Apple podcast title, the deep dive, decoding
rushes into the darkness and the necromancer.
Apple Podcast Description, Apple Podcast Description.
Join us on this comprehensive deep dive into
Into the Darkness, the haunting first movement
of Russia's epic suite, The Necromancer. We unpack
the 1975 progressive rock masterpiece from the
album Corressive Steel, exploring Neil Peart's
Lord of the Rings inspired lyrics, Geddy Lee's
soulful vocals, and Alex Lifeson's proto -stoner
metal guitar riffs. Whether you're a hardcore
music theorist or just insanely curious about
how a Toronto suburb inspired a dark fantasy
quest, this deep dive extracts the fascinating
musical, literary, and historical secrets behind
the song. Discover the truth behind the vinyl
misprints, the Down the Tubes tour, and the polarizing
critical reception of this shadowy classic. Rush,
Into the Darkness, Caressa Steele, The Necromancer,
Progressive Rock, Proto Stoner Metal, Neil Peart,
Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, Lord of the Rings, Music
Analysis, Will O'Dale. If you're looking at your
app right now, you already know exactly what
we're getting into today. The title is The Deep
Dive, Decoding Russia's Into the Darkness and
the Necromancer. And if you read the description,
which I highly recommend, it's packed with all
those great keywords like progressive rock, proto
-stoner metal, Neil Peart, caress of steel. You
know exactly what our mission is. We're going
way back. Way back. We are unpacking a 1975 masterpiece
from their third studio album, Caress of Steel.
We're exploring Neil Peart. his really heavily
Lord of the Rings inspired lyrics, Geddy Lee's
incredibly soulful vocals, and Alex Lifeton's
heavy, heavy guitar riffs. So whether you are
a hardcore music theorist or you're just like
insanely curious about how a completely normal
Toronto suburb somehow inspired this dark fantasy
quest, this deep dive is going to extract the
fascinating musical, literary, and historical
secrets behind the song. And there are a lot
of them. Oh, there's so many. We're even getting
into the truth behind the vinyl misprints, the
infamous down the tubes tour, and the wildly
polarizing critical reception of this whole shadowy
classic. It's going to be a fun one. It is. So
welcome. I am thrilled to have you with us as
we travel back to July 1975. We are stepping
right into the heavily soundproofed kind of ozone
scented tracking rooms of Toronto Sound Studios.
That's a great visual. Thanks. Our goal here
is to explore what is arguably the darkest, most
shadowy corner of a legendary Canadian rock band's
entire catalog. We're using a highly detailed
Wikipedia article chronicling Eye into the Darkness.
That's the opening movement of the musical suite,
The Necromancer, as our map today. Exactly. But,
and I think this is important note, we aren't
just reading facts here. Right. We really want
to decode how three incredibly young, incredibly
exhausted musicians managed to turn the sheer
dread of their everyday lives into this sprawling
fantasy. epic. Okay, let's unpack this. Just
to set our baseline into the darkness is just
the first part of a three -part suite that closes
out the A side of Caress of Steel. Yep. It's
a track composed by bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist
Alex Lifeson with drummer Neil Parrott taking
over the lyrical duties and it's all co -produced
with Terry Brown. It is a phenomenal piece of
audio architecture and I think for you, the listener,
understanding the exact context of July 1975
is it's totally crucial. It's everything. Right,
because this wasn't a band at the peak of their
stadium filling powers. This is a band essentially
fighting for their lives. Yeah, they were in
a tough spot. Very. They had just come off Fly
By Night, they were relentlessly touring, and
they decided to take a massive, potentially career
-ending creative risk. They spent three weeks
in Toronto Sound Studios trying to build a completely
immersive audio world. Three weeks. Three weeks.
And the reason we are spending an hour dissecting
a track that isn't even four minutes long is
because it represents a hinge point. A pivot.
Exactly. It's a master class in world building.
