It was, however, those occasions when two irritating phenomena would somehow come together and both prevent me from hearing the whole song and getting the name of the band from the DJ that were most frustrating. For weeks around Christmas in 1989, I'd been plagued by hearing just the very end of a particular song - and I wanted to hear more. Every time I would go to the radio, hoping to hear the whole thing, the song never came up in rotation. It only appeared when I least expected it, and always just as I turned on the radio I'd run into it in the closing moments of the song. And, so, that December, I found myself listening to the radio more often than usual as I sought sleep, hoping to hear that song, in its entirety, again. And one night, I finally did.

The song that had been haunting me talked, strangely, in those last few moments I always caught, about magic wands and second sight, things that any good, young, hard rock listener in the '80s would eat up, but something was different. There was a maturity in the music that I wouldn't have quite understood at the time, mixed in with furious blasts of drums and a soaring guitar solo over top of the texture of acoustic guitar, and a singer with a particular, unusual voice. Something in this mixture spoke to me, but, after many nights hoping to catch the name of the band, or the name of the song, something, I was beginning to think I'd never hear it again.

One night before Christmas, I settled in to bed with my Walkman. The station played a few inconsequential songs, commercials, and then the DJ announced some song when the opening strains of guitar, bass, and drums kicked in. Something tickled at my brain momentarily, but it was when the voice appeared that I knew this had to be it. "Wait!" I thought, frantically. "What did he say? Did he say Rush? Rush?!"

He had - the band I'd been pining for all that time had been Rush, the very band that just a couple of years earlier I'd thought people had to be knuckleheads to listen to - not based on any actual evidence other than that a couple of lunks in shop class in my freshman year of high school had liked them and talked incessantly about their then-new album. "Hey man, didja pick up the new Rush?" I recall one lunk saying to the other, and, in response, he received, "Hell yeah, man. Can't wait for the tour." This was accompanied by the kind of familial sharing of stories about seeing the band, listening to the music, their drummer, etc. These guys were not the cool kind of rock listeners, obviously. Everyone knew rock was all about the guitar solo, and I hadn't heard these guys mention guitar solos yet. This, clearly, was not a band I was going to be interested in, I thought at the time. And I never gave them another thought.