Geddy Lee on why people didn’t like Rush
No band is safe from having a few detractors here and there. For every fan you make along the way, there will always be those few people who think you are part of one of the worst groups in the world and don’t deserve success. While many critics have given great acts a clubbing in the past, Rush got it the worst of all, and Geddy Lee thinks he’s the reason why they were reviled.
It was impossible to differentiate them from the other bands clogging up the blues rock scene when they first started. Since every different outfit in the 1970s was taking its cues from Led Zeppelin, Lee and Alex Lifeson began the group with the intent of making blues-flavoured hard rock before going in a different direction with Neil Peart on Fly By Night.
Falling in love with the progressive rock giants working around the same time, Rush would become one of the biggest bands in the world by making the most complicated music of all time. Even if you consider yourself a connoisseur of progressive music, most people aren’t ready to take on what Rush did throughout the 1970s.
Before you even get to the lyrics, every track seemed like a grand epic whenever the band played, taking four or five decent song ideas and throwing them into an eclectic musical stew to create pieces that veered over ten minutes. That’s before you get to Peart’s lyrics, taking cues from classic literature and making the musical equivalent of trying to quote Shakespeare while running on a treadmill.
It’s no surprise that that kind of music wasn’t for everybody, though, since most casual rock fans just want bands to play the hits and not bore them with songs about dining on honeydew and Middle Earth. It may have worked for a few Led Zeppelin pieces, but when you write an entire track about venturing into The Shire and being harassed by Sauron, you’ve lost the fans that just want to hear ‘Working Man’ for the hundredth time.
Once Rush started to pick up steam, though, Lee’s voice would get called into question more than once. Favouring the higher side of his voice, Lee was definitely channelling a lot from Robert Plant and going even higher, which sounded angelic to some and like nails on a chalkboard to others.
When discussing the backlash the group got in their early days, Lee pointed to his voice specifically as the reason why some would-be fans were turned off, saying, “Rush is definitely a polarising band. I think that’s partially my voice, which is quite high and kind of unusual. People either dig it or they don’t. And the kind of music that we make is complicated and can be quite jarring in terms of the time changes and aggressive nature of it.”
If anything, they did have a sense of humour about Lee’s voice, even featuring a lightning round of comparisons of his voice in the documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage, comparing it to everything from Mickey Mouse on helium to the dead howling in Hades. No matter what side you fall on when it comes to Rush’s music, though, there will never be another band that had that much chops and delivered it to their fans every time they played a show.
