In Rush's early years, they opened for a number of major acts, learning the tricks of the trade from older masters – among them Kiss.

They say everyone got along, up until a point. "We would get high with Ace Frehley in his hotel room and make him laugh," Geddy Lee tells Rolling Stone Australia, "and they were a really good influence on us in terms of learning to put on a show."

But Neil Peart recoiled from Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley's larger approach to marketing their band as a product. "I don't want to knock them," he says. "But once I was in a little restaurant in Kansas, and a guy with Kiss Army tattoos kept playing Kiss songs on the jukebox. He believed in a marketing campaign, swallowed it as religion. He was like a convert to Scientology."

Peart says it went against the kind of musical purism that surrounded him as a youngster. "It's about being your own hero," he says. "I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept."

That includes the on-stage rap that seems to surround most rock shows. "We would hear them give the same rap to the audience every night," Peart says of bands they supported. "'This is the greatest rock city in the world, man!' That was creepy. I despise the cynical dishonesty."

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