The 1972 album Geddy Lee could recite from memory: “Complicated”
The thought of anyone trying to keep up with anything that Geddy Lee played in Rush seems like an impossible task.
There isn’t a single one of their songs that could be classified as easy, and just when you think that you have mastered one of them, there’s always one section of the tune that throws everyone for a loop and reminds them why they are considered one of the almighty gods of progressive music. But Lee wouldn’t have been in that position had he not been given the proper guidance by his favourite bands.
Progressive rock was still getting born when Lee started making music, and on that first Rush record, you can hear them clearly trying to play off of what Led Zeppelin was doing around that time. He and Alex Lifeson were massive Zeppelin fans in every sense of the word, but even if their friend John Rutsey was more interested in bands like Humble Pie and Bad Company, there was no sense of them going back to that when they heard bands like Yes and Genesis for the first time.
Their albums took the listener on a journey, and for someone who was a bass player before anything else, Lee saw Chris Squire as his god when he first started performing. Everything that he touched turned to gold whenever he worked on Yes’ masterpieces, and when you listen to some of Rush’s best tunes, Lee is treating his four-string like the lead instrument, to the point where Lifeson tends to take a back seat every now and again.
But it was about much more than the musicianship that appealed to Lee and Lifeson. Neil Peart was the one trying to draft different stories when he joined the band, and while it might have been a strange fit going from ‘Working Man’ to ‘By-Tor and the Snow Dog’, it all sort of made sense when you look at how they structured everything. They were looking to tell complete stories when they played, and that kind of approach was practically descended from Jethro Tull.
Tull definitely weren’t the first band to be considered progressive by any means, but when you look at how Anderson was structuring his tunes, he was laying the groundwork for what an episodic song could do. Everyone else was making mystical songs about the spiritual side of music, but since Anderson was never comfortable with the prog label to begin with, making an album all about mocking the whole genre on Thick as a Brick was the best road for him to go down.
Taking on an album like this is a bit daunting for any newcomer to prog, but Lee felt that there was no other album that he knew as well as this, saying, “I mean, their staging was elaborate, their music was complicated, and they had a great sense of humour. They would interrupt a song to read the news, you know. They had all kinds of Monty Python episodes on their shows. Me and my friend Oscar heard Thick as a Brick so many times when we were young that we could even recite the whole album.”
If Tull was going to make a classic like this, though, throwing in a bit of humour usually does the trick to keep the audience invested. Most people wouldn’t have had the time or patience to listen to an entire album that’s based off of one elongated track, but the thought of them making a few twists and turns that were meant to be goofs was the kind of tongue-in-cheek move that they really needed to make.
Lee was going to need to remember a lot more once Rush started going for even more ambitious tunes in their discography, but that didn’t dull his appreciation for what Thick as a Brick had done for him. They were transformed by that kind of album, and even with records like 2112 and Moving Pictures under his belt, Lee knew that Thick as a Brick was the kind of masterpiece he could only hope to write.