It is that exact moment where musicians decide
to push past the comfortable boundaries of standard
blues rock and attempt to blend high concept
literary storytelling with deeply experimental
sound design. And that intersection of storytelling
and sound design is exactly what makes this track
so weirdly unsettling. Let's look at the Sonic
Foundation first. When you comb through the sources
and see how music writers and critics have tried
to categorize this single 3 minute and 47 second
track, it's all over the map. You've got people
calling it standard progressive rock. Others
call it acid rock. The publication Ultimate Guitar
referred to it as having a whiskey blues style.
Which is an interesting term. Yeah, and then
writer Ryan Reid throws down the gauntlet and
categorizes it as Black Sabbath -style proto
-stoner metal. That was my favorite. It's so
good. But you hear whiskey blues and proto -stoner
metal, and you immediately assume those are two
completely different bands playing in... two
completely different decades. How did Rush actually
glue those entirely different sonic textures
together without it just sounding like a chaotic
mess? Well, what's fascinating here is that they
didn't just glue them together. They stretched
them out. What do you mean? They took the DNA
of their earlier work and subjected it to immense
atmospheric pressure. If you look back at their
eponymous debut album from just a year prior
in 1974, it was deeply rooted in that heavy,
bluesy, zeppelin -esque hard rock. Yeah, lots
of swagger. Tons of swagger. With Into the Darkness,
they retain the tonality of that blues rock,
but they slow the tempo down to a relentlessly
agonizing crawl. It is so slow. It really is.
The song is in a standard 44 -time signature.
but because of how much space they leave between
the beats, it feels like it's dragging a heavy
weight. Furthermore, they anchor the entire piece
in the key of E minor. Okay, E minor. Now, E
minor on a guitar naturally utilizes the lowest
open string, providing this incredibly deep,
resonant, booming foundation that naturally lends
itself to a darker, more ominous emotional tone.
Right, but it's not just that they are playing
in E minor. A lot of bands play slow songs in
E minor and they just sound sad or maybe a little
bluesy. Sure. This track doesn't sound sad. It
sounds genuinely threatening. There's a specific
chord progression they are using here. E minor
seven to D, back to E minor seven, then to C
to G, and finally a D over F sharp. Now, I don't
want to get totally lost in the weeds of music
theory here, but I need you to explain how that
specific sequence of chords actually generates
that feeling of dread. What is that D over F
sharp actually doing to the listener's brain?
It's all about harmonic gravity and the denial
of resolution. Denial of resolution. I like that.
When you play that progression, you are moving
through these somewhat standard, almost folk
-like changes. The C to the G feels briefly expansive,
almost like a breath of fresh air. Right. It
opens up a bit. Exactly. But then they hit that
D over F sharp. In music theory, that F sharp
in the bass acts as a leading tone. Okay. It
possesses this intense, undeniable gravitational
pull back down to the root note of E, the passing
chord that offers zero stability. When your ear
hears that F sharp, your brain instinctively
knows it has to resolve down a half step to the
E. So it's pulling you down. Pulling you right
down. So instead of finishing the musical phrase
on a chord that feels final or triumphant, the
D over F sharp acts like a trapdoor. The trapdoor.
Yeah, it forces the listener right back into
the gloomy suffocating loop of E minor. You are
never allowed to escape the musical basement.
Man, I love that visual. A harmonic trapdoor.
Yeah. But let's elevate this a bit because the
trapdoor isn't the only thing messing with the
listener's sense of safety here. Oh no, not at
all. We have to talk about the tritone. And for
anyone listening who knows their theory, You
know exactly what a tritone is, but let's look
at it not just as a diminished fifth, but as
a physical sensation. Okay, yeah. Think of it
like this. You are walking through your house
in the pitch black. You are walking down a staircase
you've traversed a thousand times. You confidently
take a step, assuming you are hitting the flat
landing, but your foot finds nothing but empty
air because there is one more stair left. That
is terrifying. Right. That split -second, stomach
-dropping feeling of the ground completely vanishing,
your brain immediately recognizing that the physics
of your reality are suddenly wrong. That is what
a tritone does to you harmonically. It creates
immediate, profound instability. That visceral
sensation of falling is precisely why the tritone
has historically been referred to as the devil
in music. The devil in music. It is an auditory
optical illusion. Structurally, the motif they
use in Into the Darkness is brilliant in its
simplicity. It starts with the first two notes
played an octave apart. Okay, an octave. Now
an octave is the most stable resonant interval
in music. It establishes a sense of vast secure
space. You feel like you are standing on solid
ground. On that flat landing on the stairs. Exactly.
