Stuff you might not know about The Heroes and Heroines of Prog Rock, Part III

Join us at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights this Sunday afternoon at 2:00 for an intriguing collection of the most memorable moments in prog rock. We’ve picked songs to surprise and delight. And of course there’ll be plenty of stories like these to illuminate the music.

YES

Those delicious brass stabs and other offbeat accents in “Owner of a Lonely Heart” were not originally intended.  They were actually leftover bits of other tracks that didn’t get mixed out of guitarist Trevor Rabin’s original demo.  But their unexpected appearances sounded so refreshing on the demo, they became part of the final arrangement.

YES

Jon Anderson joined the 90125 lineup when the album the band was working on was almost finished.  But Anderson was unhappy with some of the lyrics.  So he came up with words of his own.  On “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” he rewrote producer Trevor Horn's lyrics for the second verse inserting the line "Watch it now, the eagle in the sky.”  As a cheeky riposte, Horn and his engineer added a gunshot sound effect eight beats later.  It was there way of "shooting down" the eagle.

KATE BUSH

Kate Bush was a young teenager when her family assembled a demo tape featuring more than 50 songs she had written.  Record labels weren’t interested at the time, but a friend of the family passed the tape along to another friend of his, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.  The guitarist was so impressed that he personally financed a more professional demo for 16 year old Kate…which then caught the ear of a record company executive who signed her.

RUSH

In their early days, Rush attracted an audience that was overwhelmingly male.  And they would joke about it backstage.

“See any girls in the front row?”, they’d ask each other.

“No.  Some attractive boys.  And a lot of ugly boys.”

But as their music began to reach a broader audience, they saw a change in the people who came to their shows.

“We noticed!”, Rush told The Guardian.  “There were girls in the front row!”

There was even an occasion when they saw a sign at the back of the arena that read:  Girls Who Love Rush.

But singer Geddy Lee laughed as he recalled that moment.  “We were too old to take advantage of it by that point.”