The early Rush song that was resurrected at the end of their career
Rush were two completely different bands from when they started in 1968 versus when they played their final show in 2015. Alex Lifeson was technically the only original member, although Geddy Lee joined his friend soon after Lifeson formed the group’s original incarnation. All that said, Rush were still a completely different band in 1974 than they would be four decades later.
For one, they had a different drummer, John Rutsey. Although he didn’t have the technical chops and lyrical prowess that Neil Peart later brought to the band, Rutsey was a solid hard rock drummer that helped propel the band’s Led Zeppelin-inspired jams. That was the other major difference between early Rush and later Rush: stylistically, there were no ambitious overtures, time signature changes, or fantastical settings in their songs.
By and large, Rush were influenced by the British hard rock scene that exploded in the late 1960s: Led Zeppelin, Cream, Deep Purple, and The Who were major influences on the band. The obsessions with Yes and Genesis would come as the band members matured, mostly through Lee and Lifeson, as Rutsey was more attuned to Bad Company and other straight-forward hard rock acts of the day.
But in their earliest days, the three members of Rush all aspired to make simple hard-hitting rock and roll. That can best be heard on their self-titled 1974 debut, the only album to feature Rutsey on drums. Songs like ‘Finding My Way’ and ‘Working Man’ were complex enough to point toward the band’s future, but they were still simplistic enough for any garage band to pick up in a matter of minutes.
One song that the band frequently played in their early club gigs around Toronto, Canada, was ‘Garden Road’, another foot-stomping rock and roll number with a limited number of chords and an emphasis on impact. Along with other early songs like ‘Fancy Dancer’ and ‘Feel So Good’, ‘Garden Road’ never made it passed the band’s first recording sessions and was permanently dropped when Peart joined the band.
“‘Garden Road’ and ‘Fancy Dancer’ . . . never made the grade. Yeah, they were sort of riffy songs,'” Lifeson said in the book Content Under Pressure. “Very repetitive, mostly 12-bar sorts of things. They wouldn’t have survived the test of time, I don’t think”.
Despite this assessment, ‘Garden Road’ saw a resurgence at the end of the band’s career. While embarking on their final tour, the ‘R40 Tour’, Rush decided to perform their concerts in reverse chronological order, beginning with their Clockwork Angels material and going back in time through their different eras.
When it came time to replicate their earliest years, guitar amps were placed on chairs and old gymnasiums were projected behind the band. Before the final song of most nights, ‘Working Man’, the band incorporated snippets of ‘Garden Road’ to truly bring the audience back to the beginning.
Check out a rare early performance of ‘Garden Road’ down below.
