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'Distant Early Warning' is the Cold-War themed first song off the 1984 album 'Grace Under Pressure' by Canadian prog rock band Rush. The title references a line of US and Canadian-owned radar stations across far northern Alaska, Canada, Iceland and Greenland tasked with early detection of a Soviet invasion. They were the best of three such lines, including the Pinetree Line, and the line that would've made a much funnier song title, the Mid-Canada Line which was so shitty it was overwhelmed by flocks of birds, and it was placed under a major migration route. But it was cheap!
[during a close-up of the bass] Here we see Geddy Lee's futuristic bass guitar, the headless Steinberger, an instrument also used by Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads. This futuristic, minimalist design was very impressive to teenage Tycho. Look at it, it's so cool!
Rush is another band like Yes that was around forever; they were formed in 1968 and and retired in 2015, which was cemented when 33% of their members died from brain cancer in 2020. This was the incomparable drummer Neil Peart, the bookish nerd to Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson's goofy childhood buddy dude-bros.
Peart was born 35 years old and never met a percussion instrument he didn't like, and his increasingly complex set-up of standard drums, electronic stuff and other random things to make noise on grew, requiring more and more elaborate set-ups with rotating stands which took over the stage, prompting his band mates to compete for space with stacks of tumbling clothes dryers full of laundry and industrial chicken rotisserie ovens (I heard but was not able to confirm that Geddy Lee fed the local homeless with the chickens).
Anyway, Peart's lyrics were often inspired by his favorite books at the time, which led to his nickname "The Professor" and even included an unfortunate foray into Ayn Rand's works that is common to overly-intelligent young men, and which he thankfully outgrew.
Geddy Lee was born Gary Lee Weinrib in suburban Ontario to two Polish holocaust survivors. 'Geddy' was how his mom pronounced Gary, and it stuck. He became friends in elementary school with fellow goofball Alex Lifeson (born Aleksandar Živo-ji-nović; his last name can be translated to "son of life" so that's what he changed it to), and they dropped out of high school to be in a rock band in '68 with some non-Neil-Peart drummer who was more into hair-bands like Bad Company and was eventually replaced, since Geddy and Alex were into bands like Yes and Genesis.
The band languished in Canada for a few years; no musicians had ever come from there so it was just assumed that they sucked and there was no one around to sign them to a record deal. A programmer at a rock radio station in Cleveland picked their self-titled and essentially self-published debut album up in 1974 and liked it because the song 'Working Man' was long enough at over seven minutes to allow the DJs to take extended bathroom breaks, it caught on, and thus a successful rock band was born.
They released several weird albums with songs about elves, necromancers, and Libertarians, songs that clocked in at over twenty minutes long (allowing DJs to take even longer bathroom breaks), and songs that changed time signatures so often that no one could dance to them. They almost got burned out and were definitely sick of the high-concept shit. So songs started getting more poppy starting in the eighties, which leads us to this video. Geddy Lee gets to play his Steinberger (so cool!) and to indulge in his love of keyboards, which pissed off a lot of their metal-head fans (not to mention their guitarist); Neil Peart gets to write high-minded lyrics invoking cold war fears, relationship issues, and Biblical characters. Alex Lifeson gets to play the guitar, so maybe he should just quit complaining.
I would like to thank the makers of the 2010 documentary 'Beyond the Lighted Stage' (available to watch on YouTube) which helped immensely with my research. If you'd like to learn more about the band Rush, feel free to check it out! Fair warning though- it will make you hate Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. But it also has Les Claypool and the lady who picked the Rush album in 1974 so her DJs could take a dump, so it's worth the risk in my opinion.
[during a close-up of the bass] Here we see Geddy Lee's futuristic bass guitar, the headless Steinberger, an instrument also used by Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads. This futuristic, minimalist design was very impressive to teenage Tycho. Look at it, it's so cool!
Rush is another band like Yes that was around forever; they were formed in 1968 and and retired in 2015, which was cemented when 33% of their members died from brain cancer in 2020. This was the incomparable drummer Neil Peart, the bookish nerd to Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson's goofy childhood buddy dude-bros.
Peart was born 35 years old and never met a percussion instrument he didn't like, and his increasingly complex set-up of standard drums, electronic stuff and other random things to make noise on grew, requiring more and more elaborate set-ups with rotating stands which took over the stage, prompting his band mates to compete for space with stacks of tumbling clothes dryers full of laundry and industrial chicken rotisserie ovens (I heard but was not able to confirm that Geddy Lee fed the local homeless with the chickens).
Anyway, Peart's lyrics were often inspired by his favorite books at the time, which led to his nickname "The Professor" and even included an unfortunate foray into Ayn Rand's works that is common to overly-intelligent young men, and which he thankfully outgrew.
Geddy Lee was born Gary Lee Weinrib in suburban Ontario to two Polish holocaust survivors. 'Geddy' was how his mom pronounced Gary, and it stuck. He became friends in elementary school with fellow goofball Alex Lifeson (born Aleksandar Živo-ji-nović; his last name can be translated to "son of life" so that's what he changed it to), and they dropped out of high school to be in a rock band in '68 with some non-Neil-Peart drummer who was more into hair-bands like Bad Company and was eventually replaced, since Geddy and Alex were into bands like Yes and Genesis.
The band languished in Canada for a few years; no musicians had ever come from there so it was just assumed that they sucked and there was no one around to sign them to a record deal. A programmer at a rock radio station in Cleveland picked their self-titled and essentially self-published debut album up in 1974 and liked it because the song 'Working Man' was long enough at over seven minutes to allow the DJs to take extended bathroom breaks, it caught on, and thus a successful rock band was born.
They released several weird albums with songs about elves, necromancers, and Libertarians, songs that clocked in at over twenty minutes long (allowing DJs to take even longer bathroom breaks), and songs that changed time signatures so often that no one could dance to them. They almost got burned out and were definitely sick of the high-concept shit. So songs started getting more poppy starting in the eighties, which leads us to this video. Geddy Lee gets to play his Steinberger (so cool!) and to indulge in his love of keyboards, which pissed off a lot of their metal-head fans (not to mention their guitarist); Neil Peart gets to write high-minded lyrics invoking cold war fears, relationship issues, and Biblical characters. Alex Lifeson gets to play the guitar, so maybe he should just quit complaining.
I would like to thank the makers of the 2010 documentary 'Beyond the Lighted Stage' (available to watch on YouTube) which helped immensely with my research. If you'd like to learn more about the band Rush, feel free to check it out! Fair warning though- it will make you hate Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. But it also has Les Claypool and the lady who picked the Rush album in 1974 so her DJs could take a dump, so it's worth the risk in my opinion.