But then the third note of the motif hips and
it is exactly a tritone higher than the second
note. They take that perfectly stable foundation
and instantly inject a massive harmonic gap.
Your stomach drops. The human ear desperately
wants that dissonance to result either to push
up a half step to a perfect fifth or drop down.
But Rush forces you to sit in that uncomfortable
tension. They just leave you hanging there. They
do. Yeah. And if we connect this to the bigger
picture of their evolution as a band, this wasn't
just a studio trick they used once and threw
away. They learned something profound here. They
learned how to weaponize tension. Precisely.
Right. They learned how to use dissonance not
just as a passing mistake, but as a structural
pillar of their songwriting. Which is huge for
them. It's massive. Yeah. If you look ahead in
their catalog, this tritone utilization became
a foundational tool. You hear them returning
to this exact technique to build tension in their
1978 instrumental epic, La Villa Strangiato,
specifically in the chaotic monsters section.
Oh, totally. deeply embedded in the DNA of their
1981 album Moving Pictures on tracks like YYZ
and the incredibly moody Witch Hunt. Witch Hunt
is so good. It really is. In 1975 with Into the
Darkness, they were essentially prototyping the
sonic dread that would define some of their most
legendary later work. Okay, so they were weaponizing
the music theory. but they are also literally
weaponizing the recording studio itself. Oh,
the studio techniques are wild. The instrumentation
on this track is entirely built to disorient
you. Before Geddy Lee even starts singing, the
listener is hit with these eerie, reversed guitars.
Then you get these very airy, spacious, almost
hesitant, half -strummed acoustic arpeggios that
drift through the mix. Neil Ponet brings in this
relentlessly slow, dragging drum beat. And weaving
through all of that are Alex Lifeson's guitar
solos which the sources we have refer to as squally
squally it's great words sounds like a storm
brewing in the background But I really want to
drill down on those reverse guitars, because
in 1975 you couldn't just open a laptop, click
a button, and hit reverse audio? No, absolutely
not. Reversing audio in 1975 required physical
destructive manipulation of magnetic tape. Just
chopping it up. Basically. You were talking about
taking a massive reel of two -inch analog tape
from a Studer multi -track machine, physically
unthreading it, flipping it upside down and backwards,
and threading it back through the playback heads.
That sounds so tedious. It was incredibly tedious.
To really grasp the impact of this, we should
look at how music writer Will Romano analyzed
these specific guitar tracks. What did he say?
Romano noted that there is a forward playing
guitar track, one coded in chorus and reverb,
that sits normally in the stereo image. But that
forward track is immediately answered by a reverse
audio squall. Romano perfectly describes this
reverse effect as disintegrating into the ether,
like sonic wraiths. Sonic Race is such a killer
description. It really is. But what is it about
a reversed guitar that actually sounds like a
ghost? Like, scientifically, why does our brain
interpret a backward guitar string as something
supernatural? It comes down to the natural physics
of sound envelopes, specifically attack and decay.
Okay, explain attack and decay. When you pluck
a guitar string in the real world, there is an
immediate sharp transient sound that's the attack.
Then the sound slowly rings out and fades away.
That's the decay. Right. Pluck, then ring. Exactly.
Our brains have evolved over millions of years
to understand that this is how physical objects
vibrate in reality. When you reverse a piece
of tape, you are completely inverting those physics.
Because the decay becomes the attack. Yes. The
sound begins with a long, unnatural swell that
rises at nowhere, gets louder and louder, and
then abruptly stops with a sharp, unnatural cutoff.
