The guitarist Alex Lifeson called absolutely perfect: “He can handle anything”
Most guitarists aren’t looking to be the greatest in the world when they pick up the instrument. Music is not meant to be an Olympic sport, so the best artists are those who either get the most vulnerable whenever they play or put together songs that do the best job of articulating what they feel inside. Alex Lifeson was more than capable of pushing himself forward as a player in Rush, but something started to change in his musical DNA when he heard Andy Summers for the first time.
For the first few years of Rush’s career, though, it wasn’t out of the question to think that they were going to be just another blues rock outfit. Lifeson and Geddy Lee each liked progressive music, but their debut had a lot more to do with Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie than anything coming from Yes or Genesis.
Once Neil Peart joined on Fly By Night, you’d swear that they grew up by five years in the span of just one record. Beyond just their internal chemistry, Lifeson was also quickly becoming one of the most acclaimed guitarists for his technical prowess. He had the classical chops for their softer pieces, but the best parts of their sound tended to come from when he had a fire in his belly on tracks like the solos on ‘2112’ or the chaos of ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
It was certainly impressive, but that’s not how Summers looked at his guitar playing. He had been trained in genres like jazz, so he could clearly play intricate stuff when he wanted to, but that’s not how he thought about the instrument. To him, it was just another tool to help bring the song to life, and every Police track usually needed a different sound to go along with it.
‘Roxanne’ may have broken down the door for them with the punk-by-way-of-ska guitar stabs, but Summers never sounded the same on any one album. ‘Walking on the Moon’ gets most of its atmosphere from the incredible chords that he played, and even for as simple as ‘Every Breath You Take’ is, Summers’s ability to make his guitar sound like a clock is one of the most unsuspectingly brutal riffs in the rock canon.
For Lifeson, that kind of creative ingenuity is something that he strived for when putting together his own guitar parts, telling Rolling Stone, “His tone and style were just absolutely perfect–he left space around everything. And he can handle anything from beautiful acoustic playing to jazz to hybrid kinds of stuff.”
That versatility is probably best showcased in the B-side ‘Murder By Numbers’. While Sting carries the tune with a brilliant melody, hearing Summers play some of the most dissonant jazz chords and make them work is one of the most subtle works of genius that a guitarist has ever made this side of George Harrison.
For any prog band, that kind of influence was bound to show up in Rush’s catalogue sooner or later, too. The Canadian icons never claimed to be snobs about what they liked, and listening to a song like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ tends to sound like it came from a group that happened to spend a little too much of their downtime listening to Reggatta De Blanc.
Summers may deserve all the accolades in the world for reinventing mainstream rock, but he wasn’t looking to make something flashy for the sake of being flashy. He was a sound technician trying to make music no one had heard before, and that is probably more progressive than most prog acts are doing right now.
