A Farewell to Kings

The Zoo Crew has got a real one spinning for the Zoo Freaks right now, and it is the title cut off Rush's 1977 record A Farewell to Kings. If you have ever caught this one on THE ZOO, you already know how it opens, that nylon-string guitar walking in from somewhere outside the room, birds in the air, then the whole band slamming the door. Alex Lifeson told Guitar Player years later that they cut that intro in the courtyard at Rockfield Studios in Wales, on one of those rare sunny stretches the place ever gets. They set up a couple of mics for a simple stereo picture. Neil Peart had a little percussion nest of bells and what the guys used to call knuckleheads. Geddy Lee parked a Minimoog out there. Alex had the Ramirez classical, and he walked the gravel while he played, like a troubadour making a circuit of the yard. You can hear the guitar drift across the stereo field because he was moving. Geddy, trailing behind with the synth the way every good troubadour needs a sidekick, said the Welsh birds ended up on the tape too, unless they flew in from somewhere else.

Geddy has called the piece a different animal for them. The intro is built one way, then the band comes in with a bang and a weird time signature that still makes it a tough song to play. Alex remembered walking back and forth trying not to crash into Neil, and he said they could never quite leave a simple idea alone. A dropped note here, a strange one there, and suddenly the listener has something to hang onto. The classical guitar itself was a find. Alex had studied a bit of classical playing in his late teens, spotted a Ramirez on a wall priced at seven hundred dollars, borrowed the money, and put that instrument to work in earnest on this very intro. He still had the guitar decades on and swore it sounded fantastic.

The title is lifted from Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, and the lyric, written by Neil Peart, is about hypocrisy and about finding your own way by looking inward instead of waiting on the halls of power to hand you a map. Robert Telleria, in the book Merely Players, reads the sacred halls in the song as churches, courthouses, and schools, and the hypocrites as the elite who keep those doors. It is the same hunger that ran through 2112, only brought down to earth, a wish for a new renaissance that starts with the person standing in the room. Geddy later admitted that when they tried to rehearse the song on the Snakes and Arrows run, he could not get through the vocal without hurting himself, so they let it go. Some of the old book stays on the shelf for a reason.

The whole album was the first one they made in the United Kingdom, which mattered to three guys who had grown up on Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Cream. Alex told Classic Rock that 1977 was a great year for exactly that reason. They were still doing something like two hundred and fifty shows a year plus making records, and youth was the only thing keeping the engine from seizing. Rockfield sat out in the Welsh countryside, and the sheep became part of the lore. They worked all day and all night, crawled off to bed around noon, and the sheep were out in the fields talking the whole time, keeping everybody awake. Punk was blowing up across the water the same season. Alex said he could feel that it mattered, culturally and musically, even if it was not lined up with what Rush was doing. He figured it was good to shake the tree. 2112 had bought them their freedom after the label pressure of the mid-seventies, and A Farewell to Kings was the record where they walked forward the way they wanted.

None of that courtyard in Wales happens if three Toronto kids do not stick with a basement band long enough to get a name. Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee met around thirteen, first year of junior high in Willowdale, a suburb on the north side of the city. Alex has said they were aliens in a class full of kids who already knew how to fit, and they became best friends on the strength of that. Geddy remembers cracking each other up and understanding where the other one came from. Alex already had a drummer pal, John Rutsey, from even earlier, hockey and school days at St. Paschal's. The two of them had a little basement outfit called The Projection, with a neighbor on bass who did not last. Out of that came the first gig under the name Rush.

The name itself was a gift from John's older brother Bill. They had a drop-in centre date coming and no moniker worth printing, so they sat in the Rutsey basement trying things on. Bill said they needed something short and to the point, and he offered Rush. They took it. The first show landed in September 1968 at the Coff-Inn, a youth centre in the basement of a church in North York, and they got paid twenty-five Canadian dollars. The original bass player and singer that night was Jeff Jones. When the next week's gig came around, Jeff had a party he would rather attend, so Alex called his schoolmate Geddy to step in on bass and vocals. Jones did not come back. Geddy did. There were lineup wobbles after that, a short stretch where Geddy was even shown the door and the others tried the name Hadrian, and then a bad gig sent them back to the three of them. By the early seventies the power trio had settled into the Toronto bar circuit and the high-school dances, playing Cream, Hendrix, and John Mayall covers and telling themselves they were the Canadian Led Zeppelin. Geddy has laughed about that one. In their own heads they were. Out in the room they were probably just another loud young band that at least got to play.

Nobody in the Canadian press was interested enough to hand them a deal, so they cut a single on their own Moon Records label with manager Ray Danniels, a 1973 cover of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away. It did not set the radio on fire. They paid for studio time and put out the first album themselves in 1974. Working Man, the long closer, caught some air in the States, and Mercury picked the record up. John Rutsey, who had pushed the rehearsals and led the early glam flash of platform boots and shiny jackets, left soon after. Health was the reason most often given. The man who answered the ad was Neil Peart, back from a stretch in England where the drumming dream had not quite landed. Geddy remembers him showing up in shorts, in a battered car, with his drums stuffed in trash cans. The playing was the thing that settled it, and Geddy liked him straight off. Alex took a little more convincing. Peart got the gig, took over the lyric book, and the trio that would carry A Farewell to Kings was locked in. Two years of hard touring and the fight over 2112 later, they had the room to stand in a Welsh courtyard and let a classical guitar walk the gravel while the birds sang.

If you want the band's own shelf, the album page lives on the official site at Rush, and the same crew keeps a light on at Facebook, Instagram, and X. The deep listeners have built their own libraries too. Rush is a Band has been logging interviews and anniversary notes for years, including the Prog magazine sit-down where Geddy and Alex walked back through the Rockfield sessions. Power Windows keeps the liner notes, the quotes, and the track-by-track paper on this record in one place. Cygnus-X1 holds another full set of album notes and lyrics for the same disc. And the long-running RUSH Fan Club group is still busy with people trading stories about the songs. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks. That courtyard is still out there on the tape.