Closer to the Heart(2005)

. .. closer to the heart (2005) when i was in high school, the popular kids didn’t listen to music simply because they liked it, no, the popular kids listened to music to enhance their popularity. guys didn’t really like the music of journey, but the cutest girls loved journey, so if you wanted to make out back then, you had to at least pretend to like them. but it didn’t matter what music my friends and i listened to, because us geeks, dorks, goofs, nerds, poindexters, and neo-maxie zoom- dweebies weren’t making out with anybody no matter what music we listened to, and that freed us to listen to any damn thing we wanted, and we wanted that righteous power trio from the great white north, yes, we wanted rush! sure, rush was girlfriend repellent, but so were dungeons and dragons and black t-shirts with superheroes airbrushed on the front and really, really bad bacne! we weren’t cool! our only possible dating partners were non-player characters! therefore, rush made perfect sense! we didn’t just listen to rush… we worshipped them! rush was led by gary lee weinrib, whose yiddish grandmother pronounced his name geddy, who would grow up to become geddy lee, the best bass player in modern rock history. he was cursed with a high-pitched voice only a yiddish grandmother could love, but that voice sang of things we could whole-heartedly endorse: princes of darkness and necromancers and spaceships sucked into black holes, lords of the ring and trees that fought each other. if goofy-lookin’ geddy lee could get laid with a voice like that — and we just knew he gettin’ laid any time he wanted — that meant there was hope for us, the voiceless masses who yearned to be modern day warriors with mean, mean strides of our own. .. and those life-affirming lyrics were written not by the singer, but by the drummer, neil peart, who ensconced himself in a fortress of snares, tom-toms, double-bass drums, timpanis, timbales, crotales, wind chimes, splash cymbals, crash cymbals, pang cymbals, and not just one cowbell… but five cowbells! when you saw rush live – which i did seventeen times between my freshman and senior year – the only thing you saw of neil peart was the spray of splintered drumsticks showering the stage like the perseid meteor shower. and as geddy and neil laid down the beat of our pubescent hearts, alex was right there with his cherry-red doubleneck gibson guitar and camel-toed white satin pants. alex, who changed his last name from zivojinovic to its english translation son of life and became alex lifeson, whose fingertips furiously fretted six-strings and twelve- strings with surgical precision. in our teenaged bedrooms that had never witnessed real live girls, we silenced our loneliness by cranking the best record rush ever committed to vinyl – 2112 – and wielding broomstick mic stands and singing along not just to the lyrics, but to every guitar riff, bass line, and drum fill like our sad, lonely, virginal lives depended on it, which they did! long live rush!.

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