Shiftless Chef Has Been At the Movies

Last night, my wife and I watched Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage on Netflix. She was a trooper, too - she watched three-quarters of it before going to bed, but only because she had to go to work the next day. Since I've had the day off for a while now, I watched the whole thing, and I liked it a lot.  I liked it so much that at point in the movie, I couldn't tear myself away long enough to go to the bathroom.  That may have been when Geddy Lee discussed Rush' kimono period.  He said that they had no idea how to dress like rock musicians, and since they were in San Francisco's Japanese district, they'd try kimonos and while they were at it, Neil Peart would grow mustaches.  

A couple of things are notable. One is that early Rush, before they recruited Neil Peart from a tractor supply store in rural Canada (in the movie, he speaks with wide-eyed wonder about being picked up at work in a limo or other big car; also, stories that he interrupted his doctoral thesis at Oxford, or that he was from space, can now be put to rest), was. Immediately, Rush was identified as "Led Zeppelin, except from Canada." Footage of early Rush rehearsing in Geddy Lee's basement shows Alex Lifeson playing this sort of Blue Cheer pigfuck, primitive and monumental like the discovery of fire or the earliest examples of hammers. I shit you not it sounded like Keiji Haino just getting worked up. I'm sure they couldn't have sustained that past an album, and I'm sure that they had no interest in doing so, but now I'm on the lookout for bootlegs of early Rush rehearsals.

That the members of Rush are essentially good, decent people rings true throughout. In terms of their success, they're probably the most self-effacing bunch I've seen. They shouldn't be rock stars, and they know that they're dead shit lucky, thanks to the salt of the Earth types of Cleveland, Ohio who gave the band its first break. There's one scene where Geddy and Alex go to a deli. The waitress recognizes Geddy but not Alex, and Geddy is really nice to her when he pays the bill, although whether they asked for separate checks is not entirely clear.

In short, they're just ordinary, nice guys, which is at odds with the fact that they play music the same way assholes play music, which is the the way Barry Bonds played baseball, whether Geddy paid for Alex' lunch and gave the waitress a tip that allows her to finish her night classes or not. The funny thing is that Rush' acquisition of all that technical prowess was obtained in the most honorable way: they wanted to be better musicians, so they practiced all the time and got good. Prowess itself is a big reason for their success, which is rare and weird, and it's noted by everyone from Rush fans to Jack Black, today's foremost fat comic actor.

Ultimately, their abilities are like a fancy Swiss watch that can tell you the precise time of any city in the world, great or Port Lavaca, TX, but the one you're standing in. Furthermore, for a band that is, at base, hard rock, they demonstrate more often than not that they don't understand the idiom's inalienable truths. When they were Canadian Led Zeppelin, they did. You'll understand if that I'd prefer to cede the discussion of the literary and philosophical import of Rush's lyrics to somebody else after I state that Rush probably shouldn't inform one's worldview too deeply beyond his senior year of high school.

Also of note: Dave Grøhl is nowhere to be found. Maybe his footage was left on the floor, or he was talking about Thin Lizzy across town at the time.

Maybe it doesn't speak well of me to say I really enjoyed the movie, and I don't care - I watched it on TV.  They're affable sorts (throughout their career, they received review after review that characterized them as "humorless."  What's Rolling Stone know?), and it's good to see nice guys succeed in an industry that rewards a class of people a notch above criminal, and they did it by saying no.