Oh, wow. It is the exact opposite of how acoustic
energy behaves on Earth. Yeah. Because the attack
is missing at the beginning, the listener's brain
can't identify the origin of the sound. So it
feels wrong on a biological level. Exactly. It
induces a subconscious anxiety because you are
hearing an event happen backward in time. When
Romano calls them sonic wraiths, he's highlighting
that the music literally sounds haunted because
the physical laws of nature are being violated
right there in the stereo field. That is just
pure audio horror, and it sets the stage flawlessly
for the actual narrative of the song. It really
does. Which brings us out of the music theory
and into the literary deconstruction. Let's look
at the lyrics, which begin with a spoken word
narration penned by Neil Peart. The famous narration.
The scene setting is just dripping with mid -70s
fantasy atmosphere. I'll read the exact text
from the sources. The influences here are worn
proudly, almost defiantly, on their sleeves.
100%. For anyone familiar with the progressive
rock landscape of the 1970s, the deep, abiding
obsession with high fantasy and specifically
J .R .R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is well
documented. Led Zeppelin was singing about Gollum
and Mortar. It was just in the water at the time.
He was everywhere. In Tolkien's expansive lore,
the main villain, Sauron, is referred to by the
alias the Necromancer during the events of The
Hobbit and early Lord of the Rings. rings history
right so the forbidding lands they're journeying
into are quite clearly a stand -in for Mordor
and the three travelers are an obvious archetype
reflecting Frodo Sam and Gollum Pert is directly
grafting a classic high fantasy quest onto the
skeletal framework of this proto stoner metal
crawl but wait this is where I have to push back
a little on the sheer audacity of this lyrical
choice. Oh, the narration explicitly identifies
these characters as the men of Willowdale. Now,
Willowdale is not a region in Middle Earth. Definitely
not. Willowdale is a real perfectly normal middle
class suburb of Toronto, Ontario. It is the exact
suburb where Neil Getty and Alex grew up. The
three travelers are literally just the band members.
Yes, they are. Doesn't injecting a random Canadian
subvert into the middle of a grim Tolkien -esque
epic risk making the whole thing sound incredibly
pretentious, or at least breaking the immersion
for a listener who isn't in on the joke, it's
like saying Frodo, Sam, and a guy from Cleveland
marched into Mordor. It's a very fair critique.
And on the surface, it does seem deeply incongruous.
Right. But if you look at the underlying psychology
of what they were doing, it's actually a brilliant
piece of reality blending. Writer Robert Telloria
put forth a fascinating theory about this specific
lyrical choice. What's his theory? He suggests
that this journey into dark and forbidding lands
isn't just a playful, nerdy homage to Hobbits.
It is a direct albeit heavily veiled, analogy
for the band's own lived experience at that exact
moment in 1975. Oh, interesting. It's an analogy
for their constant, grueling, soul -crushing
touring schedule. Ah, okay. So the dark and forbidding
land isn't actually a magical realm. It's the
American Midwest in a broken -down van. Precisely.
Think about the life of a rock musician on the
road trying to break through in the mid -70s.
You are crammed into a tiny vehicle, exhausted,
chronically sleep deprived, eating terrible food,
traveling toward a destination you absolutely
have to conquer the stage night after night.
It's a grind. Toleria points out that in classic
fantasy quest tales, the travelers are characterized
by a deep restlessness and a singular, almost
oppressive focus on their destination. That perfectly
mirrors the psychological state of a touring
rock band. The pressure just weighing on them.
Right. The pressure from the record label, the
fear of failing and having to go back to regular
jobs in Willowdale, the endless expanse of the
highway that is their mordor. The Necromancer
wasn't a dark wizard. The Necromancer was the
music industry. or the threat of failure looming
over them and draining their life force. When
you frame it like that, it actually makes the
fantasy elements feel incredibly grounded. It's
not just escapism, it's a coping mechanism. Exactly.
I mean, think about what a 1970s down the tubes
tour diet actually looked like. They were probably
living on stale beer, cheap diner food, and nicotine.
So when Pirate writes these majestic lines about
them fording the River Don, it's creating this
massive humorous but also desperate contrast
to their actual reality. And that phrase, fording
the river Don, is a highly deliberate literary
choice by Peart. He was an incredibly voracious
reader. Fording a river is one of the oldest
recurring tropes in ancient literature and mythology.
