Kindle Notes & Highlights
Guys, if your girlfriend hates Rush, don’t bring her to the show. And if you absolutely have to bring her, buy her earplugs. At two of those British venues we looked out all night at a scowling female, front-row center, each with her fingers in her ears for the whole show. Hardly inspiring, for them or us!
He doesn’t do what he does for any of us, necessarily, and he would certainly never want a single member of his fandom to believe he or she has a claim on any aspect of him. Truly, he is not for rent to any god, government, group, or individual. He does what he does because it’s the right thing to do and because he wants those who follow his work to see that “care has been taken.”
Again, it’s worth remembering that if they were going to end, they were going to do so on their own terms. If Rush was going “down the tubes,” they were going to go down with a serious statement and a very, very loud thud. No whimper. Only a bang.
“I call myself an individualist because no-one knows what that means either—except me. So if anyone asks me to put an ‘ism’ after my name I’ll say I’m an individualist because to me an individual life is the ultimate, supreme-value in the world.”23 Peart dislikes “authority of all kinds,” but especially the righteous authority wielded by governments, churches, and “moral majorities.”
“Our progress has always been sincere—not in an arrogant way, but for our own pleasure,” Peart stated in 1982. “We’ve always incorporated music from people we liked, so it has made us stylistically schizoid.”59
