IN A WAY, RUSH IS LIKE A NICE GIRL WITH HUGE TITS

So, did you love the Rush movie premiere on Saturday? You bet you did! That shit was awesome! I mean, even peppered with commercial breaks of grueling duration on VH1 Classic, Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage made an unmistakable statement: Rush is better than everybody.

Now, we all know about their engaging, evolving sound (over the course of 24 records) and that their concert experience is quite similar to an eye-rolling orgasm; plus, there are the little consequential benefits to Rush fandom, such as a near-total absence of casual fans (whose fleeting enthusiasm endangers a good concert vibe), and of course the fact that only at Rush shows am I the best-looking guy in my section (I pull Rush honeys like whoa!); and finally, we agree that Rush is only beginning to enjoy a critical thaw that is due them for 30+ years, and that Rush-hating mainstream music press is staffed by jelly-spined girl-worshippers who don’t like music so much as fall in proxy self-love with musicians.

So yeah we know all that good stuff about Rush the band. But being so invisible to the media, the men of Rush remained unscrutinized and mysterious. So what I would hear for the first time this weekend was their speaking voices for more than a couple seconds — and that’s where R:BTLS was most revelatory. From Neil Peart’s books, we know Alex is the funny one, Geddy the friendly chap, and Neil himself the erudite renaissance man. But once they got to chit-chatting away onscreen, their personalities came into deeper focus than those tropes provide. For example, Alex is way hilarious, if not for his affable wit then for his almost comically Canadian intonation and accent. And who knew that Neil, far from a stiff, aloof intellectual, was actually a gabby, happy spaz? Not me! I already planned to dry-hump the guy’s face and now I see that I won’t have to first escort him to a lecture or art film to get him in the mood! Hot.

It’s almost as though Rush’s relative media silence for, uh, 2-3 decades allowed us to let them off the hook as people. Like, if it had turned out that they suck. Even going into Saturday night’s premiere, I figured that the band’s awesomeness would handily excuse any of their possibly enormous shortcomings as people (see: Dave Mustaine). Like a good blind date. Or like the hot girl in a Theatre Of Pain shirt who snatched the last Corona six pack at Ralph’s on Sunday; she compensated me generously with tacit permission to do a lot of side-staring at her knockers. Now in my post-movie thinking, Rush represents that same hot girl but with outright juggs, a Hellacious Acres tee, and a just-purchased sixer of Corona to like split with me. The little lime wedges to jam in the bottle are my unending Rush love and respect.

Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen’s Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage is out now in a two-disc DVD with tons of extra shit. All this validation will probably juice up Rush’s summer tour too.

-ADF