Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown

Introduction

T oronto in the 1960s was not a stereotypical rock ’n’ roll city. It was a running joke in urbane, clean, and conservative Toronto that the sidewalks retracted at seven o’clock in the evening. Musically, its vibrant folk scene of Yorkville (Toronto’s equivalent to Greenwich Village ) helped incubate the careers of artists who would soon personify the smooth sounds of the 1970s, including Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, and Murray McLaughlin. Until then, Canada’s most cutting-edge rock music seemed to come from somewhere else—working-class Winnipeg, for example, produced Neil Young, the Guess Who, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive—and there was no reason to assume that Canada’s most prominent hard rock band would emerge from the sprawling, sleepy suburbs surIntroduction 2 Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class rounding Canada’s affluent financial capital. But in 1968, two high school students from Willowdale, part of Toronto’s North York suburb, began jamming together and formed a band which would endure for four decades , purveying a loud and distinctive form of progressive heavy metal to millions of fans in North America and Europe. The two students were guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/singer Geddy Lee, and the band they formed was Rush. On the surface, Rush at the start of its recording career scarcely reflected Lifeson’s and Lee’s suburban Toronto origins. Their densely distorted guitar rock borrowed generously from the acid rock of the late 1960s and the early heavy metal sounds emanating from Britain’s declining bluecollar industrial centers. Lee’s strident, strained, and nasal tenor voice cut through the musical texture as sharply as that of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. On stage, Rush appeared as long-haired, rough-hewn heavy metal rockers, and the band’s volume, rebellious stance, shrieking vocals, and guitar solos were anything but models of gentility. But Rush was not all it appeared to be at first glance. It had songs about futuristic societies, swords and sorcery, and interstellar voyages—themes that would appeal to any teenage boy deeply into Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons. The lyrics occasionally quoted Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Hemingway. In between thunderous heavy rock sections were acoustic passages vaguely reminiscent of European classical music. Rush rarely sang about partying on the weekend, preferring instead to play philosophical anthems about individual will and standing out from the crowd. Offstage, the members of Rush surprised some interviewers by appearing as soft-spoken, studious young men who seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the media’s attention. This was the group that I discovered as a pubescent rock fan in the early 1980s. Rush’s music spoke vividly to me of the suburban context that I, like many other Rush fans, knew, capturing the in-between-ness that I experienced as a suburban middle-class kid. The band’s music drew from the sound of blue-collar rock, yet its lyrics gestured toward highbrow themes. Rush combined the blunt-force power of hard rock with the Introduction 3 disciplined complexity of classical music. The musicians made a living performing in the public eye before hundreds of thousands of fans, yet appeared camera-shy, even introverted off-stage. Moreover, Rush spoke directly to the ambivalence of the suburbs. In some songs, the band took listeners far away from the tree-lined residential streets of the present to alternate realities; other times, Rush eloquently confronted the reasons why such flights were necessary. “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth,” Geddy Lee sang in “Subdivisions,” “but the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.” “Subdivisions” fed directly into the dystopian myth of the North American suburb, describing the predictability, the cultural bleakness, the uneventful, unchanging landscape that endless residential neighborhoods provided for the North American middle class. This ambivalence seems strange given the comfort and relative affluence suburban postwar America enjoyed, but there remained an uncomfortable in-between-ness here for some young suburbanites who felt both a pull toward the conformity of North American middle-class life and a revulsion from it. Rush’s take on these matters hit a nerve and won it a sizable chunk of the suburban rock audience through the 1970s and 1980s. The group’s resonance with such audiences is not surprising, since Rush’s Willowdale was scarcely different from any number of suburban communities throughout Canada and the United States. It was a grid of...