The 1975 album Geddy Lee never wants to revisit: “Less proud”
Rush is one of the few bands that can rest easy at night knowing that they never had to sell out to the masses.
Their fanbase was always going to be loyal to them no matter what, and even if they had periods where things weren’t working like they were supposed to, they could always pick themselves up and move on if they made a track that they didn’t like. And while Geddy Lee was more than happy to keep experimenting every chance he got, he felt that some pieces of their catalogue were a bit awkward for him to return to.
Granted, it’s totally understandable for any band to have a few stumbling blocks along the way. Any prog rock band that came out around the same time had the same problems that they did trying to find their sound, but when you look at their one album without Neil Peart, it seems like everyone was witnessing the birth of an entirely different band when they had John Rutsey behind the kit.
The album isn’t terrible by any means, but the band was definitely getting the more bluesy rock and roll songs out of their system. They clearly had a lot of love for bands like Led Zeppelin when they played, and when you look at some of the biggest songs of their early years, there’s a reason why only a few cuts from their debut actually ended up getting played all the way up to their final shows.
And when Peart did join the band, it was like a night and day difference. Peart knew exactly what the band needed, and given that they were slowly falling in love with bands like Genesis, it was only natural for them to make songs that had a bit more complicated moments in them. They were a strange mix of Zeppelin and Yes in many respects, but it’s not like Fly By Night doesn’t have its fair share of blemishes.
‘Anthem’ is one of the fiercest rockers that the band ever made, and ‘Beneath Between and Behind’ was punchy as all hell, but Lee felt that the album was lacking in a few areas when he listened back to it, saying, “I look at [the albums] in terms of songwriting and spirit. They all hit me in a different way historically. There’s things I’m proud of and less proud of. Fly By Night is a very transitional record. It’s our first record with Neil. So there are a lot of parts of that record that strike me as new. [It’s] sort of the least experienced record for me.”
When compared to what the band would be doing only a few albums later, though, you can pretty much see where Lee is coming from. A lot of the bugs of those early records haven’t been worked out just yet, and while Peart was already a strong lyricist, you can tell which ones are his songs and which ones were leftovers from their early years, like ‘Making Memories’ and ‘Best I Can’.
But if there’s one song that needs to be discussed here, it’s ‘By Tor and the Snow Dog’. The tune isn’t meant to be the most ambitious song in the world by any stretch, but this was the first time that the band wrote something that told a story throughout its runtime, which ended up opening the door for every single epic that they would write afterwards, like ‘Hemispheres’ and ‘2112’.
A lot of their higher-ups may have been confused by some pieces of the record, but they weren’t about to back down and go back to singing meatheaded songs about rock and roll. They had gone through that growing-up period, and even if Fly By Night was them entering musical puberty, they weren’t going to try to dumb down their sound when they knew they had something great on their hands.
