The best band Rush ever toured with, according to Geddy Lee
There are few bands in the rock canon that have maintained such a creative and professional high bar as Rush.
Whether picking up 1975’s Fly by Night, the first album with drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, or giving 2012’s LP farewell Clockwork Angels a spin, there’s never any doubt that serious blood, sweat, and tears are poured into their complex arrangements and lofty conceptual arcs. Alongside such creative strive is their famed live shows, the perfect arena for their power trio synergy, dusting off the Rush machine in light of Peart’s death in 2020 with German drummer Anika Nilles for a string of upcoming dates.
Such bags of energy and an unerring respect for their dedicated fanbase have served as a major asset to Rush’s permanence, able to soldier through rock’s chaotic and upending terrain via progressive hard rock chops to a happy marriage of new wave synths for the MTV era.
It turns out that an example was set years back before global fame propelled Rush as one of Canada’s most successful acts. A month or so after their Fly by Night sophomore had dropped, Rush found themselves, along with the likes of ZZ Top, Status Quo, and REO Speedwagon, supporting Kiss during their Dressed to Kill Tour, a pivotal point in Kiss’s rise.
“It was an early time for us, Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson reflected on CBS’ The Hour in 2010. “We’ve got to see how hard they worked. I know Geddy [Lee, bassist and frontman] said quite often that there’s not a harder-working band than Kiss… We learned a lot from those guys.”
Kiss was also a band that made it by sheer determination. While garnering a reputation for their arresting live spectacle, the New York greasepaint glam rockers were still struggling with record sales, three albums that translated well on stage but struggled on the Billboard 200. With the Casablanca label nearing bankruptcy, one last gamble was made on 1975’s Dressed to Kill Tour, eventually captured on the Alive! double album and finally showered with commercial success.
For Lee, Kiss’s drive rubbed off on Rush during those crucial early years. “They were struggling too,” he stated. “It was their first headline tour. But it were small gigs, we were playing a lot of theatres. For us, it was a dream because we were working regularly, which was awesome and travelling all around America, probably for the first time and in our minds we were like ‘well, we may never get back to half of these cities.”
Both bands would grow from strength to strength, Kiss unleashing their defining Destroyer in 1976, while Rush’s 2112 cemented their momentum in the hard-prog world, but Lee and Lifeson clearly took notes when witnessing Kiss’s unwavering pursuit for success in the bumpy road of 1970s rock.
“We’ve learned a lot about how hard you need to work to put on a show,” Lee concluded on Kiss’s legacy. “Regardless of what you think of them musically, you have to respect them in terms of their work ethic.”
