Fatal Flaws: Why Geddy Lee was never happy with Rush’s albums
Rock and roll has always been built on imperfections. For every great prog-rock epic that doesn’t seem to have a single line out of place, there are also songs that can be an absolute shitshow and yet still hold together as a whole if listened to in the right way. Rush were more meticulous about their craft, though, and Geddy Lee was not impressed when he went back to listen to some of his masterpieces.
Then again, Rush always set the bar a little bit higher than almost any other group. They may have only been three people, but the amount of music they were able to pull off on their own was enough to leave five-piece rock bands confused half the time, especially when it came to songs that went for over the ten minute mark.
In fact, if you look at how their career had gone, it’s almost impressive to see a group grow up so fast. While anyone who has listened to Jimmy Page for more than a few months could feasibly come up with something like ‘Working Man’, God only knows what they must have been smoking to birth an album like Caress of Steel or create something as complex as ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
Although every piece of Rush’s catalogue tends to have its own unique flavour, Lee was never all that enamoured with how he came off on some of the classics, telling The Guardian, “I never finished a record I was totally happy with, but I think it’s a fool’s errand [to redo it]. I would not want to redo anything. Let it stand for what it was, warts and all.”
Well, those warts sum up some of the greatest happy accidents in rock history, then. Compared to the number of times that punk rockers have managed to fill up tracks with the most by-the-numbers power chord songs, most people would need an advanced degree in music theory to even begin to decipher what the power trio were doing on their albums.
And as demeaning as he can be on himself there, a lot of that ingenuity has to come down to the way that Lee is playing every song. Sure, his vocal performances weren’t for everyone, but what he did on bass is miles better than what most lead guitarists can do, along with playing keyboards when the time called for it and even using bass pedals with his feet once they hit the stadium circuit.
If anything, the only thing that doesn’t look great in retrospect is their choice of fashion sense in the 1980s. Since they admitted that they didn’t have the first clue about what made something trendy, hearing them sound like the most accomplished new-wave musicians this side of A Flock of Seagulls was certainly going to be an acquired taste for some fans and absolute musical vomit for others.
But that never stopped Rush from doing exactly what they wanted to do throughout their entire career. Some pieces of their catalogue might be a bit harder to look back on with rose-coloured glasses, but there are seldom few bands that lasted decades that kept their artistic freedom for as long as they did.
