This song is about the travails of using marijuana and opium, which is grown in Bangkok. In a 2012 interview, Alex Lifeson told High Times that "A Passage to Bangkok" is "about a fun little journey to all the good place you could go to have a puff." He added that they thought the song would be fun to write and that he felt drummer/lyricist Neil Peart handled in a "very eloquent way." He also said that the song was most likely written and sketched out with an acoustic guitar in front of a cassette player in the farmhouse. Rush liked to make initial recordings in that way before going into the basement to rehearse.
In the book Contents Under Pressure: 30 years of Rush by Martin Popoff, Alex Lifeson admits to smoking hashish (a high-grade form of marijuana) after some dental work in the early '70s. In the book Traveling Music: The Soundtrack To My Life And Times by Neil Peart, he admits to using recreational drugs including marijuana and LSD as a youth.
The title of the song is Neil Peart's play upon the E.M. Forster novel, A Passage to India.
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