Like crossing the Rubicon. Exactly. Julius Caesar
crossing the Rubicon. Or souls crossing the river
Styx. When a hero fords a river, it signals a
definitive point of no return in their quest.
It is the crossing of a threshold. You're going
back. Once you step into that water, you are
fully committed to the danger on the other side.
You cannot retreat to the safety of your origins.
By utilizing this ancient literary device, Peart
elevates their mundane reality. Wow. Three guys
from a Toronto suburb deciding to fully commit
to the terrifying uncertainty of a career in
progressive rock becomes a mythic journey. They
cross their Rubicon, and they knew they couldn't
go back to Willowdale. And once they cross that
river, the psychological toll is immense. The
lyrics go into this deep, visceral detail about
their physical and mental deterioration. They
get very dark. Very dark. The story foreshadows
that the travelers are destined to become empty,
mindless specters stripped of will and soul,
purely as a result of the necromancer's dread
power. And then Geddy Lee's sung vocals come
in to reinforce that. He sings about a shadow
that weighs like iron tears. He describes the
road as being lined with peril. and says the
air itself is charged with fear. I have to pause
on Iron Tears. That is just such a staggeringly
heavy image. It is a phenomenal turn of phrase.
Iron Tears perfectly encapsulates two distinct
ideas simultaneously. The deep emotional weight
of profound sorrow and the cold unyielding physical
weight of an oppressor or a weapon. It's suffocating.
It is a suffocating image, and it ties flawlessly
back into that Black Sabbath -style heaviness
we discussed in the musical architecture. The
lyrical heaviness is directly mirroring the musical
density. I compliment each other perfectly. Which
brings us perfectly to the next critical layer
of this deep dive, how those heavy words were
actually delivered to the listener, the voice
of the storyteller. Oh, boy. Because the vocal
performances on this track, both the spoken word
and the sung melodies, created a massive division
among critics. Let's look at the narration debate
first. Yes, the great narration debate. So Neil
Peart delivers the spoken word intro, and his
voice is heavily modulated, pitched down, and
coded in studio effects. Very helly process.
And the critical reception was wildly polarized.
On one side, you have critics who fully bought
into the cheesy B -movie atmosphere of it. Richard
James reviewed it and called the voiceover a
convincing, dramatic, thriller film trailer narration.
Jordan Hoffman similarly described the effect
as an eerie horror movie filter. For that camp
of listeners, the heavy -handed drama of a pitched
-down voice totally worked to establish the creepy
campy vibe of the song. But... If we're analyzing
the complete picture, there was a very strong,
very vocal counter perspective. There always
is. Adrian Begrande was merciless in his critique,
calling the intro an overly extended, mellow
piece featuring a drowsy and lifeless narration.
Ouch. He felt that instead of building tension,
Pert's slow, monotone delivery actively killed
the momentum of the track. Furthermore, Richard
James, even though he liked the sound of the
effect, critiqued the actual structural writing
of the song. What was his issue with the writing?
He pointed out a massive redundancy. The spoken
word tells you the setup, and then Giddy Lee's
sung lyrics immediately repeat the exact same
thematic information. It's essentially telling
the listener the story twice. Oh, I see. James
also leveled a heavier critique regarding the
plot itself. There is a complete absence of character
motivation. We never find out why these men from
Willowdale decided to march into the Forbidding
Lands in the first place. OK, let's talk about
that lack of motivation, because I actually strongly
disagree with that critique. Oh, really? Yeah.
I think demanding a clear origin story fundamentally
misunderstands how horror and dread operate.
Think about classic horror films, John Carpenter's
Halloween or Ridley Scott's Alien. Right. The
less you know about the monster or exactly how
the characters ended up in the terrifying situation.
the scarier it is. You don't need a 10 page prologue
explaining why they are in the forest. You just
need to know they are in the forest and the forest
is hostile. The mystery of the unknown is infinitely
more terrifying than a fully explained backstory.
This raises an important question for any creator
to consider. At what point does over explaining
kill the atmosphere? Exactly. You make a compelling
point. The ambiguity forces the listener's imagination
to fill in the blanks, which is often much darker
than whatever the artist could explicitly write.
