The band Geddy Lee said carried the torch for Rush: “There’s a weirdness there”
It’s impossible to think of anyone taking the place of Rush in prog rock history.
Every one of the band members were masters at their craft, and it would have taken a healthy dose of wackiness to even begin to make those strange detours that they did throughout the course of their career. But Geddy Lee realised that some of the greatest names in the genre were still out there if people were willing to look for them.
After all, prog rock didn’t simply die the minute that the punk revolution started. It had taken a few dents in the public eye, but there were bound to be more than a few people who were willing to throw their hats in the ring and make rock and roll more expansive than ever before. Some went down the road of fusion bands, but as Rush pressed on, they suddenly found their style becoming more en vogue at the end of the 1980s.
No one was exactly celebrating them as one of the world’s most popular cult bands yet, but the music world suddenly had a far greater respect for people who knew how to play their instruments. That may have taken a beating once grunge focused on bands that could play a bit more sloppy, but if you listen to the technical chops of a band like Dream Theater, a lot of it comes down to Mike Portnoy studying every single drum fill that Neil Peart ever played.
While that kind of playing would have normally been dead in the water after Nirvana became the biggest band in the world, it wasn’t like they were afraid to take a few chances as well. The 1990s may have been the era of grunge, but it was also an extremely lucrative time to be a weirdo with an absolutely bonkers approach to music, and Primus seemed to fit the bill pretty nicely in the wake of grunge.
Les Claypool didn’t look all that out of place with his flannel on, but what he was playing was far beyond anything that the Seattle crowd was playing. His approach to the bass was enough to make anyone else’s fingers fall off, and while ‘Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver’ and ‘Jerry Was a Race Car Driver’ were practically the opposite of what labels look for in a hit, the fact that they were able to be played in heavy rotation would have felt impossible before the age of irony kicked in.
Rush couldn’t have been further from that style of music, but Lee could see a band like Primus taking over for them. When asked about the bands that could carry the torch for Rush, Lee had no problem nominating them as successors, saying, “Perhaps Primus. There’s a weirdness there that I detect was maybe partly inspired by the weirdness of our music.”
If they were to succeed, though, it also had to do with one’s tolerance for weird stuff. Hemispheres is a classic example of Rush getting way too self-indulgent for their own good half the time, but when listening to an album like Sailing the Seas of Cheese, it’s going for a similar style by having strange time signatures in the mix and the slightest dash of warped humour to keep everything lighthearted.
While Primus eventually broke up after doing all that they could do together, most fans should be grateful that they didn’t drive their music into the ground. In the same way that Rush switched things up on every record, Claypool knew that it was better to keep searching for inspiration everywhere he went than try to keep Primus going for the hell of it.
