Chit-Chat Check-In #164 Transcript

Hello, this is your Captain speaking. Listen, music snobs—as much as I don’t want to admit that I am one, I probably am a lot of the time. I certainly have been many times, over the course of my life, very dismissive of things that everybody likes. And I promise I’m not going to do that thing that I see music snobs doing all the time, which is where they state, publicly, something along the lines of, “You know, well, actually, The Beatles were good.” That drives me crazy. No shit, Sherlock. You’re just reverse-engineering some rationalization for your belief that you’re better than everybody else (laughs) and have exquisite taste that rises above the masses. It’s bullshit. It’s funny to watch, but it’s something I really hope I don’t ever do. Because I rediscover bands all the time, and I feel like I can usually admit to myself that I was wrong and everybody else was right. And actually, that feels good to figure out why something was so popular and people loved it so much. And continue to love it so much.

And all of this is being said to get to the fact that I saw Rush the other night. And, spoiler alert, they’re fucking fantastic. I grew up not liking them, partially because they were one of the bands beloved by my tormentors. That does dampen one’s enthusiasm for a band, when the kids who are teasing you are wearing Rush t-shirts, for example. They’re doing god’s work, getting an arena full of middle-aged men to weep. They did that with nostalgia, with beautiful tributes to their fallen drummers—they have a new drummer, Anika, I think it’s Anika Nilles—she’s great. An incredible, inspired decision to hire her over what I would imagine would be a long line of extremely adept Neil Peart fans, a lot of them already famous drummers. You could see that it would have been easy to find some drummer from some other, bigger band. But they opted for a woman, which in and of itself is kind of a beautiful statement for a band that has historically been associated with a mostly male audience, in a field that has been often pretty dismissive of female musicians. So, she kicked ass. Just incredible to watch.

I met Geddy years ago through a shared love of musical instruments. It was a real gift to get to hang out with Geddy. We did it at The Loft years ago. Took a lot of pictures of basses I own, and spent the day with him, and had some lunch. He was putting together this fantastic book that he released a few years ago. Basically an instrument, coffee-table book of his bass collection, and conversations with other bass players. Just a beautiful, bass-centric labor of love, that he put together this beautiful, beautiful tribute to all the basses he owned and bass-playing in general. It’s very expensive. Prohibitively expensive book. And I don’t think you can find them very easily, but if you can get your hands on one, it kind of sets the standard for any instrument photography, also. Beautiful.

Anyway, I got to say hi again the other night at the United Center. I’d never met Alex, and Anika. It was an incredible night I got to share with Mark and most importantly, with Glenn, who would have been maybe one of the drummers standing in line if he had been given the opportunity to audition for Rush. Because I think it would have been his teen fantasy. So, yeah, we got to hang out a little bit with them, and they’re just down-to-earth, beautiful, unapologetically nerdy guys. Very welcoming.

So, anyway, yeah. Guess what guys, Rush is great. And I look at why there were lines in the sand between bands like Rush and bands like Black Flag, and the things I responded to as a kid. We looked at each other with suspicion, fans of Rush and fans of Black Flag. It was a real mistaken suspicion. We should be suspicious of the people that don’t have something that sustains them, and that they’ve fallen in love with. And Rush was absolutely something that gave people courage. They communicated in an unapologetic nerdiness and misfitness, just out of step, writing songs about fantasy, and you know… they had a hit song with Tom Sawyer as the main character. So back then they were getting resistant teens to embrace literary references (laughs). I don’t know—I could go on and on about how valuable I find them to be, but then I’m doing the thing that I talked about at the beginning of this post. “Well, actually, you know, Rush was fucking good. Did you know that?” You probably knew that.

Anyway, this is my attempt to play a Rush song. They have so many memorable songs. They have so many fucking memorable songs. But this is one of my favorites, and the only one I could figure out how to play solo acoustic. That’s another thing—I don’t know if you know about Rush, but it’s very complicated music, lots of odd time signatures, and lots of notes. So I’m playing about a tenth of the notes in this version.

Hope you’re all well, hanging in there. Go see Rush, if you can. Carry on.