'Rush' overpowers the senses

By Kurt Rogahn

You know how it is when watching a thunderstorm? The sight of the lightning hits your senses before the thunder.

That's roughly the effect on the senses the rock concert at the Five Seasons Center had Friday night. Particularly with opening act Pat Travers, the sight of hands on guitars and drumsticks hitting skins advanced faster than the sound. And the sound itself reverberated as in an echo chamber -- it came at the audience of between 3,000 and 4,000 rock fans from the front of the hall and again, a half-second later from the rear of the hall.

The effect was unnerving, particularly considering that Pat Travers and star act Rush put out nearly three hours of solid rock 'n' roll.

Travers, backed by two guitarists and a drummer, hails from England. His sound seems rooted in both late '50s rock 'n' roll and late '60s "heavy metal" rock -- rhythmic, rolling and pulsating. It's almost the type of rock that sounds good on a car radio with the top down on a summer afternoon.

But the sound system garbled the work of Toronto-based Rush, a three- man outfit that has reminded some reviewers of early Led Zepplin. The sound for Rush, however, was a trifle clearer than it had been for Travers.

But whether it's the fault of the hall's acoustics or the fault of sound crews and musicians who insist on turning up the amps just one more notch, Friday's concert was an assault on the senses that didn't have to be.

Like the Zepplin's Robert Plant, Rush lead singer Geddy Lee's voice stretches into the upper registers. But Plant tends to use the higher ranges of his voice a bit more sparingly than Lee. During his Cedar Rapids stint, Lee sounded shrill rather than exciting.

Lee's vocals were frequently drowned out by Alex Lifeson's guitar and Neil Peart's drumming. That's a shame in the case of "The Trees," a "message song" in a decade that seems to have turned its back on "messages."

"The Trees" on disc has its moments of calm and its moments of frenzy as it tells the story of a forest. The story of the forest parallels what seems to happen in communities of humans. Live, the group turned a number which would sound fine had it been done by a folksinger (that's something one can't say for many heavy-rock numbers) into a loud, heavy-rock number.

A change of pace would have been welcome had Rush toned down "The Trees" and allowed the audience to hear what the song had to say.

But there was a slight change in pace of the concert when Lee turned from his bass to the synthesizer for numbers from the group's "Cygnus X-1" and "Hemispheres" albums. Back of the group, projectors ran a movie which flashed in titles part of the story behind Cygnus X-1 (it has something to do with a man lost in space on a space mission).

Light shows and psychedelic designs right out of the '60s backed "Hemispheres," which the band's literature describes as having something to do with a story about the conflict between the hemispheres in man's brain.

Unknown to the audience, sirens went off toward the end of Rush's concert. It sounded like it belonged to the music. The sirens, however, were real. The building's fire alarm system started "whooping" in response to sensors going off in the adjoining Stouffer's Five Seasons Hotel. Fire trucks rolled up and firefighters and police officers checked the building. It was a false alarm. The fire trucks and police officers headed back to quarters before the audience left the auditorium.

Rush is a group which tends to produce "thinking man's rock." But the sound system Friday night wouldn't allow a man to hear himself think.