Now, while Peart's spoken word was heavily debated.
The actual sung vocals by Geddy Lee received
almost universal praise. Oh, yeah, they're fantastic.
Specifically because it was such a stark departure
from his established style. Right, because when
you think of early 1970s Geddy Lee, you think
of that stratospheric, banshee whale, you think
of him shredding his vocal chords on Working
Man or Anthem, but that is not what he does here.
Not at all. Music writers like Alex Body and
Will Romano zeroed in on this distinct shift.
Body highlighted that this vocal performance
is one of the rare moments in their early material
where Lee things with profound delicacy and sensitivity.
He dials it way back. It's very restrained. Romano
called the vocal delivery soulful, observing
that it perfectly reflects the earthiness and
the fundamental innocence of the three travelers
before they are corrupted by the forbidding lands.
What Lee is doing here is essentially theatrical
voice acting within the context of a progressive
rock suite. Voice acting, that's exactly it,
because he is setting a baseline of innocence
that he knows he is going to destroy later. Exactly.
This delicate, soulful delivery is a highly intentional
character choice, because in the very next movement
of the suite, a track called Under the Shadow,
Lee completely abandons that delicate tone and
unleashes what Romano describes as a raspy scream.
Yeah, he really lets loose. That aggressive high
- scream represents the voice of the vampiric
necromancer himself. So Lee is using his vocal
timbre to delineate the character's sweet and
soulful for the innocent men of Willowdale in
part one and a raspy terrifying wail for the
villain in part two. It shows an incredible level
of narrative control. It really does. It's cinematic,
and the instrumentation mirrors that cinematic
approach beautifully. We talked about those reversed
Sonic Wraith guitars earlier, but I want to look
at how they actually sit in the final mix. The
mix is fascinating. Jim Mathaels, the incredibly
talented guitarist for the progressive metal
band Fate's Warning, specifically cited The Necromancer
as one of his favorite songs of all time. I praise.
He was completely captivated by those reverse
tracks, but he noted how they act as a nice foil
for the other clean guitar lines. They aren't
just a flashy studio gimmick thrown on top. They
are woven into the fabric of the song as an essential
contrasting textural layer. The texture of this
track is paramount, and it ultimately comes down
to the philosophy of the studio mix. Will Romano
had a really insightful analysis of this. He
referred to the mix as being inherently filmic.
Filmic. But he elaborated on that, saying it's
filmic in the sense that we're also aware we're
watching a film. Think about the mechanics of
recording in 1975. You have incredibly warm analog
mixing desks, tape saturation, physical plate
reverbs, even though the individual elements.
The acoustic arpeggios, the slow drum beat, the
bass lines are recorded with absolute clarity.
The way Terry Brown and the band mix them together
creates what Romano calls a patina. A patina,
like the oxidation you see on an old bronze statue
that turns it green or the sepia tone on an old
photograph. Precisely. A patina is a layer of
age or weathering. In audio terms, Romano is
suggesting that the mix applies an artificial
layer of atmospheric distance. It actively separates
the listener from the raw, sweaty reality of
the performance. Oh, that makes so much sense.
When you listen to a blues rock track from their
first album, it sounds like you're standing in
a small, smoky garage listening to three guys
sweat over their instruments. But the patina
on Into the Darkness removes you from the garage.
It places you in a dark, cavernous theater. You're
watching it on a screen. You feel separated from
the sound source, watching a shadowy fantasy
movie unfold on a massive screen. The mix itself
is functioning as a storytelling device. That
concept of an audio patina completely changes
how you engage with the song. You aren't just
listening to notes, you are listening to the
physical space constructed around the notes.
It's architectural. Now, speaking of the physical
reality of the music versus the story it tells,
we have to pivot to something that has nothing
to do with Tolkien or reverse tape or vocal acting.
We have to talk about the physical artifacts
themselves. The vinyl records. Because there
is a massive, incredibly nerdy layer of mystery
surrounding this track that revolves entirely
around the physical vinyl records printed in
1975. I am talking about the mystery of the misprinted
time stamps. This is one of those fantastic pieces
of physical media history that you only find
if you are obsessively reading the wider notes.
