“It just clicked”: Geddy Lee on the most painless album Rush ever made
An album can feel like a Herculean task for any artist to work through. Even though all is well when people are having fun, it can easily become a nightmare the minute that things stall or things start turning a corner in the studio. It takes some real strength to get out of that situation, but Geddy Lee thought that of all Rush albums, it became a breeze once they decided to leave their ambitious side on the backburned at the start of the 1980s.
Then again, nothing that Rush has ever made has primarily known to have been easy to work on. Listening back to some of their classics, it takes a lot of musical strength to figure out the arrangement on ‘Tom Sawyer’ or where the hell the beat is in the middle of ‘Limelight’ or ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
Anyone should be proud of making something that inventive, but there comes a moment when that can come back to bite you, and Hemispheres really was the breaking point for the Canadian icons. Artists are more than welcome to flex on their albums when they want to, but at some point during the title track’s 20-minute runtime, you’d think that one of them would at least realise when things had started to get a little bit out of hand.
If they went any further down that road, they may as well have been writing classical compositions, so when making Permanent Waves, it was practically a walk in the park. Now that they had found some time away from the touring life, the goal was to write something that didn’t mean having to strain every muscle in one’s body to complete.
And listening to the genres they tackled, they were at least listening to where music was heading too. ‘The Spirit of Radio’ is a blatant homage to the kind of cod-reggae that The Police had been doing around the same time, and listening to Alex Lifeson’s solo on ‘Freewill’, there are even a few touches of Eddie Van Halen’s signature fury in the way that he hammers out every single note.
More than anything, Lee remembered those sessions as being some of the most fun that he had ever worked on, saying, “It was real simple; I don’t know why. It was just one of those sessions you dream about; everything felt good. It just clicked.” Little did Lee know it was the precursor to what was coming next.
Since they had time to flesh out tunes on the road, Moving Pictures became the next phase of their career, taking the basis they started with here and turning it into pure prog-rock gold on tunes like ‘YYZ’ and ‘Red Barchetta’. This may have seemed like the last type of music to get popular, but by some miracle, Rush managed to get the masses to come to them instead of the other way around.
But for all the radio play songs like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ got at the time, Permanent Waves deserves to be considered more than the calm before the storm. This was the beginning of a new chapter for the group, and looking back through their history, rarely have they ever sounded as excited to be in the studio as they have here.
