A Farewell to Kings - Rush (CD 1997)

For my 150th contribution to epinions, I've decided to talk about my favorite album by Rush, A Farewell To Kings. I absolutely adore this album!! I got this for Christmas in 1977. I asked my parents for either this album or Kiss/Alive 2 and since the Kiss album was a DOUBLE and more expensive, they got me A Farewell To Kings instead and I was (and still am) awfully glad they did. I just picked up the remastered version of this album. I don't hear much of a sound difference ( I had no problems with the sound on the original CD version). It does include a few photos that were left off the original CD, however.

I had gotten into Rush during the summer of '77, which was around the same time I was just discovering such great hard rock bands like Black Sabbath, Queen, Nazareth....and Kiss, of course. The first Rush album I heard was 2112, which didn't impress me much at the time. While I do like that album, it is not one of my favorite Rush albums for some unknown mysterioso reason. I really became a fan when I heard Fly By Night, which IS one of my favorite albums of theirs.

The winter of 1977/78 was one of the snowiest winters I can recall when growing up. My brothers and I and many of our neighborhood friends did a great deal of sledding that winter (aah, the good old days!) We probably did a great deal of shoveling, too...even though growing up in a family of 12 kids, that chore was very evenly divided!! I also remember discovering a place down near the river in our town that had patches of dehydrated ice and I used to go walking there quite often. One of the reasons I love this album is that it brings back many of those memories...and a few more pleasant ones as well, which I will share with you later in my review.

My oldest brother Kevin also bought a pair of headphones and this was the first album I ever used them for!

The main reason I love this album, however, is the music itself, which I think is absolutely amazing. I would have to say 1977 to 1981 was my favorite era for Rush. It was their most progressive era and their most musically adventurous as well. A Farewell To Kings was the first album where Geddy Lee played synthesizers (Terry Watkinson of Max Webster, a band that toured with Rush back then, tutored him in how to play. Hugh Syme played the synthesizer on 2112). The synthesizers really added some much needed color to Rush's sound at the time. Alex Lifeson was adding more guitars to his collection and started to experiment with different sounds and guitar techniques. And, last but not Lee, Neil Peart was adding more percussion instruments to his ever expanding drum kit, like orchestra bells, wind chimes and temple blocks. All of this,and the use of bass pedal synthesizers, helped to broaden the trio's sound and even soften it up in places, even though the band always had a mellow side. A Farewell is not Rush's heaviest album, though it still has its moments and nobody could call them a soft rock band back then.

The album gets off to a great start with the title track. Lifeson begins the piece with a medieval flavored classical guitar solo...Geddy Lee plays a very attractive synthesizer line and Peart (who is also credited with helping write the music for this song) plays either orchestra bells or tubular bells very quietly in the background. Peart's pet birds provide the chirping that you hear. A few seconds of silence follow this peaceful intro and then Lifeson rips into one of my favorite guitar riffs of his. It's loud and powerful, but somewhat sad, too...there is a bit of wistfulness about it, which goes along with the lyric quite nicely. Geddy sings in his high granny voice Pearts' lyrics...",When they turn the pages of history, when these days have passed long ago, will they read of us with sadness, for the seeds that we let grow". Man, Geddy sure could hit them high notes back then!! The instrumental section is perty darn exciting, with Geddy laying down on a complex bass line which Peart drums right along with and Lifeson playing a wild guitar solo. Terrific song, it is followed by....

...Xanadu, where our humble narrator roams through caves of ice and goes skinny dipping in the river Alph, with a very simple diet of Paradise milk (which he hopes is NOT skim!) and honeydew, which he likes to put on his toast. The song starts out very quiet with Peart banging on some wood blocks and playing his wind chimes....once again, his pet birds can be heard in the background, singing, "I can't believe its not peanut butter. Speaking of peanut butter, when's lunch?". When I listen to this section, I feel like I'm walking through the woods in the dead of winter, with only my York Peppermint Pattie to keep me company. This song has many sections to it, some of them extremely heavy, some of them kind of mellow and none of them even the least bit dull. Geddy provides more of his traveling, but melodic bass playing and sings very well and plays his synthesizer a bit, Lifeson gets in a few more memorable guitar solos and a few heavy metal guitar riffs, and Peart, as usual, drums his rump off. I like every second of Xanadu AND the first half of this album.

Though I don't think "A Farewell" has any weak songs on it, I would have to say the next two tracks are my least favorite on the album. I used to love Closer To The Heart, but I've heard it so much that I can't enjoy it like I once did. Nonetheless, its still a pleasant and catchy progressive pop rock song. Neil's friend Peter Talbot came up with the title and the song's opening line, hence his writing credit. My favorite part of the song is the guitar solo. I also like what Neil plays underneath it. My fondest memory of "Closer" is when my brother Kevin was allowed to play it at our tiny little church in McGraw. If that sounds unusual, the priest at that church once had to talk my Mom into letting my brother John and I buy the Black Sabbath album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath!!!

Cinderella Man, which Geddy wrote the words for, is a harmless little ditty about a "modest man from Mandrake who travels rich to the city and is called insane because he has goodness and morals" and all of that nice stuff and ties in with the medieval, Renaissance theme of the album. Lifeson plays acoustic guitar during a few of the verses, Geddy provides another one of his roving bass lines....the instrumental section is one of Rush's more playful ones, with the guys actually flirting with DISCO...but just briefly! My funniest memory associated with this song...on the LP version of this that we still have at our Mom's house, my brother Charlie changed the line "He held up his riches to challenge the hungry" to "He cut down his britches to challenge the hungry"! Works just as well, as far as I'm concerned!

The album picks up a bit with its next track, the ballad Madrigal, which is one of the sweetest love songs this band ever wrote. I really like the lyrics for this, especially the first verse, which goes:
"When the dragons grow too mighty,
to slay with pen or sword
I grow weary of the battle
and the storm I walk toward.."
Geddy sings the lyrics with the respect and emotion that they deserve..I think its one of the best vocal melodies he has written. I wrote a poem when I was in college (during a very boring psychology class) that was somewhat inspired by this piece. Its my kind of love song.

A Farewell To Kings ends on a very strong note with the very exciting sci-fi epic Cygnus X-1, which tells the tale of a space ship journeying into a time warp in the Black Hole of Cygnus. Just in case you were wondering, that's producer and engineer Terry Brown at the beginning of the song, speaking through a voice synthesizer. There are plenty of cool heavy metal guitar riffs, and Geddy sings and screams like a madman, especially during the last part of the song, where the band lay into their heaviest and most ferocious riff on the album, as the narrator's ship 'The Rocinante' ( which Neil claims was named after Don Quixote's horse in a novel by Miquel de Cervantes..it was also the name of John Steinbeck's truck in the book "Travels With Charley"), is sucked into the Black Hole. "to be continued.." it says in the lyric sheet, which made me very eager to hear the second part on their next album. You know, after hearing the second part on Hemispheres, I'm not sure exactly what DID happen to the narrator and his ship. Did the narrator die and go to heaven and meet Apollo and Dionysus, or was it all a dream? Well, that will be for my review on Hemispheres, if I ever decide to write it.

To be continued?...