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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: August 6, 2002

Concert Preview: After some bumps in the road, Rush is back on the trail

by Ed Masley

The members of Rush chose wisely when they decided to open their first new album after six long years of silence with "a certain amount of force" and the spirited "One Little Victory."

But this is more than just a little victory.

In 1997, drummer Neil Peart lost his only child, a 19-year-old daughter, in a car accident.  Within 10 months, he'd have another tragedy to face when his wife died of cancer.

As guitarist Alex Lifeson says, "I think a lot of people didn't expect us to be touring again, let alone make a record again."

But Peart is doing better now.  He's remarried and touring the way he likes to travel -- on a motorcycle, out where he can see the country.

"He's enjoying playing," Lifeson says, "as we all are.  So he's getting on with his life, which is exactly what he needs to do.  He wrote a book, 'Ghost Rider,' which came out about a month ago.  It details a lot of his feelings and what he went through."

And he wrote an album's worth of lyrics for his other family, Rush.

When faced with getting back to business, Lifeson says, "We didn't know what to expect, really.  Neil's recovery took a very long time.  But eventually, he got himself grounded again, and he let us know that he was ready to come back to work -- or to at least attempt it."

So they reconvened the band in a Toronto studio and started slowly down the road to "Vapor Trails."

Very slowly down the road.

"It used to take four or five months to write and record an album," Lifeson says.  "This album took us 14 months.  We really didn't want any kind of time limitations or deadlines.  We just wanted to make the best record we could at a pace that allowed us the freedom to really try things, to rewrite things, to feel it all the way through.  It took us two or three months to really get going on it.  The first couple of weeks, I don't think we did a thing except sit around and talk and get comfortable with each other again in a working environment.  But once we started rolling, it was like it had a life of its own, and it really became a very satisfying project to work on."

Bassist Geddy Lee and Lifeson focused on the music, jamming to a drum machine, while Peart wrote lyrics -- which is how they've done it, Lifeson says, since drum machines became available.

But other things had changed.

"The trust that we'd developed in each other after what we'd gone through had drawn us closer together, so we let each other do things more," says Lifeson.  "Geddy's great at arranging, so I left that up to him.  I'd sit in the room with him sometimes.  And sometimes I wouldn't.  I like to stay late.  He likes to go home at 5:30 to have dinner with his family and put his daughter to bed and read her a story, and I like to work until 1 in the morning.  So I'd do a lot of guitar stuff and I'd do my own writing in those evenings.  And I'd work with Neil on his drum stuff when we were at that stage as well.  So it was like a workshop being in the studio.  It was terrific."

And now that the workshop is through and the album is finished, Rush is reconnecting with the fans it hasn't had a chance to see in five years.

"Geddy and I were talking about this just last night," says Lifeson.  "We were sitting in the dressing room after the show in Kansas City.  We like to have a little meal and share a little glass of wine for 20 minutes before it gets all crazy in the dressing room, just nice and quiet.  And we were talking about how we have these moments of intense clarity on stage where you look at the audience going 'What the hell is going on here: 16,000 people freaking out because I'm playing a guitar or I'm singing a song?'  We're still freaked out by it after all these years.  But a Rush audience can do that to you.  I don't think there's any other rock band whose fans are anywhere close to being what our fans are like."

There is, of course, another school of thought on Rush.

As Lifeson says: "We certainly haven't been the darlings of the press.  Maybe more so now because we've survived this long and we've gone through a very difficult period.  But we've always let our music speak for us, and you can either like it or hate it.  I think with Rush fans, they're completely into the band and the music speaks to them in a very personal way.  For people that are not into the band ... there's no real middle ground with us, it seems."

This seems to bother Lifeson, but he does his best to take it all in stride.

"I think, objectively, we've made a lot of great achievements," he says.  "And sometimes, we're not recognized for it, but you know, it's no big deal.  We do what we do and we love what we do.  ... It doesn't matter, really, if you're in the Hall of Fame."

Although the band has yet to be inducted, their equipment is already there.

"We donated a bunch of equipment," Lifeson says.  "So they went to a great effort to get all this equipment from us to set up, but we're not inducted in the Hall of Fame.  And we're a band that's been around since 1968.  We've sold, you know, 40 million records.  So I don't know what their criteria are.  Maybe you just have to be cool.  And we've never been cool."

A lot of things have changed for Rush since 1968, but, Lifeson says: "In some ways, it's the same band.  There's certainly a spirit now that goes back to that.  We're playing with that same sort of enthusiasm and frenzy that we had when we first started out.  And I can really sense it.

"But certainly, it's a lot of miles on these bodies and a lot of things that we've seen and grown through.  And we've tried to be progressive.  We've tried to be different with every record.  I don't know if we always succeed at that.  But we try our best.

"And now that we're all in our late 40s and we're still at it, we can see that our music has taken on a different maturity as we have as people.  And that feels good, to have gone through this long of a period of time in something like rock music and still be charged up by it, excited by it, still freaked out by the whole experience."