Day After Day #122: Vital Signs

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Vital Signs (1981)

I know Rush can be an acquired taste (or a complete turnoff) for some folks. But not me. I grew up in Toronto in the '70s and early '80s and Rush was what I gravitated toward. I've expanded my musical worldview considerably since then and got into punk and indie and funk and all sorts of cool shit, but I still like to listen to Rush every so often.

Growing up in Pickering, Ontario, a suburb east of Toronto, I used to hear about how Rush played at one of the high schools in town in the mid-'70s. I got into them around 1980 when Permanent Waves came out, although the first album I had was 1975's Fly By Night. 

I was in seventh grade and a classmate of mine, who was kind of a troublemaker, had an older brother who went to college so naturally, the kid decided to sell a bunch of his brother's stuff. Because that's what you do, right? No consequences down the road for that. Anyway, the kid knew I was a big hockey card collector and traded two of his brother's records for a bunch of cards. I gave him a bunch of my doubles for Led Zeppelin II and Fly By Night. This was just as I was getting into music, so I immersed myself in these records, which were both amazing. Of course, fast forward a few months and the kid comes back to me, begging me to give the albums back because his brother was home from college and obviously enraged that all his shit was gone. I was bummed but I sold them back for a few bucks each and then went and bought Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, which was still relatively new. 

Even though I didn't have the album anymore, my temporary ownership of Fly By Night turned me into a big Rush fan (as well as hearing them on the radio regularly). Not long afterward, the band released their eighth studio album Moving Pictures, which is their most successful. They had begun playing Led Zep and Cream-inspired riff rock, turned to prog-rock and long, complex suites, and then with Permanent Waves, started playing shorter, more radio-friendly songs.

Moving Pictures saw them do this to full effect, with "Tom Sawyer" becoming their best-known song and eventually a classic rock radio staple. That, "Limelight," "Red Barchetta" and the instrumental "YYZ" made up a killer side 1 of the album, while side 2 got a little less hype. But album closer "Vital Signs" might be one of the more underrated songs in Rush's catalog.

In "Vital Signs," Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart discusses how humans are interacting with technology, which admittedly was very different 43 years ago than it is today. 

"Unstable condition/A symptom of life/In mental and environmental change/Atmospheric disturbance/The feverish flux/Of human interface and interchange/The impulse is pure/Sometimes our circuits get shorted/By external interference/Signals get crossed/And the balance distorted/By internal incoherence."

In the chorus, singer Geddy Lee notes that despite the acceptance of technological advancements, it's important to maintain your individuality. Peart often wrote about individuality in Rush's early years, especially on the album 2112. 

"A tired mind become a shape shifter/Everybody need a mood lifter/Everybody need reverse polarity/Everybody got mixed feelings/About the function and the form/Everybody got to deviate/From the norm."

Another interesting thing about "Vital Signs" is it was sort of a preview into the band's next musical shift, as they used it to try out some Police-esque reggae as well as some futuristic sounding sequencers. And Peart was also very influenced by Police drummer Stewart Copeland's more minimalistic style; known very much as an "everything but the kitchen sink" drummer, Peart began playing more economically like Copeland.

Indeed, the band's next album, 1982's Signals, was very different from what came before. The band introduced much more electronic sounds (and have acknowledged after the fact that maybe they went a little overboard) for the rest of the '80s before going back to a more guitar-based sound in the early '90s. They continued to release albums and tour successfully until 2015, when Peart retired. Lee and Alex Lifeson have made occasional appearances since then, but the band effectively ended when Peart called it a day. Sadly, Peart died in 2020 after a battle with brain cancer.

I saw Rush in concert on the Grace Under Pressure in 1984 and then twice on the Power Windows tour in '85, but I never saw them again after that. Honestly, I'm not sure why, although it was partly because I was just listening to other types of music for much of that time. I wanted to see them on one of their final tours but just never got my act together to get tickets. But thankfully there's plenty of great live footage on YouTube to check out whenever I feel like it. I especially like finding old clips of them that I haven't seen from the early days, which remind me of trading extra hockey cards for some stolen vinyl.