Animate

Hey there, Zoo Freaks, settle in for a ride through one of those deep cuts that still hits like a hard left on a winding road. The Zoo Crew has "Animate" by Rush spinning from the Counterparts album, and this track has always carried that insistent pulse that makes you lean into the speakers. Geddy Lee once said he loves it, calling it one of the great songs the band has done, with something about the bestiality of it, the insistence that just keeps driving forward. That bass line digs in hard, and there is a story behind the gear that makes it even better. During the sessions, Lee ended up playing his parts through an old amplifier that had been pulled out of the studio garbage and fixed up by a tech assistant. It had that raw energy, all the little explosions and crackles disappearing into the mix so you just feel the drive without knowing where it came from. Lee also dug the way Neil Peart counted it in at the top, that human touch instead of some sterile click track.

Peart brought his own flavor to the drums. In a 1994 talk with Modern Drummer, he explained how he went back to a basic R&B rhythm from his early days and mixed it with that hypnotic feel a lot of the British bands around the turn of the nineties were using, names like Curve and Lush. The middle section carries the mark of African music that had gotten under his skin, not any one specific rhythm, just the impact of it opening things up. The whole piece sits around six minutes, landed at number 35 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, and later showed up on the Retrospective 3 collection. Originally the idea floated around as something called Duality before it settled into Animate, and the album title itself comes straight from the line "my counterpart, my foolish heart." The cover art plays with those pairings too, a rabbit on a turtle, salt and pepper shakers, a tooth and a nail, all those visual counterparts sitting there.

Lyrically Peart was digging into Carl Jung and the idea of the anima, that unconscious feminine side living inside the male psyche, and its counterpart the animus. He set the words up so they could almost sound like a love song about two people, but he meant them as one person talking to the other half of himself. Drawing from Jung and from Camille Paglia, he was working through what the modern man was supposed to be after all the clichés of the eighties. You get the goddess in the garden, the sister in the soul, the priestess of the pagan mother, the mermaid of the lunar sea, all those archetypes of the feminine pulling against and completing the masculine side. The bridge talks about learning to rule the tender part, building a fortress, and gently dominating that submissive trait, but it is all about balancing the strong and the sensitive inside one person rather than denying either. Peart later noted a line that echoes Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the same poem that fed into Xanadu years earlier, though the connection did not hit him until he was writing one of his books. Fans who caught the Counterparts tour remember how the song opened up live, one bass player recalling seats dead center where he could watch Lee's flamenco picking technique up close and still felt the studio version had the sharper edge.

That brings us around to how these three even got rolling in the first place. Rush came together in the Willowdale neighborhood of Toronto back in August of 1968. Alex Lifeson was on guitar, John Rutsey on drums, and Jeff Jones handling bass and vocals at the start. Jones did not stick around long. Lifeson brought in his school friend Gary Weinrib, who became Geddy Lee, to take over bass and the high-flying vocals. The name itself came from Rutsey's older brother Bill, who suggested something short and punchy when the guys were sitting around trying to figure out what to call the band before an early gig. They spent years working the local Toronto bars and clubs, soaking up Cream and Led Zeppelin while sharpening the edges. In 1973 they put out a single covering Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away on their own Moon Records label after the usual doors stayed closed. The debut album followed in 1974, and it was the track Working Man that caught fire when a Cleveland station added it and word started spreading south. Rutsey stepped away after that first record, and Neil Peart stepped in on drums and lyrics, locking in the lineup that carried the band through the progressive epics, the radio staples, and everything that followed.

Those early days were pure grit, rehearsing in basements, hustling gigs, and eventually taking the leap to self-release rather than waiting for someone else to green-light the sound. From there the catalog grew into the kind of deep catalog that still keeps the speakers warm on stations like THE ZOO, where the Zoo Freaks know every twist in the road. You can dig deeper into the band's world at their official site Rush.com, where the lyrics and the full Counterparts story sit ready. The official Facebook page is over at Rush on Facebook, the Instagram account lives at Rush on Instagram, and the X feed is Rush on X. For the longtime fans keeping the archives alive, check out the Rush is a Band site at Rush is a Band and the deep dives at Cygnus-X1.Net. There is also the active Clockwork Angels (Rush Fans United) group on Facebook where folks swap stories and memories, plus the Rush Global Community and the Cygnus-X1.Net Facebook group for anyone who wants to keep the conversation going. So crank it up, Zoo Freaks, and let that insistent groove carry you down the highway a little further.