Guilty as charged. When Caress of Steel was officially
released to the public on September 24th, 1975
by Anthem Records in Canada, the physical vinyl
sleeves and the record labels themselves had
some very specific and fundamentally incorrect
track lengths printed on them. Right. If you
look at an original pressing, Into the Darkness
is listed with a very specific one time of exactly
4 minutes and 20 seconds. And the second movement,
Under the Shadow, is listed at 4 minutes and
25 seconds. But... If you sit down with a stopwatch
and actually time the music, the slow, brooding
main body of Into the Darkness completely ends
at three minutes and 47 seconds. There's a gap
there. The audio from 3 .47 to 4 .3 consists
of a secondary spoken word narration and then
this massive explosive drum roll. Musically,
functionally, that drum roll is the chaotic introduction
to the battle scene in this second movement under
the shadow. Right, it's a transitional piece.
Because of how the vinyl was mathematically cataloged
by the record label, that entire transitional
sequence was credited to the end of Movement
1. So on the original vinyl artifact, that transitional
drumroll belongs entirely to Into the Darkness.
But then the 1980s arrive, and the album is remastered
and re -released on compact disc. The CD era.
The engineers creating the CD metadata decided
to correct the timestamps. They kept Under the
Shadow at 4 .25, but they shortened the official
digital runtime of Into the Darkness to 4 .12.
Wait, if you do the math on that, if movement
1 now ends at 4 .1 instead of 4 .2, that leaves
exactly 8 seconds of audio completely unaccounted
for. Correct. Specifically, that massive transitional
drum roll. They orphaned the drum roll. They
absolutely did. It mathematically ceased to exist
on the track list. It's not in track 1, and it's
not accounted for in the runtime of track 2.
I know it sounds incredibly pedantic, but I just
geek out over physical media quirks like this
because it demonstrates how the actual medium
you use to listen to the song vinyl versus a
digital laser reading a CD literally alters the
boundaries of the art. It's a brilliant philosophical
observation about how formatting dictates our
understanding of a piece of work. And speaking
of the harsh reality of how art is consumed,
we have to look at the live legacy of this track.
How it survived on stage. because the story of
Into the Darkness doesn't end in the recording
studio. It lived on the stage and its life on
stage is tied to a profoundly dark period in
the band's history. You're talking about the
Down the Tubes tour. Yes, the promotional tour
for Caress of Steel. which ran for several grueling
months and finally ended on January 10th, 1976,
was not a glorious victory lap for a band that
had just recorded a masterpiece. No, it was rough.
It was a slow -motion disaster. The album was
entirely confusing to radio programmers and casual
fans. It was not selling well. The venues they
are booked into were actively getting smaller
as the tour progressed. That's heartbreaking.
The band members themselves with a deeply grim
sense of humor, self -deprecatingly named it
the Down the Tubes Tour, because they genuinely,
legitimately fear that their career was over
and they were going to be dropped by their label.
That is just wild to think about. We're talking
about Rush. We know they go on to become one
of the biggest, most influential progressive
rock bands on the planet, selling millions of
records. Legend. But in the winter of 1975, they're
playing half empty rooms, thinking they're absolute
failures. But during that specific Down the Tubes
tour, they were actually stubbornly playing the
entirety of the Necromancer suite live, right?
They were subjecting these confused audiences
to the whole thing. They were. They played all
three parts of the suite on that specific tour.
They stood their ground. But the psychological
toll and the reality of crowd dynamics eventually
won out. What happened? Well, by the time they
hit the road for their very next tour, the tour
that would be recorded for their iconic 1976
live album, All the World's a Stage. The set
list had been drastically altered. Into the Darkness
was entirely excised from the performance. Just
cut out entirely. The band only played the second
and third movements, Under the Shadow and Return
of the Prince. But wait, think about what that
means from a pure storytelling perspective. If
you drop the first movement, you are essentially
choosing to rip the opening chapter out of the
book. You are. You skip the introduction of the
innocent characters, you completely skip the
establishing dread of the Willowdale travelers
entering the forest, and you jump straight into
the explosive screaming battle scene of part
two. Why would a band so obsessed with narrative
continuity just butcher their own story like
that? Because of the primal demands of a live
rock concert environment. When you are a band
fighting for your life on a stage, trying to
keep a restless, potentially intoxicated 1970s
rock audience engaged, pacing is everything.
