“Still one of my all-time favourite songs”: the first classic track Alex Lifeson truly connected to
A revolution takes a while to gestate. While the kids of the counterculture scene had their own battles to pick, they also carried the traumas of the previous generation and transmuted that latent need for change into action. Geddy Lee typified this. His parents met at Auschwitz. Unlike 1.1million others, they managed to survive the wicked extermination camp before eventually making their way to Canada.
Such a story wasn’t lost on Alex Lifeson when he first met Lee at high school. Born in the shadow of such barbarity, it was clear to the pair that the future needed to be different. Long before forming Rush, they were hooked on rock ‘n’ roll and its potential to expand your horizons. They’d sneak off to see The Who or Led Zeppelin whenever they could somehow wangle free entry to a venue, and such daring expeditions were, in part, inspired by one song that came before them.
In 1966, when Lifeson was only 13, Buffalo Springsteen put their finger on the happening zeitgeist. In doing so, they spurred it on. “There’s something happening here,” the band sang, “and what it is ain’t exactly clear”. While that might have been true of society at large, the same could be said for Lifeson, whose real name is Aleksandar Živojinović OC, who was steadily having his own world changed by the great music billowing up around him.
The song zapped him like a kid’s first ice cream—it made the world suddenly feel a little bit more vital. It arrived humbly, as these things often do, but has never eased its grip on him since. “This was the first rock song that had a big influence on me,” he recalls. “I remember hearing it on the radio in my dad’s car when I was a kid. Buffalo Springfield were unlike the other bands of the ‘San Francisco sound’; they were more country sounding.”
Perhaps this gave them a wider appeal that a young kid like Lifeson found easier to identify with. Either way, his interest in music became a little bit more serious. His ears were opened to the musicianship beyond the message, too. “Stephen Stills and Neil Young trade leads on this one,” he says, almost hearing the mingling melody as he recalls his relationship with it.
He delves even further, telling Guitar World that it is a rock ‘n’ roll great. “I like Young’s very fast vibrato and edgy, truncated playing style, particularly on his soloing, whereas Stills’ sound is sweeter and smoother,” he explains. “This is still one of my all-time favourite songs. In fact, Rush did a version of it on our covers tribute EP, Feedback.”
While the track might not typically align with Rush’s sound, that didn’t matter then, and it still doesn’t matter to Lifeson—like many others of that era, the song hit like a cold splash of water, demarcating that a revolution of sorts really was unfurling, and with a rolling bass and luscious melody it asserted a need to keep the foot on the pedal.
In due course, Lifeson would get into Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix, but it was this little folk ditty that grabbed him by the lapels and launched him into musical adulthood.
