There is one person I know for sure whom has understood this message and song since I was quite young, and I am grateful for you, Teresita, for your friendship many years ago, and again this past year, when I really needed a friend.
Thank you. I hope you know what this song means to me, though I know that you do...thank you...
Although this title may evoke memories of the cartoon dandy Snagglepuss delivering the lines like Thurston Howell III of Gilligan's Island, for me, it is the live album from Rush that was one of the vehicles for putting them into the limelight from the Great White North down to the US and the rest of the world.
"Exit, Stage Left" as an album was revolutionary in that it was not only a moving portrait of a band on the run, but was an escalation of the band as independent maestros of each of their respective talents and instruments: Peart on percussion, Lee on Bass/Synthesizers/Vocals and Liefson on lead guitar. In other words, it was the turning point for the band and for establishing a live watermark for many future band members of other bands to caution. If Rush could do these things live, then the studio question was simply out of the question. Rush has been accused (and sometimes rightly so) for their static performances. However, the reason that they cannot be bouncing around the stage is exactly tied to their art and craftsmanship.
"Closer to the Heart" comes from "A Farewell to Kings," an album that has strong affinities for me for many reasons, and although it became a mainstream hit, it does highlight the Rush of the "Exit, Stage Left" era quite well.
It does beg many questions on a philosophical level as well. What does it mean to be a true craftsman or woman at what cost? We prey upon the faults of others at the market place when they fall below our standards, but often they are just trying to crank out a living as we are. In the Republic of Plato, Socrates in his ironical way of being naive suggests that a "perfect" society would involve everyone doing one thing really, really well and leaving the rest to those who do other things better. Novelty or a novel idea, there is something that rings true. However, in modern society, that sort of excellence comes at a cost. Should we abandon the rest of life's duties to become the "best that we were born to be?"
In either case, I believe, as with the song, that if we produce, with our hearts and with our attention, we can produce the best that we can, and indeed, whether Plato was selling us a Noble Lie or not, it could be better for all of us.
Rush’s Signals is an oft-maligned piece, which left many people to either become new Rush fans, or for other to leave the fold. It was not without its diatribes of musical pundits bantering back and forth about what this meant for the future of Rush, much like Van Halen’s 1984, causing a similar rift amongst die-hards. Considering I ended up mainly listening to the older Rush, for me it was a bit of a harbinger of things to come. However, I also stopped listening to Dokken, Vandenberg, and Whitesnake around the same time, so that does not mean much as I still listen to Rush, but unless startled by VH1, none of the latter. Neither here, nor there, sort of.
Signals was the end of a Rush era, things did change. This song haunted me throughout high school though. Being known as “the Swimmer,” I knew that there would be a day when I would “lose it,” and no longer be the fastest. It terrified me.
That day did happen, and it was hard, very hard.
This song did capture that feeling quite well. I recently thought of it though in a different light, actually in the opposite way. What happens if you do lose it, if you lose nearly everything that you thought was “you,” what happens then? How will you react? Those are the questions that temper the meddle that we are made of, the ones that determine how that sun will rise again tomorrow.
Growing up in the mid-80’s as a decently educated white male in America, it is not too surprising that Rush would have come across my radar screen to some extent. For a while, at least, I was the self-proclaimed “biggest fan” in Amarillo, listening endlessly to Moving Pictures, Hemispheres, Permanent Waves, and 2112, Anthology, and Exit, Stage Leftdown in my basement room on my dad’s old record player that he had left many years before. Geddy, Alex, and Neil were my solace. Like the narrator of 2112, I had found this strange, new thing that gave music, and for a Time, that discovery, which would define a great deal of my teenage musical inclinations, was Rush.
Perhaps the most important to me, however, was A Farewell To Kings. And, for all intents and purposes, it still is. Yet, it is with bittersweet fondness and regret that I listen to the title track. It is a memory of losing my greatest childhood friend. By losing, I don’t mean that she died, but that we lost track of each other during a transitional phase in each of our lives, and unfortunately, the thread was never regained, despite my attempted efforts to do so.
Teresita and I never lived in the same city or town, never dated, never even kissed, but there was a deep love and respect for each other’s plight in the sea of teenage angst. We wrote hundreds of letters over the years, having met at a swim meet in Odessa when I was 13, and she 15. For about a decade, we shared every triumph and every defeat in our lives, each dream and hope, whether fantasies in life to be unrequited, or sincere desires or expectations to be fulfilled.
Our common joke was that should life got too tough and “the dragons grow too mighty, to slay with pen or sword,” we would go start a pineapple farm on some deserted tropical island. Life did get pretty tough for me at times, and I often thought about that pineapple farm and whether Teresita had found her respite in the turmoil that our lives can throw at us. I know that she had some very difficult times, and for many of them, I was her only ear willing to listen, if only per letters, or by phone when possible. This, of course, was pre-cell phone and regular email contact, and a phone call used to take concerted planning and was a thing of expectation, rather than mere commonplace. It was the means to a deep, caring conversation that we held for those many formative years.
I am saddened at writing this, in all honesty, for of all my life, I believe that over the years, in spite of hardships and difficult times, I have been able to recover or at least make the attempt to redeem lost friendships of those whom I had valued so dearly, except for Teresita, a dear and respected friend.
Thinking of “Kings,” it was not unexpected to me that the memory of her came to my mind, and this song.
Given this, I can say that this is one of my one regrets in life, that I let this friendship slip away...and, throwing it out to the cosmos, I have learned the hard way not to take such precious gifts of friendship for granted.
