How Rush made their career defining album on the brink of collapse
After their second and third albums, Fly by Night and Caress of Steel, respectively, had flopped both critically and commercially, Toronto three-piece Rush could have been forgiven for thinking they were racing to the end of their career.
Fans didn’t know what to make of the darker sound of their latest album in 1975, and when sales slowed almost to a halt, the group’s label was considering cutting its losses and letting the band go.
In fact, the reception for the record was so bad that it even affected the trio’s ticket sales and touring opportunities severely enough that they christened the shows they did get booked to play in support of the release as the ‘Down the Tubes Tour’.
Speaking 50 years after the release of the album, Rush vocalist and bassist Geddy Lee summed up the mood around the group at the time, saying, “Our record company, Mercury, had told us in no uncertain terms that we were a huge disappointment to them. They had signed us on the basis of our first record, which was pretty straightforward hard rock. But we loved all those English progressive rock bands, Yes and Genesis, and on our third album Caress of Steel, we had a song that was 20 minutes, ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’. Mercury was like, ‘What the fuck? Who are you guys?’ And even we thought that. ‘Who are we?’”
Off the back of successful negotiations with the band’s manager, Ray Danniels, Mercury decided to give them one more chance to find out who they were, though with a heavy suggestion that they try to produce some more commercially viable material. Feeling as though they had nothing to lose, the group decided to go for broke and felt that, in Lee’s words, “If we’re going to go out, we’ll go out doing our crazy shit, not failing at what you want us to be”.
Their “crazy shit” turned out to include writing a 20-minute suite/song (the title track ‘2112’) inspired by one of the novels (Anthem) of the controversial right-wing and capitalist objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand, which, admittedly, is not the kind of source material that most bands would consider.
As Lee described it, the story in the long song “was set in a futuristic totalitarian state, controlled by the priests of the temples of Syrinx. One day, our hero finds a device. He’s not sure what it is, but it has strings, and he figures out that he can make music with it. He goes back to present it to the priests. And of course, they shut him down because they want control over everything. In the end, he contemplates ending it all, because he doesn’t want to live in a world that can’t embrace such a thing that he’s found…”
If anything was going to turn their fortunes around as a band, surely, undoubtedly, this was it; well, it had to be, and strangely, it was.
Despite slow initial sales, the group were buoyed by positive feedback from Mercury executive Cliff Burnstein and strong support from fans when touring the album, eventually going on to sell over three million copies in America alone.
