2112: I. Overture / II. The Temples of Syrinx / III. Discovery / IV. Presentation / V. Oracle: The Dream / VI. Soliloquy / VII. Grand Finale

Zoo Freaks, settle back and let this one run the length of the side. The Zoo Crew has the whole of 2112 on the turntable, that seven-part ride from the 1976 album of the same name, and if you have ever pointed a bike down a long empty highway with a stack of vinyl rattling in the saddlebag, you already know why this piece still feels like a declaration. Overture. The Temples of Syrinx. Discovery. Presentation. Oracle: The Dream. Soliloquy. Grand Finale. Twenty minutes and change. No radio edit. No apology to the office.

The story Neil Peart set down is a future in which the Solar Federation holds the galaxy under a red star, and the priests of the Temples of Syrinx decide what a person may read, see, and hear. A young man finds a guitar in a cave behind a waterfall, teaches himself to play, and carries the strange device to the priests like an offering. They smash it. He dreams of an elder race that once left this world. He breaks. Then the sky answers. Peart later said the spark sat close to Ayn Rand's short novel Anthem, though he did not see the likeness until the tale had already taken shape, and he worried he might be walking too near another writer's ground. On the sleeve he credited the genius of Ayn Rand. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have both said the ending was left open for the listener. Peart's own intent was that the elder race returned and took the planet out of the priests' hands. Those last spoken lines, Attention all planets of the Solar Federation, We have assumed control, come back until the room feels occupied.

None of it was written in a quiet cabin. Lifeson told Rolling Stone they were about twenty-two, still living out of arena dressing rooms, cars, and the van, stitching the piece together while the Caress of Steel tour rolled on. Soundchecks became the rehearsal hall, so by the time they reached Toronto Sound in the cold weeks of early 1976 they already knew the road map. Geddy has said the overture was the last chunk written, the way a classical overture often is, built from the musical threads of the sections that follow so the opening already knows where the side is headed. He also remembered that he and Alex had the shape in mind, the overblown intro and the pacing of the movements, before they even held Neil's lyrics, and that the words dropped in so cleanly they barely changed a line. Acoustic guitars in Holiday Inn rooms and the back of the station wagon did the early work. Strum hard enough, Geddy figured, and you can already hear the stacks.

The label did not want another concept record. Caress of Steel had stumbled in the shops, and the men with the contracts wanted short, repeatable songs they could push at radio. Lifeson has called 2112 their protest album and said, plain as a fist on the table, that it was the band giving the company the finger. In one interview he remembered thinking that if this was the end, he could go back to plumbing with his dad or head back to school, because stepping backward just to please the office was not a life he wanted. Geddy's line has been quoted on the road for years: if they were going down in flames, they were going to be their flames. Peart told a writer in the eighties that they had been under heavy pressure to compromise, and that compromise was a word he could not live with. The turn of it, once the record caught fire with the people who actually bought albums, is that the label never again got to tell them what to cut. Lifeson has said everything that came after was possible because of this one.

Listen close when Discovery arrives. Lifeson starts on open strings and lets the playing grow more tangled as the kid teaches himself the instrument, which is the whole plot in the fingers. They wanted the cave in the speakers: extra reverb, water moving over stone, nothing like a strutting rock vocal. The lyric sheet printed chords that build high like a mountain, but on the original take Geddy sang sounds. By the 1996 live album he had switched over to the printed word. Hugh Syme, who also drew the starman that became the band's mark, played ARP Odyssey synthesizer on the overture. The second side of the vinyl was a different stretch of the mind, shorter songs for balance, including Lessons with words and music by Alex and Tears with words by Geddy, a rare split of the lyric job Neil usually carried. The Who were in the bloodstream. Lifeson has said Tommy and Quadrophenia were part of why a suite with an overture felt like home ground.

A guitar magazine once pointed out a bit of arithmetic in the finale. The first spoken sentence is seven words, the second is four, and each is said three times, which lands on twenty-one and twelve. Lifeson said he had never noticed, and that nobody planned it. The Rand credit stirred a rougher storm. On a British tour a hard-left writer at New Musical Express came at them and painted the influence as something ugly. Geddy, whose parents survived the Holocaust, has said he was hurt and angry at the charge. He has been clear for years that 2112 was an anti-totalitarian story, not a party platform, and that the band had no tie to Rand's politics. The sleeve note was about the book that helped three young players stand up for the work when the office wanted them smaller.

Before any of that starman business, they were school kids in Willowdale, on the edge of Toronto. Alex Lifeson was born Aleksandar Zivojinovich, and he took the stage name because Lifeson is the English sense of the family name and the original was a mouthful for club promoters hunting a marquee. He and Geddy Lee met around thirteen in junior high, a pair of outsiders who cracked each other up and understood the houses they came from. Alex already had a basement band called The Projection with drummer John Rutsey and a neighbor on bass. John's older brother Bill tossed out the name Rush while they sat stuck for one in that same basement, and it stuck. The first gig, a drop-in centre called the Coff-In, had Jeff Jones on bass and voice, a short set of Hendrix, Cream, and the Yardbirds for a room of about twenty people. Jones could not make the next week, so Alex called the kid he had been jamming with.

Gary Lee Weinrib walked in and never really left. His grandmother's Yiddish accent turned Gary into something that sounded like Geddy, and the name stayed with the band. Years of Ontario high schools, church basements, and bars followed, with Led Zeppelin and Cream as the north stars and original songs starting to edge out the covers. They cut a Buddy Holly tune, Not Fade Away, on their own Moon Records in 1973, then paid for the debut album themselves and put it out in 1974. Working Man, that long blues-rock closer, caught ears on American radio, and Mercury picked the record up. Rutsey, who had written most of the first album's words, stepped away as health and the coming road pulled in different directions. Neil Peart came aboard in the summer of 1974, a bookish drummer from the Hamilton area who had been knocking around England in small bands, and the trio that would make 2112 locked in. Fly By Night tested the longer form. Caress of Steel pushed it further and nearly sank them. 2112 is where the idea stopped asking permission.

That is the side spinning for the Zoo Freaks on THE ZOO, a twenty-minute argument that a band still in its early twenties decided to win or lose on their own terms. The priests lost. The players kept the guitar. If you want the sleeve story from the source, the band keeps the album written up on their official site at Rush. Their official pages sit at Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the deep fan bench, the long-running news shrine at Rush is a Band still tracks the catalog, including the platinum trail of this very record, and the circle over at Rush fans official keeps the conversation going among the people who never turned the side over early. Crank the finale. The good kind of control is the kind with the guitars up.