“A very difficult time”: The album Geddy Lee called the most disappointing of Rush’s career
Being in one of the most successful rock bands isn’t all multi-million dollar record deals and amassing millions of fans across the entire globe; as Canadian rockers Rush found out back in their 1970s heyday, the music industry likes to throw up some particularly testing moments too.
From their very beginning, Rush have overseen a particularly tumultuous discography, noted by both extreme peaks and much-maligned troughs. Even their self-titled debut album, where most other groups would establish the entirety of their sonic manifesto, was something of a misstep, adhering to the prevailing hard rock sounds of the early 1970s and offering little of the mind-expanding sound that the Canadian outfit would soon become known for.
Luckily, the group managed to find the right track once Neil Peart joined the ranks, but even then, they had their fair share of controversial efforts. Namely, the band’s pivot to synthesiser-led rock exploration during the 1980s alienated a lot of their core fanbase, moving arguably too far away from the progressive leanings of their golden age output.
Admittedly, for a band whose discography stretches across five different decades, Rush were bound to experience a few peaks and troughs along the way – there are, after all, a multitude of bands who have experienced the same highs and lows in the space of only a handful of records. Nevertheless, there is one particular record which always stood out to Geddy Lee as being particularly disheartening.
Asked for his best and worst moments with Rush, the songwriter told Jam! Music, “I guess the most satisfying moment was the way the 2112 album was received after it was completed.”
“We realized for the first time that we’d won a hard fought battle for our own independence and created a sound that was all of our own.”
Geddy Lee
On the other side of the spectrum, though, Lee also revealed, “The most disappointing was probably the way the previous album Caress Of Steel was received by our record company and people in the industry.”
Adding, “It was a very difficult time for us.”
A pivotal record in the band’s shift towards progressive rock, Caress Of Steel is very rarely regarded among Rush’s greatest works. Notably, though, Lee was careful to cite the reception of the album as being a major disappointment, rather than the album itself.
After all, it marked a very important time in the band’s development from hard rock to prog, and although that transition perhaps wasn’t as seamless as it could have been, Caress Of Steel certainly paved the way for the kinds of beloved masterpieces that followed.
For the record company, the album was seemingly far too different from the band’s previous works to be marketable, and much of the fanbase that Rush had built up over their first two records felt similarly ostracised by the album. However, it also marked the starting point for an entirely new generation of Rush, which was far more experimental, innovative, and interesting than what had gone before.
It is easy to see how the time surrounding that album would have been difficult for the band, what with the mixed reactions and record company pressure, but sometimes those difficult times are necessary for a group like Rush to move forward into bold new avenues of expression.
