Rush Hour

Talking gear (and unexpected visits from the police) with Alex Lifeson

Hey, loyal JTL readers!

First, a few quick announcements:

I’ve already been working on this project for a few months, but the official announcement was made last week: I am collaborating with Jeff and Steven McDonald from Redd Kross — one of my all-time favorite bands — on their forthcoming autobiography, which will be out via Omnibus Press in late 2024 or early 2025. I honestly couldn’t be more stoked to be part of this; both Jeff and Steven are absolutely brilliant and hilarious, and I can now ask them every question I’ve ever wanted to about their wild 45-year career.

And speaking of icons that I first fell in love with back in the ‘80s, I recently interviewed the delightful Susanna Hoffs for The Forward about her equally delightful forthcoming first novel, This Bird Has Flown. Though rom-com fiction generally isn’t my bag, I guess I’m actually quite open to the concept if you throw in guitars, a pastoral Oxford backdrop and some really witty writing. (Several male friends of a certain age have expressed surprise that I was able to keep my composure during our interview. But a) I’m a professional, and b) Vicki Peterson was actually the Bangles member that I had the biggest crush on. Susanna’s all right though, I guess…)

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And now, on with our featured presentation…

Rush was another (albeit very different) band that I fell in love with in the 1980s — in the very first weeks of 1980, in fact. “The Spirit of Radio” and “Freewill” from their then-latest album Permanent Waves were in regular rotation on Chicago’s FM rock giants WLUP and WMET, and I was completely taken by the Canadian band’s intensely hard-rocking mixture of technical proficiency, articulate lyrics and serious “outsider” vibes. (I wrote a piece for The Forward back in 2020 about how much Permanent Waves meant to me at the time, which can still be found here.)

I admit that I dropped them for a while during the second half of the ‘80s — both because Rush started unexpectedly sounding like The Police (a band I’d always loathed) and because their whole “prog-rock power trio with conceptual lyrics” shtick seemed anathema to whatever already-outdated punk precepts I had aligned myself with at the time. But I got back into their ‘70s stuff around 1990, and even managed to see one of their shows on the Test for Echo tour, which I’m not ashamed to say kicked some serious ass.

So it was a real thrill for me when I got to interview Rush vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee in 2004 around the release of their Feedback EP (a Q&A that I will try to dig up at a later date), and then when I was able to talk to his guitar counterpart Alex Lifeson for this interview in 2020. My conversation with Alex was done for the Stompbox book project, so it was pretty gear-intensive. (I was also warned ahead of time by his publicist not to bring up Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart, whose death a few months earlier was still a very painful subject.) But I think Alex’s personality — charming, laidback, and far more self-effacing than you’d expect from a man who has been hailed for decades as a genuine guitar god — comes through rather nicely in the course of our Q&A, which has never been published before in its entirety…