I Love You, Man

I was so happy when I Love You, Man came out.

Finally, a full-length motion picture that prominently features Rush, my favorite band. Finally, a film that depicts two grown men eating delicious fish tacos and playing music in a garage. But mostly, finally, a film with Rush in it:

Rush is my favorite band. A buddy made me a mix tape of Rush back in...7th grade? I say "mix tape," but really it was just a straight copy of Chronicles. Doesn't matter. That tape changed my life. I still have that tape somewhere, but it doesn't play. I keep everything.

Pretty soon, I'd collected all of their albums on cassette — like real, store-bought cassettes. After that, the CDs, and then all the vinyl on Mercury...and then all the CDs again when they remastered all of them in the late '90s. Did I mention the MoFi gold discs? Yeah, those too.

I wore out most of those cassette tapes — especially A Show of Hands, which I used to play in the car on the way to work. I found that the distance from my parents' house to my old job was exactly the duration from "Force Ten" to the end of the album. Some of those tapes melted. I have them in a box somewhere. Told ya, I keep everything.

Some guy I worked with gave me a copy of All The World's A Stage on 8-track, as a joke, but it was awesome. That tape is upstairs on my stereo right now, with nothing to play it.

When I was in grad school at Ohio University, I stopped in at Haffa's Records and found a Hemispheres picture disc, and — holy shit, those are expensive now.

Over the years, I've collected some strange, rare stuff, like the Max Webster Universal Juveniles CD, with the song "Battlescar," which is a duet with Rush. That was a good find. Throw in some posters, calendars, and other random stuff that says "Rush" on it, and you have a pretty good idea of what my wife has to deal with now.

I've seen Rush four or five times — every tour since 1994, save the most recent one, when they were just touring on hits and the prices were outrageous. And you thought I was lame before this paragraph.

I think I have...10 Rush t-shirts?  Maybe 12.  Some of them are threadbare, pitted-out, and falling apart, but I kept them anyway. When I ruined my white Test For Echo t-shirt, I went online and bought two more so that wouldn't happen again.

Rush became part of my identity. People started to know me as "a Rush guy." This sort of thing happens when you wear 12 Rush t-shirts around town, and write Rush lyrics all over your notebooks, and cite Neil Peart as a world-renowned poet, and say stuff like "Alex Lifeson is the best guitarist in the world," even when you know the correct answer is Eddie Van Halen.

Of course, I never have anybody to go with when Rush tours, so I always ended up taking a significant other (whoever that was at the time), or my buddy Brian, who also likes Rush — just not enough to do anything that I'm talking about here because he's mostly normal. I have one buddy, Mike, who wanted to go see one of their recent shows, but I flaked out. I should've gone with him. Regrets.

But here's the thing (and how this all ties in with I Love You, Man). Whenever I go to a Rush show, I look around and I think, "Man, what a bunch of weirdos." All the air-drumming and air-licking and weird proggy head-banging just seems strange to me.

I have a hard time making friends with other Rush fans. For a band with such a particular type of music and a specific type of audience, you'd think that I'd be in an arena with 25,000 friends at each concert, but that's not the way it goes.

Of the Rush fans I know, most of them are on the Internet — Kevin in Wisconsin, Meghan in Tennessee, Nat in New York — all great people I've never met in real life but get along with great over Facebook. I'd love to meet these people someday, if only to prove that not all Rush fans moonlight as D&D players who don't shampoo or wear deodorant.

So the Rush thing — it's hard to make friends if you're a Rush fan. That band polarizes people. "I don't like his voice," people will say. "Their music is too weird for me," other people will say. "Geddy Lee looks like Death," my wife will say.

I can see what you mean. It just takes me longer. (Those are Rush lyrics.)

(For the record, my wife allowed my groomsmen and I to enter to "Hope" from Snakes & Arrows on our wedding day. So she's not a devil woman.)

But that's not to say that it's impossible to make friends with people who like Rush. I'm being an asshole when I take the D&D/hygiene potshot. They're friendly, well-read people who take their music very, very, very seriously.

LISTEN TO THIS SONG AND TELL ME IT IS NOT FUCKING BRILLIANT, MAN!

OR THIS ONE:

ROCK!

Anyway, I saw this film and immediately thought about my friends, many of which would see this film and think, "Ha! A movie about a dude who likes Rush! That makes me think of John King!"

So in a fit of narcissism, I created a Facebook group: "People Who Saw 'I Love You, Man' and Thought of John King."

I'm the only person in that group right now.

Please be my friend.