With the release of Rush Backstage Club Newsletters 1980-1994, it gives rise to a question: how much stuff do The Boys have left in the vault? Prior the internet ruining everything, Patrick McLoughlin was able to run a family business — blessed by the guys in Rush — that functioned as an intermediary and merch store between fans and the band. When folks wrote fan mail or to place an order for a t-shirt in the ’80s and ’90s it went somewhere…and that somewhere was McLoughlin’s offices in Las Vegas, Nevada. Most big name artists get bags of mail from their legions of fans, and Rush was no exception. Some artists just ignored the letters and sent replies to join a fan club or some other kind of marketing material. However, with The Rush Backstage Club newsletter, those who wrote to Neil Peart would sometimes get their letters answered by him.
It’s kind of amusing to see these letters reproduced and bound in book form. Peart was a very prolific (and sometime very funny) writer who took great care to be detailed when telling stories about certain periods in the band’s history. Because these are kind of the golden years of Rush, it’s fascinating to read about the making of Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures because, at the time, the band really didn’t know how iconic (and life changing) these albums would be in short order. It’s clear that Peart knew they had created music that was extremely satisfying to a band whose exploration of album side concepts had run its course. The “next phase” of the band in the ’80s and ’90s was certainly in a style that was more angular, with songs that were more compact, and exploring themes that were more diverse. Though Rush was initially a bit leery of New Wave music as the ’70s drew to a close, their genuine appreciation of The Police, Talking Heads, and Ultravox grew into major influences as the band progressed through the ’80s.
There are some geeky gearhead moments in the newsletters when Peart writes about all the experiments they did with microphones to capture the drums in different ways on Moving Pictures. These days, all those mic effects could probably be done in post-production editing. But I don’t think there are many artists (now and then) who spend a lot of studio time trying out a Pressure Zone Microphone to see if direct sounds affect the tonal quality of a track? Or how ’bout this for more geekery: Peart’s early aversion to drum machines led him (along with producer Terry Brown) to find a way to make “real drums sound like artificial ones” on the song “Vital Signs.” I’ve always thought Peart was playing electric drums on that track, but after all these years, the analog world teaches the digital domed city something new.
Another relic from the past highlighted in the pages of these newletters was the Moral Majority’s concern that the youth of the day was being seduced by rock bands into Satanism. I had almost (almost) forgotten all about backward masking — the dark arts of secret, subliminal messages recorded backwards on rock albums. Of course, the whole thing was a paranoid fantasy cooked up by those — Peart calls Christian crypto-fascists — to control their flock by scaring them into abandoning bands like Rush. Peart submitted a “Guest Column” to respond to a story printed in the University of Texas at Austin’s The Daily Texan about backward masking, Satanism, and rock music. Reading it in the pages of the newsletter took me back to early ’80s when I was, for a time, often accosted in the high school hallways by so-called Born Again Christians warning me that the rock music I loved was made by people who sold their souls to Satan. Part of that, um, outreach in the name of “Fellowship” was an insistence that, yes, if I played certain records backward, I’d hear secret Satanic messages. Of course, when I did try and play the offending recordings backwards, I couldn’t discern any secret messages. However, it was fun to hear the music in reverse — well, until I realized I was probably ruining my albums all in the service of Satan. Damn you Satan!
The Q&A sections of the newsletters are by far some of the more entertaining sections of collection — if only because people sometimes ask the dumbest questions. However, I’ll give Peart credit for trying to answer them without too much judgement. To wit:
Q: Could you explain “Part IV of the Gangster of Boats trilogy?”
Meryl Rees,
Great Britain
A: Um…part four of a trilogy, get it? See above.
Overall, most of those who wrote to the band (well, mostly to Peart) asked pretty good questions — and often got pretty good answers. For a fan (or even a super fan) it must have been very exciting to see that after all the effort you put into writing to Rush, you got an answer — well, some did. Many didn’t. But it goes to show you that despite all the I can’t pretend a stranger/Is a long-awaited friend aloofness Peart exhibited when obnoxious fans would bombard him with requests to “TAKE A PITCHER WID MY GIRLFRIEND,” he could be a very giving person in his prose writing. Also, one of the more amusing ironies of these newsletters is, after all the effort Peart took to update Rush fans on what’s what with the band, he wasn’t sent any new editions of the newsletter by the band’s management after 1985 — which he noted in one of his 1993 missives to SRO’s management administrative assistant, Peg.
In the end, these newsletters offer fans a really satisfying trip back in time. There are plenty of photos, tour itineraries, order forms, and even a crossword puzzle to keep individuals occupied for hours. However, this book (or is it a collection?) is extremely niche. It will appeal to hardcore fans who love to mine artifacts like this for nuggets of trivia about Rush. For everyone else, reading these newsletters might engender feelings of being left out of something that seems pop culturally important. But, try as you might, you just don’t get it. You know, kind of like Rashida Jones’s character in I Love You, Man watching Paul Rudd and Jason Segel’s bromance at a Rush concert.
