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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 While there may have been a devil-may-care sparkle in Rush’s eyes, his image was hardly satanic, which was just fine for those early, still moderate days of youthful rebellion. He was the socially acceptable bohemian: the folksinger, says Siggins, “you could bring home to meet your parents.” The two major pieces of musical good fortune in Rush’s life both occurred during the 1960s. The first was coming to Cambridge at the birth of the folk-music boom, when very few performers played the music, yet thousands of fans were eager to listen. (That equation has nearly reversed in recent decades.) Then, in 1967, while looking for songs to fill his third LP for Elektra Records, he ran across a gold mine of material—the early, still unrecorded songs of James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell—all three unknown by the general public at the time. “I met Joni at the Chess Mate club in Detroit,” Rush remembered. “She played four songs, just so I could hear her stuff. ‘Urge for Going’ was one of them. She then sent me a tape of six songs. The last one was ‘Circle Game,’ which she said was new, and probably terrible. It ended up being the title song of my album.” That album, merging his dulcet voice and sensitive yet unsentimental delivery with his old gruff-voiced, blues-based style, made Rush’s reputation. He was crowned the master interpreter of the modern folk-derived art song. When Columbia Records signed Rush in 1970, they dubbed him “America’s song-finder.” Though his own songwriting has been limited, The Circle Game did contain his sigh-inducing, lost-love ballad “No Regrets,” which manages to be both melancholy and serene. It was recorded dozens of times. Ten years later, it became a hit in Britain by the Walker Brothers. Today, there are electronic and hip-hop covers; U2 has performed it in concert. Rush calls it his kids’ college fund. Rush made 10 albums in the first 12 years of his career, but has been unusually resistant to recording since Columbia dropped him from his contract in 1975, when tastes in American pop music were changing radically, and each big label was ridding itself of soft-rock and folk-pop talent. It has now been more than three decades since Rush has entered a studio to record a full album of new songs. In an industry that demands new product in order to keep artists in the public eye—that demands, if not full-fledged reinventions of image, at least small alterations in sound—Rush’s refusal to come up with a studio-recorded album in 33 years is astonishing. Yet he is still one of the few folkies from his generation who enjoys a thriving career. His separation from the mainstream music industry, and the current healthy state of his traveling solo act and online CD sales, can be traced to a single lucky incident in 1980. Rush had been presenting Christmas-week shows in Boston for several years, but the venues were growing smaller. At one gig, a University of New Hampshire business student asked if he could do his thesis on Rush, “a marketing survey of my audience,” the singer reported. The resulting free research showed that Rush’s audience was aging, had money to spend, and would gladly pay for the privilege of seeing him in a grander venue. “The next year,” Rush said, “we went from The Paradise rock club to Symphony Hall, doubled the ticket price, and sold it out!” Thus began the second wind of Rush’s career. He created his own company, Maple Hill, at a time when personal labels were rare, and recorded two live albums. For several years, he presented multiple concerts at Symphony Hall. The shows’ guest lists grew more stellar each year. In 1986, when he produced an outdoor concert in Harvard Yard for Harvard’s 350th birthday, his fellow performers included Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt. Today, the New Hampshire native lives in Wyoming with his second wife, wildlife activist/writer Renee Askins, and their eight-year-old daughter, Siena. “I decided to have my own grandkids and cut out the middleman,” he joked. (He also has two grown sons from a previous marriage.) He now no longer tours with a band, or presents big-cast shows in grand theaters, but Rush hasn’t totally lost the popular touch: this year, a concert video clip of his version of Stephen Walters’s song “Remember”—a hilarious ditty on middle-aged forgetfulness—went “viral” on You Tube, topping 2.5 million plays. But why give up on the studio recording process entirely? Except for Trolling for Owls, a 2003 concert album of funny songs and chatter, Rush has been silent. In the early ’90s, a six-song “work in progress” was recorded and sold briefly as a cassette, but was never completed. “No use dashing headlong into these things,” he quipped. When pressed, Rush grew more serious. “I sincerely intended to make some new albums. I made several false starts,” he said, explaining that the elaborately produced album he wants to make would cost more than $100,000—too expensive for his own imprint or a small label—and that any corporate record company able to pay that tab would offer him only extortionist financial deals. Yet these music-industry realities haven’t stopped folk peers such as Eric Andersen, Chris Smither, Geoff Muldaur, and Tom Paxton from releasing beautiful-sounding CDs on small labels. Perhaps Rush is a perfectionist, and the more time that lapses between studio albums of new material, the more pressure he feels. And the record-making process has, after all, been the lone element in his creative life not under his complete control. Being rejected by Columbia and the other big labels in the mid 1970s was the only time his legendary luck ran out. Today, Rush manages himself, tours frequently, and plays only gigs he likes, never more than 65 a year. He is masterly at what he does, and comfortable with his art and his business. Comfort and expertise. The elegant guitar-playing, the sensational yet rocking-chair-easy vocal interpretations, the funny tales about old blues guys and New Hampshire farmers, replete with perfect regional accents—it is a pleasure to see someone as comfortable in his own skin, and in his own craft, as Tom Rush. And while telling one of his seemingly rambling tales—stories that climax with such perfect punch lines that some might question their veracity—Rush may well remember his old Harvard professor who taught him about the oral tradition in poetry and story. “I ran into Albert Lord later in life, and he asked me to do some guest lectures,” Rush said. “I was intimidated and intrigued. I talked about pop music as an indicator of social trends. It was in Sanders Theatre, in the ’80s. I sang a few songs, just to make myself feel comfortable.” In breaks between the storytelling, Rush still sings a few songs. Freelance journalist Daniel Gewertz lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has written about folk, blues, and jazz music, and occasionally about movies, for 25 years in the Boston area, most frequently for the Boston Herald.  
 
 
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