‘Subdivisions’: the song that transformed Neil Peart
Rush have always been considered one of the greatest prog-rock bands of all time, as they take influence from the very best.
One of the first bands that they learnt from was Cream, a musical outfit that has quite often been credited with forming the foundation of prog-rock. Rush were such big fans of the band that some of their earliest shows were committed to just playing covers, and the influence of the rock powerhouse can be heard in the original material that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart eventually went on to make.
“We would do our own version of ‘Spoonful’,” explained Geddy Lee when talking about how the band influenced early Rush. “We would play in the coffeehouses and the high-school dances and all that stuff. We really tried to emulate Cream in the earliest days of Rush, so there was a real bond to Jack Bruce’s playing for me.”
It wasn’t just the music that Rush were able to emulate, though; it was what the band wrote about, which also led to them being considered prog rock giants. The genre has always been difficult to define, but Frank Zappa had a good go at it once, when he said that prog rock was essentially rock that incorporated various elements, which meant it couldn’t be recognised as mainstream.
“I would presume that people would accept this definition,” he said. “Progressive rock is anything that doesn’t sound like regular rock. Regular rock is everything that sounds like itself. All songs which sound the same, everything on MTV, everything on the radio, that’s rock. Progressive rock is stuff that doesn’t sound like that.”
This is a pretty good description of the genre, and it didn’t just apply to the sound, but also to what bands were writing about. When you listen to mainstream rock, a great deal of the songs talk about themes which are accessible to the average listener. This means going over topics that many can identify with, such as love, hate, and all things in between. However, a lot of prog bands opted to write about things less accessible, such as sci-fi and fantasy.
While a lot of people listen to music so they can hear something they relate to, prog fans were never bothered about the lyrics taking a more fictional approach, given they were listening more for musical complexity as opposed to relatability. That being said, despite this acceptance of the weird and wonderful, Rush didn’t stay entirely away from writing more humane lyrics, and the first time they experimented with doing so was a turning point for Neil Peart.
The drummer was a lover of all things complex, and therefore, he was happy to embrace the fantasy side of writing. It meant the lyrics were fun, but the music was serious, as was the case with plenty of similar bands. They disbanded from this approach when they worked on the track ‘Subdivisions’, a song which was human and grounded in its narrative. This revealed a connective part of writing music to Peart that he hadn’t touched upon much before, and in having such a thing revealed to him, he was suddenly more excited about covering the human experience.
“A lot of the early fantasy stuff was just for fun,” he concluded. “Because I didn’t believe yet that I could put something real into a song. ‘Subdivisions’ happened to be an anthem for a lot of people who grew up under those circumstances, and from then on, I realised what I most wanted to put in a song was human experience.”
