“Living on a lighted stage approaches the unreal,” goes perhaps the most famous line in the history of the Canadian hard-rock power trio Rush. But a most un-unreal documentary on the band, “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage” explores the roots of the band and its rise (far) above competitors (for some reason Bad Company keeps getting mentioned, as well as Kiss, the band for which it frequently opened) on the brainy end of the hard-rock spectrum. The doc is showing at the TriBeCa film festival, which kicks off Wednesday night and which carries several intresting music-related titles. Tickets to “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage” are sold here.
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Rush was at its peak halfway between a metal band and a progressive-rock outfit minus the keyboards — I always found guitarist Lifeson’s sound to be singularly colorful, connoting oranges and yellows instead of the monochrome of bands like Iron Maiden or the aptly-named Black Sabbath. (Rush gives me occasion to think I have synesthesia — detecting colors in sounds, a condition Vladimir Nabokov had and wrote about in detail in his memoir “Speak, Memory”). Rush also had the major bonus of almost comically dense lyrics that occasioned much poring over by its fans. Polysyllabic as these lyrics were, I don’t pretend to see the meaning in lines like “A modern day warrior mean mean stride/Today’s Tom Sawyer mean, mean pride.” (Although I am not necessarily averse to singing along with them in cars, alone. It beats “Love Me Do.”)
Even fans, though, will learn some things they didn’t know. I was unaware that singer/bass player Geddy Lee was the child of two Holocaust survivors, or that guitarist Alex Lifeson’s people (real name: Zivojinovich) came from Yugoslavia, where Lifeson’s father was once in a prison camp. Both friends, who met in junior high school and were inseparable thereafter, saw rock as a way to blast their way out of the seriousness of their households. The group was pretty interesting even before the late entrance of its eventual leader Neil Peart, the finest drummer of his time and a songwriter who crammed his lyrics with sociopolitical substance. Celebs like Trent Reznor and Jack Black deconstruct what Rush meant in a film that will primarily appeal to fans but will also create new ones.