The 1980 song Geddy Lee fell back in love with: “I got back into that headspace”
Playing in a band like Rush was practically like putting on a circus act every single time Geddy Lee got up onstage.
He was already one of the world’s greatest bassists whenever he took to the stage, but it’s messed-up pressure for someone to hold down that kind of low end while also singing every single song and having to play bass pedals with his feet and keyboards all at the same time. But even if most other musicians would collapse under that kind of pressure, Lee was always up for a bit of a challenge whenever the Canadian icons came up with a new song.
After all, their greatest inspirations didn’t become legends without paying their dues first, and while Lee had a lot of Chris Squire bass breaks under his fingers by the time that he worked on songs like ‘La Villa Strangiato’, that didn’t mean that he was ready for where the band would be going. Their brand of prog rock was a test of human endurance half the time they played, and by the time that they reached the 1980s, it felt like every member of the band needed some sort of break.
Caress of Steel was already the album that was too weird for the general public, but even after earning their freedom on 2112, Hemispheres was the kind of record that they couldn’t make again. They didn’t need to make entire albums focused on multiple epic tunes in a row, and when you listen to Permanent Waves, you can practically hear all of them reaching for different influences on every track.
No one would have thought that a song like ‘Freewill’ could have found its way onto the radio with its multiple time signature changes, but the band had turned into the best hook writers in the genre as well. ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Red Barchetta’ were still looming on the horizon, but they didn’t forget about the epics, either. They could stretch out when they wanted to, and ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ was the result of them taking that longer song format and getting more atmospheric with it.
There are still pieces of the tune that would test someone’s abilities on any instrument, but you can feel the world that they wanted to build on the song as well. When those sweeping strings come in, it’s almost like seeing that heavenly ladder break through the clouds, but no matter how beautiful it may have sounded in concert, Lee remembered being absolutely sick of the song for decades before finally seeing what made it so beautiful.
The band officially retired the song for years, but after relearning what the tune had to offer, Lee felt that he had rediscovered the epic all over again, saying, “I was really not thrilled with the idea of playing it. The other guys were up for it, and I wasn’t until we were in rehearsals, where I went, ‘OK, now I remember what I liked about this song.'”
“So I got back into that headspace for it. And then during the last tour, I enjoyed the hell out of playing it. We all did. It was clearly a highlight of the show.”
Geddy Lee
And for someone who loved the more pop-flavoured side of the band, this is really the best of both worlds in a sense. They hadn’t quite reached the era of the massive synthesisers taking over the mix, and when you listen to the way that Alex Lifeson colours the rest of the song, you can tell that they had the same kind of inspiration when they were making some of their later epic pieces like ‘The Garden’ on Clockwork Angels.
‘Jacob’s Ladder’ isn’t necessarily going to reach the same level as other epics like ‘2112’ or even ‘The Camera Eye’ from Moving Pictures, but the fact that the band resurrected it after so long was proof of the kind of shelf life that it had. It wasn’t meant to be a single or anything, but there aren’t too many periods throughout the band’s career where they’ve managed to sound that heavenly.
