“His original lyrics were kind of a portrait of a modern-day rebel, a free-spirited individualist striding through the world wide-eyed and purposeful,” Peart said. Peart wrote the lyrics with songwriter Pye Dubois. Rush’s unlikely career as radio hitmakers continued in 1981 with “Tom Sawyer,” which charted all over the world and became the band’s signature song. So I listen to it constantly when I’m home, and it represents something, maybe the precious last stronghold of something.” And they are still what FM radio was 15 years ago. “That particular song was written about a radio station that is a paragon it’s called CFNY-FM and it’s in Toronto. ‘”The Spirit of Radio’ could be called ‘The Spirit of Music,'” Peart said in 1980. Neil Peart was listening to a lot of the Police in this time period, and the reggae-inspired beats he blends into his signature busy attack here echoed the influence of Stewart Copeland. The 1980s were a very cruel time for most prog bands of the Seventies, but Rush managed to avoid the fate of Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer by releasing Permanent Waves weeks into the decade and earning a whole new audience thanks to leadoff single “The Spirit of Radio.” The screed against the corporatization of radio (“Glittering prizes/And endless compromises/Shatter the illusion of integrity”) became an unlikely hit and helped move Rush into arenas. “Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian.” In later years, the drummer made it very clear that the writing of Rand no longer spoke to him. One of the shorter songs on Hemispheres, it begins like a gentle outtake from a Peter Gabriel–era Genesis album, but builds to a soaring climax before ramping back down to a gentle passage punctuated by Peart’s woodblocks. They insist on completely equal treatment, and wind up destroying each other in the process. The book has provided a political awakening for countless libertarians over the years, and it gave Peart the lyrical inspiration idea for “The Trees.” It’s the story of a conflict between oak and maple trees in a forest. While most superstar rock drummers of the Seventies spent their downtime destroying hotel rooms and getting blitzed out of their minds, Neil Peart liked to chill in his hotel room with a well-worn copy of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. “At the beginning of the movie, the opening lines from ‘Kubla Khan’ were quoted, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree.’ As research, I looked up the poem, and I was so powerfully impressed by it that the poem took over the song.” “The song idea was originally inspired by the movie Citizen Kane,” Peart said in 2010. And, yet again, the lyrics show him getting carried away with his latest literary obsession. The rest of the song, in which delicate interludes filled with bells and chimes alternate with lean power-trio muscle, epitomizes Peart’s groundbreaking union of scientific precision and ass-kicking force. Setting a mystical mood for a song inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” he complements ambient electronic bird chirps with wind chimes and tubular bells before switching to the drum kit to propel a brain-bending proto–math-rock riff. Rush’s music only grew more ambitious as the Seventies wore on, and just as Geddy Lee began doubling on synths, Peart started to operate like a one-man percussion section. Image Credit: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images “2112: Overture / The Temples of Syrinx” (1976).There was no denying that Neil was the man.” “The last guy had come a long way, a two-hour drive, and it was a very uncomfortable situation having him audition after Neil, because Neil was so fucking good. “On the day that Neil auditioned, we had five guys in - three before Neil and one after,” Lee recalled in 2016. The song, with a title nicked from Ayn Rand, also marked Peart’s debut as the genre’s quintessential thinking man’s lyricist. But the airtight staccato intro of “Anthem,” which led into a crisp, racing uptempo groove, showed that Rush in the Peart era would be more or less an entirely new band, one that pushed beyond blues-derived forms into a bold new vision of rock virtuosity. The band’s self-titled debut, their only album with original drummer John Rutsey, featured no-frills hard rock - soulful but unspectacular, especially in a climate where Led Zeppelin were operating at peak strength. The first song on Rush’s second LP announced one of the most momentous member swaps in rock history.
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