The group that shaped Geddy Lee and altered the fate of music: “The most important band to come out of England”
There’s no other band that married prog and hard rock so haphazardly as Canada’s Rush.
Not just half and half either. Throughout Rush’s over 50-year recording output, the power-trio meshed a highly idiosyncratic alchemy of heavy riffage and progressive complexity that sat in the sum of its parts with a certain degree of confounding frisson. It was a crucial drive in their eventual global domination. Impossibly distinct, Rush coasted through punk’s existential threat in the late 1970s and arrived in the next decade as bona fide stars of the MTV age.
It might have something to do with their early burnishing. While proggy peers like Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer hailed from psychedelia’s original lysergic promise, Rush held a surer footing in the world of classic rock; the likes of Kiss, Blue Öyster Cult, T Rex, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Lynyrd Skynyrd all headlined bills featuring Rush as an opener.
It’s likely what assured their future success. While still dwelling in conceptual ambitions and expanded songcraft orbiting some of the decade’s cosmic wizardry, a tougher guts of rock heft kept Rush from losing themselves in prog’s stuffy bloat that killed much of the scene dead overnight.
Geddy Lee had been paying close attention to rock’s elemental shifts across the British Invasion toward the 1970s’ arena rock strut. Shaped by The Beatles and Cream, the Rush bassist and frontman took the most notes from the countercultural bloom surging on both sides of the Atlantic long before Rush had reared its head, while Lee was still a teen.
“I think most rock bands today wouldn’t sound the way they sound without The Who,” Lee confessed to Sirius XM Classic Vinyl Influences in 2013. “I think they are one of the most important bands to ever come out of England. Certainly, in my career, the most influential in terms of songwriting.”
The Beatles may well have broken the British Invasion’s Billboard hijack, and The Rolling Stones quickly scored the insurgent teen rebellion with greater authenticity not long after, but The Who seemed to spot the following decade’s taste for widescreen guitar attack even in London’s swinging zenith. Still sporting mod gear, furious anthems like ‘My Generation’ cut a bold raucousness closer to the US West Coast’s garage rock underground than anything conjured in London during the era’s emerging kaleidoscopic trends.
Pete Townshend’s power pop chops and grander narrative orchestrations would develop in earnest as the 1960s came to a close, dropping the Tommy rock opera and coaxing a more charismatic frontman aura from frontman Roger Daltrey as the new material demanded a firmer gravitas to carry over the new tunes. Powered by Keith Moon’s percussive pummelling and John Entwistle’s frenetic bass rumbles, The Who laid out a blueprint that the 1970s rock world rarely strayed from.
Certainly not Lee. Clinging on to the examples set by The Who during classic rock’s genesis, Rush would avoid all the pitfalls and traps that befell their prog contemporaries and stand as one of Canada’s biggest-selling groups of all time, while still staying true to their own creative terms.
