He worked at a pizza place and played bass.
Sometimes he would drive over to my house at midnight to bring me peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and talk until three in the morning, when I would tiptoe back inside to find my insomniac mother sitting on the stairs with her chin resting on her hand, her flannel pajamas rumpled.
âSo how is he?â
âGood.â
And then I would tiptoe back upstairs, both relieved and kind of offended that my own mom knew I wasnât going past first base.
He was a good bass player and he, like all good high-school jazz-band bass players who play World of Warcraft on the side, loved Rush and Geddy Lee with all of his beating heart. âDo you know how many bass players are also iconic frontmen, Kathleen?â
I was like, âPaul McCartney? Lemmy? Gene Simmons? Sting? Roger Waters?â
His prog-loving brain grudgingly gave me Roger Waters before he turned up âTom Sawyerâ and drummed along on his steering wheel, struggling to keep up with the one-handed sixteenths, his teeth gritted, his eyes fiery.
When he asked if I thought it was cool, I fiddled with the hole in my hoodie sleeves where I stuck my thumbs out like the skater kid I longed to be and said, âYeah, itâs great,â because I could tell the music was played well.
Dream Theater fooled me with the same line of thinking.
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What I Think Now: In the pantheon of prog rock, Rush rode out the 1970s to stay relevant in pop culture. âTom Sawyerâ is still played on every classic-rock radio station, and Jason Segel and Paul Rudd go apeshit over Rush in I Love You, Man.
I think a big part of me wanted to âgetâ Rush because they are constantly marketed as a boysâ band. Prog rock in all its forms from King Crimson to Rush is marketed as boysâ bands.
This is not me saying that women donât like prog. I am saying it is one of the most obvious examples of a genre that seemed to actively try to keep women out by how it was packaged and presented. It favored the cerebral over the emotional and yielded an endless parade of white-male-fronted bands.
But the content of prog didnât keep women out; the culture of prog did. While the 1970s kept pumping out concept album after concept album, leaving fantasy metal and psych rock in its Brahms-worshipping, double-tracking wake, women who loved busts of classical composers wired onto guitar necks were presented with close to no chance to participate. It always bothered me, hearing that nice bass player say things like âItâs so cool that you like Rush, girls never get Rush.â
But I didnât like Rush. And not because I didnât get Rush.
Itâs because the sound of three of the worldâs best musicians in constant competition, fighting for attention, pushing the boundaries of how a snare is tuned just to fuck with one another, is interminably boring.
And frankly, thatâs not my shit.
If you have to isolate Neil Peartâs drum track to âfully appreciateâ it, then youâre listening to a drummer and not a band. Iâve heard Rush devotees argue for hours over who carried the band, because itâs clear that the band did not carry each other.
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Was It Worth It: It wasnât not worth it.
I do really like a lot of prog, though I tend toward the Jethro Tull end of the spectrum because I played flute for 10 years and I kind of thought Ian Anderson was on to something. Actually, now that I really dig into these feelingsâThick as a Brick tricked me into thinking flute was relevant in popular music for far longer than it was, which dashed my young dreams and broke my heart, so maybe Iâm just bitter.
Neil Peartâs isolated drum tracks are insane, by the way.