found all these poems hidden there.”

To my parents’ credit, they were uncharacteristically cool in some regards to my obsession. I remember Dad stopping in my doorway and nodding in impressed approval as I played along with “Countdown” off ‘Signals’…Maybe in his infinite awareness, he knew that RUSH was keen on the U.S. Space Program, or maybe he was impressed with the unconventional chording ‘down’ the neck I had just learned from Hunt Adams, who had just learned it from Sean Davies. And somehow in their strictmost policies, my parents indulged a loophole that would allow me to see RUSH not once, but twice, unattended at downtown Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium! As fuzzy as those memories are, a couple will stand out forever.

First in line and against the stage, myself and fellow Rigor Mortis band members, Hunt Adams and Lang Martine, spotted Geddy Lee reenter the stage after souncheck…Without hesitation, Lang blurted out, “Hey Geddy!?”…”Yes?”…”What’s your favorite cereal?”…”I like Special K.”…Wow, none of us saw that coming, but it now somehow makes perfect sense. I’ll never forget the pitiful incident that happened the following time I saw them…I believe it was on their ‘Grace Under Pressure’ tour, but it could’ve been ‘Power Windows’…Anyway, halfway into the concert, Geddy Lee announced, “We thought that since we’re here in Nashville we’d work up and play a country music song for you tonight.”…This was met with a deafening din of boos and hisses…”Well ok, maybe not then…” and went into their next familiar favorite. The conformist rabble of ‘Music City’ robbed me of my chance to see one of the greatest prog-rock bands in the history of music perform country music. It was an embarrassing shame, for which I could never forgive my fellow citizens.

Throughout my highschool years, RUSH endured as the gold standard of what my fellow musicians and I strove for. My bands, namely Bacchus Rockus (and even in college, the Park Avenue Dregs), covered or attempted to cover a huge variety of our heroes’ works…”Spirit Of The Radio”, “Limelight”, “La Villa Strangiato”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Working Man”, “What You’re Doing”, “By-Tor And The Snow Dog”, “A Passage To Bangkok”, “Xanadu”, “Natural Science”, “Free Will”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, “Witch Hunt”, really too many to recall…Everytime a new album came, ‘Signals’, ‘Grace Under Pressure’, ‘Power Windows’, it was over to Hunt Adams’ house to figure out, or more precisely watch him figure out and learn as much of the album as we possibly could. This was a HUGE part of my ear training.

“Then one day it happened, Jackie Paper came no more…” I don’t know how it came to be, but band obsessions set up shop, eventually to run their courses and dissappear from my life. RUSH was certainly one of the more enduring fanships I committed to. At one point they were edged out by ‘different strings’, no longer hard/heavy enough nor ‘alternative’ enough to suit my tastes…I somehow outgrew them, like I did the Beatles, The Doors, Duran Duran, Iron Maiden, etc. before them. I have such fond memories of the life this amazing trio lent the soundtrack to…and for that I will always be their fan…no matter what.

Years and years later I would venture off my native soil into the land of my heroes to add ‘fruit and tobacco smuggling’ to my accolades. On the Canadian side of Niagra Falls, I braved the over-priced blase-faire of Hard Rock Cafe to study artifacts from Toronto, like cultural treasures in a museum…An hour later found me angrily demanding answers from the manager: “I’ve been looking everywhere on the walls, floors, and ceilings of your establishment, and yet I cannot find one trace of RUSH paraphernalia…What gives? Are you guys ashamed of RUSH like we are of Lynyrd Skynyrd?” My first international laughter garnered.

John M. Thompson is the owner of Scottsville Conservatory and Farm-Out! Records.  He was president of the Allen County – Scottsville Arts Council from 2008-2010 and continues to serve as the organizer for the council’s Arts on Main summer concert series.  More of his blogs can be read at www.myspace.com/johnmjohnnythompson.