“Pure surrealism”: Geddy Lee on one of the weirdest songs ever
No rock classic has ever become legendary by just doing the bare minimum. Millions of power pop bands have tried their hand at writing the greatest hook that anyone has ever attempted, but there’s always that one mysterious chord in the mix or the subtle change in the dynamics that takes a song from being a catchy little ditty to something that people want to hear again and again. Rush usually had no such problem trying to diversify their sound, but Geddy Lee still thought that the song ‘7 and 7 is’ was one of the strangest tunes he ever saw reach the charts.
If you were to look at what the Canadian icons were putting on the hit parade, though, you’d think that they had some sort of allergy to standard rock and roll. Throughout every one of their albums, they refused to take the easy route every time they performed, either writing things in awkward time signatures or trying their best to sprinkle in insane runs that could break someone’s hand if they weren’t practised enough.
There was still room for progressive music during their prime, but even by other bands’ standards, Lee was tapping into something no one could understand. Even for someone who worships at the altar of acts like King Crimson and Genesis, hearing something like Hemispheres is an insane headtrip trying to figure out, especially when approaching tunes like ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
But no progressive movement would have happened had the psychedelic movement not come first. There had already been the folk revolution, but the era of free love and acid rock is the entire reason why Yes were allowed to make sweeping epics, especially given the fact that The Grateful Dead expanded their musical palette when they first started jamming.
‘7 and 7 Is’ isn’t exactly that kind of far-reaching song, but it does have some of the weirdest chords to be found in a mainstream pop hit. Aside from surreal lyrics about looking at a bottle and wishing you were in a can, Arthur Lee took that kind of Alice in Wonderland style of songwriting to the nth degree on this song, practically giving The Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’ a run for its money in terms of nonsensical drug-fuelled imagery.
Although it was certainly odd, it was just different enough for Rush to include on their covers EP, Feedback, with Lee stating, “One of the weirdest songs ever written. Pure surrealism. Alex and I loved this song when we were kids, especially the chord progression. The lyric is probably the goofiest thing I’ve sung in my life; We had some fun with it.”
Then again, playing with that kind of surreal tone wasn’t that out of the question for Rush. Compared to the trippy sounds coming from the psychedelic scene, it wasn’t that hard to see the bridge between that and the more elaborate moments on a tune like ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ on Permanent Waves years later.
Because progressive music wasn’t just about trying to cram as many scale exercises together and call it a song. It was about trying to push the envelope, and for the late 1960s, Lee had to acknowledge that Love had set the bar pretty high in terms of unadulterated surrealism.
