My first conscious hero came from the world of rock music. The Canadian group Rush was a bass-drums-guitar trio that first came to prominence in the 1970s, riding the wave of a musical style that Led Zeppelin had been instrumental in creating. Throughout that decade, a growing coterie of so-called “progressive” bands were experimenting with making rock music more operatic, grandiose-sounding, and simply more complicated. Elaborate songwriting with many “movements” frequently meandered into 20-minute, radio-unfriendly terrain.

Rush, like many of these bands, wrote lyrics drawing heavily from the cultures of fantasy and science fiction writing. It was resolutely not music you could dance to. More often, it was like listening to a report from the creative suffering of an overmaximizedmusicalselfconsciousness.

The potential for transport, ecstasy, a new beyond-fleeting alertness is real here. Indeed, I early on derived (and still feel) intense joy in the experience of losing myself in the superhuman proficiency of what has often disparagingly, and inaccurately, been called “music for eggheads.” In the (comparatively) cerebral lyrics, constantly shifting odd rhythms, bombastic attitudes, and maturity of musicianship, I found some sort of finite salvation, a constant sense of leaving myself behind, of finding myself by losing myself, of wanting to gain that musical maturity and excellence that would allow me to know what can only be known when you climb to the absolute top of the rock ladder, only to be able to kick that ladder away. All of this I sensed that Rush could offer me, and still—with other music from the time—offers me today, nearly 30 years after I first heard them. 

(And I must have been far from the only white suburban boy to have discovered Rush in the plush-carpeted basement of a suburban home, which could also have easily housed a basement bar. I was about eleven years old, about 1980, and spending the night at my friend Greg’s house. In addition to various Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia scattered about–which would soon enough consume me as well–there were some albums and cassettes by Rush. Late that night, Greg popped into the “boombox” their live album titled All the World’s a Stage, and from the inaugural conjuring-shriek “THIS IS CALLED ‘WHAT YOU’RE DOING!’”, I somehow sensed I was in the presence of not only of rock genius, but of the sublime.)

As most readers of this blog no doubt know, Rush had (and still has!), a bass player named Geddy Lee. In the early 1980s, when Rush was at the height of their popularity, and I was beginning my journey through teenagedom, Lee was a wiry, hawk-nosed, pale, long-haired guru of the electric bass guitar with a banshee voice that, in its dizzily shrill explorations of the upper reaches of human vocality, polarized fans and critics. His style of bass playing sounded depths within me that no other instrument had ever achieved. Indeed, I did not know an instrument could achieve such arresting power, such a claim to attention, until I heard Lee play. His Canadian white-boy awkwardness and soft-spoken, self-effacing interview style seemed a colossal public-relations victory for awkward suburban white boys everywhere. I felt like I understood the personality, even the spirituality, he was communicating through the bass. He forced the bass into speaking a funky eclectic language, evoking the sounds and sensations of slaps, pops, burps, hiccups, slides, agitations, palpitations, stomps, flutters, kicks, digs, trips, moans, and scats. His playing evoked a restless and searching eroticism constantly revising, restating, releasing and reinterpreting itself. Lee was never content with a standard bass line, and through the process of absorbing his playing through what must now, almost 30 years later, total many thousands of listenings, I recognized not only a musical style but a possible way of life. Rock music became a vehicle for something more.

Still, the typically sonorous voice of the bass spoke an invigorating new dialect, a spiritually suggestive one, under Lee’s long thin fingers—fingers of the sort that I myself do not have, but which I nevertheless attempt to press into similar tonal service. My own playing owes much to Lee, and I feel the dignity and authenticity of the style of musicianship that I learned from his pop culture tutelage every time I pick up the bass.

My attraction to Rush was also my initiation into the wider world of rock music. Listening to rock, idolizing Lee, and learning to play the bass satisfied a thirst that I didn’t know had existed prior to my teen years, a thirst for a musical knowledge and experience among other things. Through watching Rush videos endlessly on MTV, listening constantly to rock radio, and attending closely to Lee’s interviews, lyrics, and playing, I came to sense that here was a virtuosity that called to me, a way of not just seeing but feeling the world that sounded depths that until then had remained shadowed. It quickly became like a religious drug, this ability to feel a shock of recognition and intensified self-awareness in my regular experiences with rock, a religious drug that allowed the “substance” of uncontainment, yet retained its “accidents” in full. This is something that all the Tipper Gore-ish parents who protested rock during the 80s never understood, or misunderstood: its religious aura. Over the course of my teenage years, I went from being at home in the church to being at home in the world of music. I dropped out of serving at mass and immersed myself in music magazines, MTV, concerts, and my own (very) slowly developing musicianship. All of my experience up to that point had taught me that there was no bridge between the world of the church and the world of rock music.

(And when I got to Harvard Divinity School in 1994 to start my graduate studies in theology–a long way from Independence, Missouri–my first meeting in Harvard Square was with a fellow I’d met on a Rush list online who showed me pictures of Rush being honored, at Harvard, the year before, as “Band of the Millennium.” Did I mention it was the Harvard Lampoon? The pieces were beginning to fit together.)

Even though circuitous routes returned me to Catholicism as a constellation with which I simply must deal, the tension between my spiritual life in rock music and my spiritual life in the church remains a valuable and even sacred one to me, a very productive tension, influencing what sort of theology I write in the academy as well as how I play music in bar bands.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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