That's true. They had to keep a move in. The
slow, brooding, 44E minor crawl of Into the Darkness,
that deliberate agonizing tempo we discussed
earlier, simply might not have translated the
kinetic energy they needed to keep the crowd
from walking out. It's not exactly a headbanger
to start with. Right. The studio magic? The reverse
tape wraiths, the delicate vocal patina, was
impossible to perfectly replicate in a hockey
arena. So, they made a pragmatic survivalist
choice. They favored the aggressive, high -octane
progressive metal of the later movements over
the slow, literary world -building of the opening.
They sacrificed the narrative to save the show.
That makes total sense when you frame it as a
survival tactic. When you are bleeding out on
stage, you don't want to play the slow, shadowy
scene setter. You want to get straight to the
pyrotechnic. Okay, let's unpack this. So what
does this all mean? We've covered a massive,
sprawling amount of ground today. Into the Darkness
isn't just some forgotten deep cut on a weird
mid -70s rock album. It is a unique, perfectly
preserved time capsule. Beautifully said. It
is the exact, messy collision point where Russia's
bluesy, hard rock swagger crashed head on into
expansive, high -concept progressive fantasy.
It's the surreal space where a quiet Toronto
suburb merged seamlessly with the terrifying
landscapes of Middle Earth. And most importantly,
it's a masterclass in how studio experimentation
using pritones to induce harmonic anxiety and
physically reversing magnetic tape to create
sonic wraiths can generate genuine palpable audio
dread. And for you listening to us right now,
I want to remind you that knowledge is most valuable
when it's actively applied to your life. Then
next time you put on your headphones and listen
to a complex piece of music, I challenge you
to listen actively for the physical space the
mix is trying to create. Find the patina. Exactly.
Are you standing in the room with the band? Or
is there an audio patina distancing you, treating
you like an audience member in a theater? Listen
for how harmonic dissonance, like a tritone,
actually makes your body feel. And when you hear
escapist fantasy lyrics about dragons or forbidding
forests, look a little closer at the context.
Ask yourself if there is a real -world exhaustion,
a desperate daily grind, or profound fear of
failure hiding just beneath the surface of the
magic. Applying what we learn makes the act of
listening so much richer. It stops being background
noise and becomes a conversation with the artist.
It absolutely does. And before we close out this
deep dive, I want to leave you with a final slightly
more philosophical concept to mull over. One
that builds on what we've explored today. Lay
it on us. Consider the nature of those misprinted
timestamps we discussed. The transition from
the analog vinyl era to the precise digital CD
era. The physical vinyl credited a chaotic drum
roll to the first track while the digital CD
mathematically orphaned that same drum roll into
an eighth second void of non -existence. The
lost drum roll. If the physical medium The plastic,
the grooves, the lasers dictates how a piece
of music is cataloged, timed, and consumed. Does
the technology we use to consume art ultimately
rewrite the artist's original boundaries? Wow.
Does the true essence, the objective truth of
a song, live in the raw acoustic performance
recorded in that room in Toronto in 1975, or
does it live in the digital metadata printed
on the back of the jewel case 50 years later?
who gets to decide where the song actually ends?
Oh man, that is an incredibly heavy thought to
leave off on. The physical performance versus
the digital metadata, does the catalog dictate
the art or does the art dictate the catalog?
I'm gonna be thinking about that every single
time I look at a track link on my phone from
now on. It changes everything. Thank you so much
for joining us on this massive, obsessive journey
through the shadowy forests of Willowdale and
the analog tape reels of 1975. Keep questioning
what you hear, keep reading the liner notes,
and most importantly, stay insanely curious until
our next deep dive. Take care, everyone.