“Extraordinary musicians”: The first great rock group shaped Geddy Lee’s career
Rock and roll was never always about being the most skilled rock and roller ever to walk the Earth. There was always room for people to grow a bit more than the traditional blues covers in their early days, and even if that meant learning a few jazz guitar licks or making the songs a bit longer, it was always worth it for a band to try to progress past the bare essentials of rock and roll. There were enough bands like Humble Pie and Grand Funk Railroad out in the world when Geddy Lee started working with Rush, but he knew when he was in the presence of gifted players.
When looking at Rush’s first baby steps into making music, though, you’d be forgiven for mistaking them for any other rock band on the scene at the time. Most people gave songs like ‘Finding My Way’ and ‘Working Man’ and were convinced that they were listening to the latest Led Zeppelin wannabe band, but as soon as they began working with Neil Peart, they found some places to expand a bit more.
They already had chops on their first record, but working with episodic songs helped give their material a bit more structure. There were moments when the songs didn’t fully click with the pop audiences, but the minute that the diehards latched onto the storyline of a track like ‘2112’, they knew that they were in for something a bit more cerebral than whatever customary ode to sex, drugs and rock and roll that Kiss was spitting out.
But Rush wasn’t alone in thinking that way. Bands like Yes and Genesis had already opened the door for them to make songs with grand concepts that took up entire sides of a vinyl record, but some of those bands fell victim to moments where they could get too self-indulgent, like when Yes decided to make something as extravagant as Tales From Topographic Oceans, which Rick Wakeman himself as disowned to a certain extent.
“They were the first group of pure virtuosity.”
Geddy Lee
This was rock and roll being treated the same way that classical music used to be treated back in the day, but before there were progressive rock acts, bands like Cream were the true peak of what musicians could do. Despite only having three people in the group, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker took the makings of blues, jazz, and rock and roll and gave it a lot more sophistication, whether that was extending their songs for long jams or playing circles around each other for the length of a concert.
Compared to every prog rock act, though, Lee knew Cream was the peak of what a power trio could do, saying, “For me, they were really the first band of extraordinary musicians that came together, they were the first group of pure virtuosity. I mean, they were the first supergroup to me, and it was a three-piece too – the perfect model. And in our early days playing in the coffee houses and drop-in centres, we would feast on Cream songs for days because of the playing, it was all about that.”
And while Lee’s voice is a bit too piercing to match anything that Bruce or Clapton did, it was all in service to him pushing himself further. He knew that he could play the hell out of his bass, but by having a soaring vocal range, he could manage to hit the high notes of Jon Anderson while annihilating bass riffs and playing the keyboards at the same time.
Whereas Cream were still looking to make something bluesy, Rush was when the threshold had been crossed in rock and roll. They were looking to make their music come to life onstage, and when fans got a load of what they could do, it looked like superhumans coming to life before their eyes.
